Discovering a backlog of requests on Meta spam blacklist Aphaia & I have put some work into clearing this and now have it under control (I hope!).
However in the course of this I have learnt a lot and some (to me) Foundation level questions arise.
The policy at Meta has been only to blacklist those sites with persistent cross wiki records of link placement. However some of the sites that have been requested for blocking are fairly obviously undesirable whether they currently are troubling just one wiki or many (porn being the obvious example but there are plenty more that I think consensus on undesirability would be found).
So should we be rejecting requests for such sites saying that they should use their own local lists? I am aware that preventative blocking of anything or anyone can be frowned on (personally if I can see trouble coming I prefer to take action before it arrives rather than clean up afterwards). It may be that, in asking en wp for example to block locally, we are merely missing the opportunity to avoid problems across wikis in the near future. Spammers are adept at exploiting any opening that they can.
There has been a tendency to treat the Meta blacklist as a place of last resort - I question whether a more thoughtful approach to keeping Foundation sites clean might not be desirable?
Herby [[user:Herbythyme]] most places