FYI I wanted to let folks know that we will be deleting user talk pages of anonymous editors who haven’t been active in 6 months. This should make user experience better for anonymous editors who are often confused by old talk pages sent to other people who share the same IP as them. (No more comments like: “What do you mean I was blocked 3 years ago? This is the first time I’ve ever been to this site!”) We don’t think this will negatively affect anything on the site. But if you are aware of any problems this might create, let me know ASAP!
system
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I think this is a smart move. That way, new anon users on the shared IP don’t get a nastygram by accident.
system
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Mebbe user pages of anons as well? Awesome idea =)
system
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Great idea! Also, +1 to Maluniu’s idea.
system
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Awesome idea! LESS confusion.
system
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Can we also delete “commercial” userpages whose sole contribution was their advertising blurb and a link to their website (maybe over 3 months or over 6 months ago)? Please? Pretty Please?
Linus
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I saw your original post
. I’ll post the same thing there that I’m writing here. I think this could become a slippery slope. I’ve always regarded userpages as sacred. You can be obnoxious, spammy, whatever, so long as you do it in your own space. Perhaps a rule similar my view on junk mail: If it’s blatantly obvious, it gets tossed. If it takes me more than half a second to determine if the envelope contains junk, then I keep it for further inspection. Thus, to apply it here, if it’s clean and not pushy, then keep. If it’s blatant spam, delete it.
Great. I’m glad folks think this is a good move. It’s going to delete 173,000 anon talk pages! Wow. That’s a lot of message that would most likely get read by the wrong folks at this point. As for deleting spammy, commercial user pages. I commented here: http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/4274/new-users-
system
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When is the deleting going to start?
Maniac
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@IsabelleZita
- based on the deletion log, it looks like it began a few hours ago
Or maybe even earlier than that… I stopped going through the log pages lol.
Is there some sort of program deleting the pages, or is it being done by hand?
@Bokehmon
It’s a bot. It does miscellaneous tasks for the wikiHow staff.
173,000 is more than we in have articles, lol. Imagine categorizing 173,000 articles by hand… Well, I’m going to assume by now that the bot did not have any major bugs, since it didn’t go on a vicious deleting rampage lol.
That’s very smart. If they haven’t been on in 6 months, they probably will never come on again!
