[Foundation-l] Spam blacklisting on Foundation wikis

[Herby]

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:58:32 -0700, "Luna" <lunasantin at gmail.com> said:
> Any link blacklist will involve a certain amount of arguing and
> bureaucracy
> -- the meta blacklist affects all languages and all projects (the stakes
> are
> higher), and the relationship between people making requests and people
> maintaining the list is different. It's my understanding is that local
> blacklists allow us to manage things "in house" and hopefully avoid a lot
> of
> the policy arguments from meta -- the restrictive policy of one wiki is
> not
> a huge concern, anymore, if it doesn't directly affect the other wikis,
> for
> example.
> 
> If we keep things local, we keep things simple for the "end user"
> (editor),
> which I guess is the way to go. Treating meta as a "last resort" is
> probably
> a bit much, as you've said, but I don't know that we gain anything by
> using
> the central blacklist all that often.
> 
> How often do spammers go after multiple wikis? Multiple languages? How
> quickly will we notice, if they do? Those questions seem important to me,
> in
> terms of deciding how often to use/consider the meta blacklist.
> Unfortunately, I'm not aware of statistics on the first two. As far as
> "how
> quickly will we notice?" I'm guessing we're counting on people to notice
> these things (people heavily active in multiple projects and languages,
> especially), which probably means not very quickly. It might be helpful
> to
> have some software try and keep track of cross-wiki spamming -- beyond my
> ability, but I bet it'd be helpful, here.

At least a couple of sites I've blocked have spammed 20+ wiki.  There
are some folk on en wp spam project that are very hot on
checking/chasing cross wiki spammers.  I followed one across es, it & fr
wikis a week ago.  There are some great tools out there for cross wiki
contributions
(http://tools.wikimedia.de/~luxo/contributions/contributions.php?lang=en)
and links (eagle's one - can't find the link instantly).

It certainly happens and a few folk are very dedicated to keeping
foundation sites as clean as possible.  I know it isn't a main stream
aspect of the project but keeping porn, gambling, finance links out of
pages seems a worthwhile activity and worth finding a "good" or even
"best" way to deal with it.

Cheers
Herby
-- 
  Herby
  herbythyme at fmail.co.uk

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