On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:45:33 -0000, Frank Shearar  
<Frank.Shearar at rnid.org.uk> wrote:

> In summary, my feelings are: "use it if you must, but make sure  
> blind/vision-impaired people have an equivalent", and that equivalent  
> MUST NOT be "get a sighted person to help out".
>
Lots of website have that now. Should be easy as well - use festival to  
generate something equivalent with audio, use random festival parameters  
and maybe some distortion with Sox to defeat speech recognizers.

> Having said that, if you're going to have permissions, I like the idea  
> of tying permissions to reputations & reputation servers. One caveat  
> with reputation servers is that it requires members of a community to  
> update their opinions of others. Otherwise you get some poor guy slaving  
> 24/7 for Squeak, submitting fantastic change sets, and he's still only  
> an Apprentice.

Well, in my idea Apprentice would be good enough as a level, but yes -  
it's an issue. I think it'd be nice to randomly pick opinions when they're  
a year old or so, and ask the holder of the opinion to update it through  
an email or something.

> Agreed. You could block a C class, but then of course you potentially  
> block innocents too.

I once blocked half a continent by blocking 10-or-so /8 ranges - we got so  
much spam from China, that was about the only solution.

> Hm, wouldn't it be nice to have some serious log introspection for a  
> wiki? Then you could check usage patterns for particular IPs and know  
> that attacks usually occur at time N from block B, you know? (This  
> violates privacy of users on a grand scale, so you really want this  
> admin-only or something.)
>
Hmm... I could easily get the same information now by harvesting the  
changes list, so not a lot of privacy hurt here...