What with the recent discussion of banning "problem" users, I thought I'd bring this up for discussion/re-discussion.
Our policy on banning people for vandalism is (as I interpret what I've read) that we restrict it to "repeated and sustained" non-useful alterations of articles.
However, it's September, the high school and college students are back with their free school accounts, and inevitably the amount of drive-by vandalism seems to be on the increase. Several of us constantly check new edits by unknown contributors, and even then, we're missing vandalism that only turns up later when paging through via "Random Page" or otherwise coming across an article. As the number of articles goes up, the chance of locating such vandalism goes down.
I've tried a few approaches to ameliorating this. I regularly check "this user's contributions" for vandals, and even sometimes for unfamiliar IP's (*thank* you folks for adding that code feature!) I do keyword searches for common obscenities, et cetera. (No, Cunctator, I don't remove them if they're obviously part of the article.) And, of course, I haunt the "Recent Changes" page. But I think it's getting harder to keep up.
I would like to suggest we add "obviously malicious vandalism" to reasons for an immediate (if temporary) IP ban: a single "Ths page is stupid" should be, in my opinion, enough to ban the address. This saves us from having to spend time on the next five instances of vandalism from that contributor, which could be better spent searching for other graffiti or *gasp* actually adding content.
Sure, one person's vandalism is another person's newbie goof. I would agree that if there's any reasonable possibility that a change was just a newbie goof or something similar, we should err on the side of caution and not ban. But in the really obvious cases - "PHREAK WUZ HERE!!" "Louis IV was a dirty frog" "f*ck you all", and similar - I honestly think we should go ahead and administer a slapdown in the form of a temporary IP ban. If they' re just drive-by vandals, they'll lose interest that much faster; if it is a serious vandal, they'll at least have to go to the trouble of getting a new IP# for each new instance of vandalism.
Yes, there's the possibility that someone may be too quick on the gun and ban someone who might, in the fullness of time, have become a useful contributor. But me, I think... do we really *want* a contributor who is starting off on the level of adding "This is so gay" to a page? The time just bringing them up to speed hardly seems worth it. If they're really *serious* about becoming a real contributor, they'll just have to wait for the ban to expire or appeal to the list.
My two cents (approx. $0.03 Canadian). -- April