User talk:Muscles

Spam Prevention

Hey Muscles, you seem to have deletion privileges. Perhaps it is good to also start blocking ip's that create spammer accounts. I think if you just mention on some pages that people should make a roguetemple forum account and ask for unblocking it could work. (It is what we sort of use for the dominions 3 wiki). Ip blocking seems to cut down on the amount of new accounts created there. (Not that it is as high as this wiki). --Soyweiser (talk) 17:31, 2 April 2013 (CEST)

I don't have a way to find the IP address for any logged in user. On Wikipedia, this is the function of a checkuser, and they are people who have an even higher trust level than administrators, because potentially they could breach the privacy of a legitimate user.

I'll try blocking all spam accounts as I delete their pages for the next week or so, and see if that results in a reduction of spam. I suspect it won't: the spam accounts are generated by botnets, and will likely come from a huge range of IP addresses. They have to crack a very simple cipher to create an account - presumably only a fraction of attempts to create an account succeed. They then have to crack a similar cipher to make a post containing an external link, and we can see that there are many more accounts created than actually manage to post. Very few spam accounts make a second post.

I wouldn't worry about Google indexing user names in the logs, although I do make sure that the deletion summary doesn't include the spam text of the page I'm deleting, as it does by default.

I could ask the site owners to install a blacklist of spam sites. That will probably help to some extent, although there's a substantial range of different sites being promoted.-Muscles (talk) 21:09, 2 April 2013 (CEST)

Yeah, I also assumed that IP blocking would not help, but for some reason it seemed to do. Probably observer bias. I will just keep blanking pages and putting them into the category:delete category. Sucks people keep spamming wikis this much :( --Soyweiser (talk) 15:11, 3 April 2013 (CEST)

Blocking spammers hasn't produced any noticeable results. Spam is increasing in frequency, and I haven't seen any new accounts caught by the autoblocker. Since it takes more time to block than it does to delete, I'm going to stop blocking spammers unless they try to edit again after the initial creation of a spam page.-Muscles (talk) 23:09, 12 April 2013 (CEST)

Thanks for taking care of the spambots

I'll check what can be done to prevent them

Spam filtering

I'm not sure who has access to the configuration files for this wiki, but this extension could help prevent many of the current spambots. --Lethosor (talk) 21:17, 4 April 2013 (CEST)

User IgnacioAo deleted the main page

[1]Felix (talk) 23:37, 25 April 2013 (CEST)

I added semi-protection to the main page. The intention of this is to prevent new accounts from being able to edit it. However, I don't know if this wiki auto-confirms users as Wikipedia does (after ten edits and the account existing for four days), so it's possible that I have locked all non-admins out of the main page. Could someone with a well-established account please make a trivial edit to the main page to check that it's possible?-Muscles (talk) 00:02, 26 April 2013 (CEST)

[2] --Lethosor (talk) 02:08, 26 April 2013 (CEST)

I guess semi-protection is ineffective on this wiki. I've full protected the main page for now. This should not stop anyone from changing the news or featured roguelike sections, and other parts of the main page are rarely changed anyway. Just ask on my talk page, or at the community portal if any changes are required.

Beats me why spambots would delete the main page. Why draw attention to themselves? Also bizarrely, many recent spambots are putting the same formulaic rubbish on their user pages, but without a spam link. Bad configuation, I suppose.-Muscles (talk) 04:28, 26 April 2013 (CEST)

AbuseFilter

It works! [3] (the first two were me testing it). After a few days we might as well enable blocking, as long as it doesn't prevent any legitimate edits. --Lethosor (talk) 02:06, 24 May 2013 (CEST)

Unusual account creation

I'm not sure if this is correct, but it appears that User:AnnieCrou created another user account (User:RosauraFo). I wasn't sure if this was intentional, and they haven't triggered any filters yet, but I just wanted another opinion before I tried blocking them. --Lethosor (talk) 21:17, 10 June 2013 (CEST)

Also, User:SelmaHeat created User:OrlandoSZ. I'm surprised that both accounts show up together, but I'll look into this. --Lethosor (talk) 21:23, 10 June 2013 (CEST)

It seems to happen when a user creates another account without logging out first. I'm going to go ahead and block them, to (hopefully) prevent this from happening too often. --Lethosor (talk) 21:26, 10 June 2013 (CEST)

Yes, the software notices when a logged in account creates a second account. It isn't necessarily problematic behaviour - one person may be introducing a friend to the site. It is certainly suspicious when the first account has no edits though.-Muscles (talk) 22:59, 10 June 2013 (CEST)

Autoblocking

I'm thinking of enabling autoblocking for filter 6, and just wanted to make sure this was all right, as it's a fairly large change (I've put up a few warnings here and here, which you can modify if you like). --Lethosor (talk) 22:19, 10 June 2013 (CEST)

I'm not opposed to this, but how many spam accounts go on to be a nuisance after they fail to create their user page? Fortunately the block log does not take up a large part of the recent changes list as the user creation log does.-Muscles (talk) 22:59, 10 June 2013 (CEST)

I was thinking that blocking would help prevent additional account creations (the filters do this automatically). I've seen this help on other wikis, so I thought I'd give it a shot. --Lethosor (talk) 23:11, 10 June 2013 (CEST)

Ok then, go for it.-Muscles (talk) 03:56, 11 June 2013 (CEST)