Mailing List Archive

On Mit, 2003-02-05 at 15:12, tarquin wrote:
> Just a quick word -- any news on the idea to put a "send this article
> to a friend" link on every page?

lynx -dump -nolist
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=President_of_the_United_States_of_America\&printable=yes | mail -s 'President of the United States' e.moeller@fokus.gmd.de

OK, we might want to create a button for that ;-). Preferably that one
would offer both plaintext and HTML, and perhaps a comment field for the
sender.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de

tarquin wrote:
> Just a quick word -- any news on the idea to put a "send this article
> to a friend" link on every page?

Sounds like a perfect spamming machine! Go in anonymously, create a
new page with your spam message, then have Wikipedia mail that to your
"friend". And the next friend, and the next, ...

If only the link (page title) is mailed, create the page [[save big on
ink cartridges]], and mail that.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Classic Nordic Literature online since 1992 - http://runeberg.org/

Lars Aronsson wrote:

>tarquin wrote:
>
>
>>Just a quick word -- any news on the idea to put a "send this article
>>to a friend" link on every page?
>>
>>
>
>Sounds like a perfect spamming machine! Go in anonymously, create a
>new page with your spam message, then have Wikipedia mail that to your
>"friend". And the next friend, and the next, ...
>
>If only the link (page title) is mailed, create the page [[save big on
>ink cartridges]], and mail that.
>
>
hmmm. id not thought of that.
but AFAIK spammers need to mail out thousands if not *millions* of
emails for it to be effective. they're not going to bother doing it one
at a time.
secondly, we'd erase a page called [[save big on ink cartridges]] PDQ :-)

I think this would be a useful feature & could help us press-gang ...
*cough* I mean invite new contributors ;-)




>
>
>

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> tarquin wrote:
> > Just a quick word -- any news on the idea to put a "send this article
> > to a friend" link on every page?
>
> Sounds like a perfect spamming machine! Go in anonymously, create a
> new page with your spam message, then have Wikipedia mail that to your
> "friend". And the next friend, and the next, ...
>
> If only the link (page title) is mailed, create the page [[save big on
> ink cartridges]], and mail that.

I think we can pretty easily protect against abuse by throttling the
system in a variety of ways. That is, a single ip or user can only
use the system a maximum of 10 times in one day, 3 times per hour,
etc. Such throttles won't be perfect, but it would allow us to have
this useful feature with a minimal possibility for abuse.

--Jimbo