Help:Spam

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Revision as of 20:32, 30 August 2013 by Ryan W (talk | contribs) (spelling; wikilinks; remove pugnacious blurb in cross-reference)

Anti-spam measures

Since the parting of ways with the Doom Wiki's previous host, management of anti-spam technological measures has become the sole responsibility of the wiki administrators. To this end, many such measures have been implemented, which involve both manual and automated interventions. Most automated measures can be escaped by registering an account, and others by having a confirmed email address.

If you find you are being limited in your legitimate editing activities by any of the anti-spam measures, you should contact an administrator (see the Useful Pages section below).

Passive and manual measures

  • The Flagged Revisions extension, which allows for and encourages edit patrolling and quality assurance.
  • The Nuke extension, which allows an admin to mass delete pages.
  • A spam blacklist and title blacklist both exist to manually block frequent topics and forms of spam.

Range blocking

If you live in an area that is prone to mass organization of botnets, such as Russia or China, you may find that your entire ISP's range has been blocked for anonymous editing. You can avoid this by registering an account. Range blocks are temporary and are applied only after a large number of spam attacks have come from your ISP's ranges.

Automated blocking

  • DNS blacklisting is performed against unregistered users. The Tornevall DNS Blacklist is currently used for this purpose.
  • Title blacklists are automatically updated against the Wikimedia Foundation's global blacklist.
  • Tor exit nodes are detected and blocked from editing for unregistered users.
  • The AbuseFilter extension, which performs automated denial of service to users who are behaving like bots based on powerful filters defined by the administrators. This can include anything from simple denial of the action requested to automatic banning.
  • AntiBot plugin framework.
  • The AntiSpoof extension disallows creation of certain usernames that bots and human spammers find attractive.
  • ConfirmEdit provides a strong captcha in the form of a randomized question that must be accurately answered, which bots and even human spammers are unlikely to be able to answer.
  • SimpleAntiSpam is an older extension which blocks some bots by use of an invisible field on the edit form. If that form has any text entered into it, an edit will be denied. Unfortunately most bots are too smart for this now.

Useful pages

Archive

See Doom Wiki:Spam/Archive for older discussion.