Help talk:Spam Fighting Guide

Good idea. Add in something about looking at the number of characters add to a page (that's how I find them). Very few pages are going to see 10,000+ characters added, and most of the spam seems to fall somewhere in the range of 12-14k. -gorc

Right now I'm not home with my beloved GIMP. If you can put it before me I'll appreciate it
Andycyca me ^_^ What? 12:29, 1 October 2007 (MDT)

I'm on it... Andycyca me ^_^ What? 23:09, 1 October 2007 (MDT)

Promote to MafiaWiki/Help namespace?

Andy, do you have any objections to me moving this into the 'official' namespaces? You'll still get credit for starting it, but I think this is quite robust (even though hopefully our spam problems are finally decreasing). -- Mr. Flay 09:48, 1 October 2007 (MDT)

Moving to Help namespace is a great honor to me! I don't really care for taking credit. I'd just like one week or so for improving this guide to its best
Andycyca me ^_^ What? 12:29, 1 October 2007 (MDT)

General Point

Any userpage must be edited only by its owner.

I'm not sure, but I've heard that the above isn't actually true. For the purpose of fighting spam, it's probably a fair assumption, but we don't want to be placing the idea of "this is not your page, leave it alone" if it isn't true... ^somestrange_flea 10:48, 2 October 2007 (MDT)

I agree. I think Mr. Flay just rephrased this for me. Thanks for helping! Keep posting suggestions!

Andycyca me ^_^ What? 01:46, 3 October 2007 (MDT)

• I would personally say that users should not contribute significant edits to other users' userpages without explicit permission. Tasks such as categorizing pages don't fall under this distinction, but adding content would. Tn5421 04:12, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

New type of spam?

Heh; the spam blacklist seems to be keeping out most of the 'advertising' type of spam, but for some reason random IPs/users have started putting short strings of gibberish at the beginning of random pages. It's the weirdest, most ineffectual sort of spam I can think of, but the blacklist won't stop it because it doesn't contain any URLs. Any ideas, aside from unified login once we go to phpBB3? -- Mr. Flay 16:05, 16 October 2007 (MDT)

I've seen this a lot lately and it's somewhat difficult to see, as the strings are very short. However, I remember seeing some of this on the rules and the frontpage. Is it possible to lock the important pages from being edited? (Kinda like "f**k" in Wikipedia) It won't stop it, but it's a beginning... Andycyca||me||What? 22:51, 16 October 2007 (MDT)

Something that needs to be added?

The article only seems to talk about the new page spam. However, it seems that there is now spam that isn't made in new articles, but in existing ones, shouldn't it be added? Bird1111 12:29, 16 November 2008 (MST)

Auto-deleting pages?

I get the impression the answer is no, but a favorite page that spambots like to start is titled "A Beginner" - is there any way to reflexively ban IPs that try to start or edit a page with exactly that name? Vi 14:35, 28 June 2010 (PDT)

I personally feel it is easier to semi-protect all involved pages. Semi-protection means that the user account has to have a certain amount of non-reverted edits over a period of time before they are allowed to edit semi-protected pages. Reflexively banning IPs that attempt to edit a page on the fly would be much more difficult. Tn5421 04:14, 10 May 2014 (UTC)