Talk:User Policy

We have been seeing a high volume of spammer and defacer activity lately. So we are adopting a new policy, as follows:

1) You must be logged in to edit pages. No anonymous edits. sorry.

2) You must ask an administrator to create a login account for you. Well what's the point of requiring you to log in if anyone at all can create a user account? So now you have to ask someone to make one for you.

Disagreement

I think this is a bit of a short-sighted policy. Surely part of the point of having a wiki is enabling the casual visitor to make quick changes? If you have to ask someone to create an account for you, and then wait for that all to be set up, then that's likely to put off a fair amount of people.

I know that spammers can be annoying, but can we at least try to combat them by reverting their edits, and blocking their accounts and IP addresses before locking down the whole wiki to a whitelisted set of users? I'm sure that we can have enough people regularly monitoring the site to combat the problem... --Frankie Roberto 13:24, 11 Oct 2005 (GMT)

I agree with the new policy

After seeing the scope of the changes made by the last batch of spammers (like 40 pages) I agree that limiting changes to a whitelist is a good idea. Yes, it's not ideal, but Scott has been making 90% of the changes to the site lately and I'd rather see his time devoted to content than to combating spammers.

Besides, even with the "open" policy there were very very few changes made by people outside the core group. Maybe if we get an extreme flood of new players this policy will be revisited. Until then it's not that bad. --WolverineFan 13:57, 11 Oct 2005 (GMT)

Response in kind

Thanks wolverine -- you hit the nail on the head.

I agree with your sentiments in spirit, fFrankie. Wikis are great, and work best if they are accessible. But the reality is that there's a fFew people editing, and a fFew people defacing. I do worry about a potential backlash of this policy: if people have to wait to log in, they simply wont bother doing so at all, thus lessening the amount of input being given. If this wiki starts to fFlail, then we'll think of something new. Cheers! Scott 16:37, 11 Oct 2005 (GMT)

A note from your random supreme overlord's missus

They have all been ip banned, accounts blocked and edits reverted but incase you hadn't realised theres a shitload of ips in the world that they could get access to and unfortunately there is more than 1 or 2 spammers in the world. After a few months the policy may well change. - Salkunh

Chief Admin Speaks...

Just a quickie, the mass edits were by a Bot, no matter what we did it picked the first linked pages from the main page and spammed them, adding hidden links (divs with 1px height) so google would pick on them. Its not defacement its just pure spamming, pure automated spamming. Yes its short sighted but thats all it was aimed to be. If theres a need to open up registrations again then fine. as said previously theres few edits by newbie players, usually theres scott and a few others and thats it... thats how its always been.

While being draconian its hardly stopping any of the real editors getting here, as a simple "hey" on IRC or the forums would sort a login. - Nik Doof 17:53, 13 Oct 2005 (GMT)

(also its four ~ to show username and date/time)

Further note...

I've just found further proof it was automated spamming. Check the User List and look for the spam accounts (not really that difficult). --Nik Doof 07:48, 18 Oct 2005 (GMT)

What the heck..

you mean all those uhm, randomly numbered users, right? *boggle* that's nuts. is there an easy way to mass-delete users? maybe something like "DELETE * FROM users WHERE (contributions = 0)" or .. something. I'm not great with SQL, (nor do i even know if the wiki can be fFed raw SQL commands like this)