[Foundation-l] Spam-blacklist for URLs (on Wikimedia sites or otherwise)

[David Gerard]

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.