- Stop using Hotmail. Microsoft are suggesting that admins of servers whose mail is being eaten pay $1400 a year for their mail to get through. Gmail is now open to all and doesn’t silently vanish messages (except your sent messages to mailing lists, which is a nuisance).
- London Wikimeet (not Wikipedia), 6th June.
A flashmob of fight-the-power morons are still spamming an allegedly illegal number into every input box on the web. The Wikipedia admins collectively declared “FUCK OFF YOU SPAMMERS.” (Some have gone rabid “ZOMG LAWSUIT” and we were getting a pile of oversight requests as well — I didn’t zap, Fred did, until Erik told us not to. Mind you, it nicely short-circuited the idiotic deletion review.) Eventually it was put into the spam filter, because distributed spam is spam.
We’re a project to write an encyclopedia, not a public graffiti wall. You want to paint “09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0” in fifty-foot high letters on every Hollywood studio, I’ll buy brushes. You want to splatter it across Wikipedia, you can fuck off. I expect the article will contain the number in due course; I’d guess two to four weeks, any earlier would in my opinion only encourage further use of Wikipedia as a graffiti wall.
Immediatism is the greatest curse of our popularity and blatantly interferes with the far from finished encyclopedia project. Wikimedia has a newspaper. No candy for you. You come back, one month.
Update: Wikipedia:Keyspam.
“We’re a project to write an encyclopedia, not a public graffiti wall. You want to paint “09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0″ in fifty-foot high letters on every Hollywood studio, I’ll buy brushes. You want to splatter it across Wikipedia, you can fuck off.”
I laughed so hard when I read that. I feel exactly the same way.