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)

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)