The only time I remember that I thought userfication was appropriate while doing new pages patrol was when I userfied the page now at User:KuwarOnline - the user had created it at the title MyProfile. Ironically, RHaworth was the one who deleted the cross-namespace redirect I created in the process, and caused an edit conflict with me when I tried to post a long message to User talk:KuwarOnline explaining the situation. The user hasn't edited since that time.
Another reason why these vanity pages should stay in article space is that there are more options for handling them; they can be speedy deleted, sent to proposed deletion, marked for cleanup/verification/whatever, and can go through the normal editing process. In contrast the only deletion process for user pages in most situations is Miscellany for deletion, people are generally more wary of editing pages in userspace, and on normal user pages stub/cleanup/verification tags are usually added by the user as a joke. Therefore, userfication is not only bad because it hides the page from the casual wikipedia browser while still being indexed by search engines; another important reason against userfication is that it stifles the course of normal article development. -- Graham87 09:34, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
A vanity article is still a vanity article in the user namespace. The WoW (world outside Wikipedia) is unlikely to appreciate the difference that "user:" makes. Search engines crawl user space. I cannot recall ever going back to check whether the victims of my userfication have become active editors.
I have therefore abandoned the practise of userfying and will use the (Main) tools of speedy, prod and AfD. Of these, I prefer prod because it gives the author time to userfy themselves or copy off and it is not as humiliating as being told several times in an AfD that they are non-notable. In addition I shall use, and recommend others to use, where appropriate: ((userfy)) (on the article itself) and/or ((badbio)) (on the author's talk page). Both of these so that we "don't bite the newbies" too badly. It is more friendly to give people positive suggestions than just say "go away".
My userfying was very successful at getting articles out of the (Main) namespace with less than 2% being "disputed". I suspect that a slightly higher proportion of prod's will be disputed but I expect it will still get rid of a reasonable proportion of the vanity articles that I spot. -- RHaworth 19:17, 3 September 2006 (UTC)