CommunityData:Wiki

Fighting spam and patrolling pages

This wiki is open for editing by anyone which means we do get quite a lot of spam. Mako has scripts which help more-or-less automatically blow away new pages that are created by spammers so you can ignore these. The scripts run every few weeks.

You can help fight these by patrolling new edits to existing pages made by untrusted (or not logged in) users on this special RecentChanges link which only shows unpatrolled edits to existing pages and doing the following things:

• If you see a page that shouldn't be there, click on it and delete it!
• If something is a spam edit, you should remove it. If it's just a single spam edit you can usually just click [rollback 1 edit] or something similar. If there are multiple edits, you can go into the history tab, click on the time and date for the last good edit, click edit, and then click save. By editing and saving a previous version of the page, you will revert the page to the version that you edited.

If the edit is a good one or if it's a bad edit that you have already reverted (i.e., if it's not something we need to deal with or look at any more) you should mark it patrolled:

• For individual edits (which do not have a ▶️ on the line with them) click on the diff link (typically opening it in a new tab). If it looks good, just click [Mark as patrolled]
• For groups of edits, (which have a ▶️ on the line with them), click the ▶️ to expand things and then either:
  • Click (prev) on the oldest (i.e., furthest down the page) edit and then mark each edit as patrolled and then click Newer edit→ to move to the next one, rising and repeating as you go.
  • Click (prev) on each one individually opening each in new tabs and then mark each one as patrolled individually.
• If you notice a lot of spam from the same user, feel free to block them by visiting the Special:Block page on the wiki.
• If you notice someone making good edits, following the instructors below to make them an administrator. If they are an admin, their future edits won't show up on the patrolling list!

User rights

In general, anybody who is not a spambot should be made an administrator. Admins don't have to solve CAPTCHAs (hooray!) and can delete pages and such.

Anybody who is part of the group should be made a bureaucrat as well. Bureaucrats can make other people into admins.

To make someone an admin you navigate to the Special:Userrights page, type in the username (like Special:Userrights/Benjamin Mako Hill) and then add the appropriate bits by checking the boxes.