Talk:RTUsers

Should this page exist?

With the old wiki, This page served a function as a public user list. On Wikia, there is a Special:ListUsers page that serves that function. Historically, this page was so heavily targeted by spammers that there were 450 changes in the last 2 months of its existence, when I was trying diligently to just keep the obvious new spam links out, i.e. on a typical day there would be 4 changes to add spam links and 4 removals. That has improved greatly at Wikia, but I'm pretty sure that a large fraction of the 'User' entries are really only here because some time ago a link-spammer put them on the old site and they didn't look spammy enough for anyone to remove them. I don't think it is worthwhile and maybe not even possible to sift out the legitimate personal entries from the bogus ones. even if someone adopted the task and did a reasonable job, would it be better than the Special:ListUsers page?

That just leaves the organizational user list, which may suffer from a similar problem despite at least one attempt to clean out the certain junk. If it is presumed accurate, is it worthwhile?

IMHO, the individual list should go and the org list swept for dubious cases (Vita-Mix? Really???) Anyone else have thoughts on that?

BillCole 20:20, January 26, 2011 (UTC)

Special:ListUsers is not at all similar to RTUsers. ListUsers is just a list of Wikia registered users who've edited pages here. RTUsers is supposed to be a more extensive list of folks who use RT. Does that make sense? Am I missing something? Tsibley 20:32, January 26, 2011 (UTC)

RTUsers is really a list of folks who use RT and have made an edit to the RTUsers page, probably, at some point in the last decade or so. On the other hand, Special:ListUsers can show people who have pages in the RT wiki's User namespace but who have never made any edits. At the Kwiki->Wifty import (June 2007) the list was 266 names long. At the Wifty->MediaWiki/Wikia import the headcount was 435. So even assuming that there are no bogus entries, the majority are pretty old. Beyond that, it isn't clear to me what purpose the list of individual users is supposed to serve, so it isn't clear to me whether it could be cleaned up, pruned, restructured, etc. to make it something useful. It isn't that I want the page gone gone, but more that since the Wikia migration meant I wasn't firefighting against constant vandalism, I noticed that the individual section of the page really may not be providing any particularly useful information worth defending. BillCole 06:04, January 27, 2011 (UTC)