On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 4:46 PM, wren ng thornton <wren@freegeek.org> wrote:

On 7/30/12 5:35 PM, Henk-Jan van Tuyl wrote:

- Block creation of usernames
o ending with two or more digits
o with more than one x or q
o starting with "buy"
o longer than 20 characters
o with more than 4 consonants in a row

As other's've mentioned, many of these constraints impose undue burden on users with linguistic heritage outside of western Europe. Creating a decent filter for recognizing legitimate names across the majority of languages is quite difficult.

Though there's no reason this has to be a strong blacklisting of usernames. If there's a willing volunteer (as seems to have been implied), then something like this could serve as a filter requiring manual override. All usernames are available... but some take longer to activate. Of course, there's always the power-to-weight issue for this kind of solution.

Yeah, I volunteered. I'd like to see some kind of random round-robin system to dispatch approval edits to a group of volunteers (i.e., if I only had to scan 10 or so edits for spam a day -- I don't feel inclined to read for correctness). It wouldn't be so bad if there was 10-20 volunteers. I suppose a lot less could do it if it was just approving user requests (but, I also think that would be less effective at stopping spam)