At present, Wikimedia operates a global spam URL blacklist, which lives on meta: and is editable only by Meta admins, which blocks URLs added to it from being added to any page.

en:wp is also getting an imperial arseload of spammers. The people on the front lines, in the #wikipedia-spam and #wikipedia-spam-t channels, are finding things getting very difficult.

At present, getting a URL added requires finding a meta admin, or adding it to [[m:Talk:Spam blacklist]] and hoping someone will get to it soon. And of course meta's admin requirements are very different to those on other wikis.

Obviously, the present blacklist works globally because if a spam URL shouldn't be on one wiki, then it shouldn't be on the others either.

But it would be nice to have a wiki-specific list as well as the global list. The upside of this would be being able to respond to spam much more quickly. The downside is consolidating the lists regularly and sensibly, which may turn out to be a damn nuisance - regularly is easy, sensibly requires thinking about every URL added and whether a local admin has been overenthusiastic in dealing with a spam problem when a temporary block would have sufficed.

In the long-term, with our growing problems with spam, it's probably not very efficient to keep throwing the task onto a few meta admins, and to continually go through a two-step process to get sites added to it.

So ...

wikitech-l: Does this sound workable in our present setup, per http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SpamBlacklist_Documentation ?

foundation-l: How would we make the local <-> global thing workable? There's an automatic updater for trusted shared lists ... would that be enough?

- d.