[Foundation-l] Flagged bots to edit pages containing spam links

[White Cat]

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13706

Perhaps a community discussion is necessary on the matter, I hereby initiate
it.

When a person tries to edit a page that contains a URL matching the spam
autoblocker regex, the user is prohibited from making the edit until the
spam link is removed. The spam autoblocker was intended to prevent the
addition of new spam.

In a scenario where a spambot adds spam links to wikipedia, then later the
spam url is added to the spam blacklist, then a user tries to edit a page
that already contains spam added before the spam url is added to the spam
blacklist. For a human this isn't much of a deal to deal with, it is however
a different story when it comes to bots.

Consider you are operating a bot that makes non-controversial routine
maintenance edits on a regular basis. The spam autoblocker would prevent
such edits. If your bot's task is dealing with images renamed/deleted on
commons or if your bots task is dealing with interwiki links this is
particularly problematic. Interwiki bots, commons delinking bots often edit
hundereds of pages a day on hundereds of wikis. Thats a lot of logs. So the
suggestion that I should spend perhaps hours per day reading log files for
spam on pages on languages I cannot even understand (or necesarily read the
?'s and %'s) is quite unreasonable. This is a task better dealt with by the
locals (humans) of the wiki community rather than bots preforming mindless,
routine and non-controversial tasks.

There is also the matter of legitimate reason to include spam on pages such
as archived discussion on a spam bot attack where example URLs are used
before these make their way to the spam autoblocker.

      - White Cat