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)