What disturbs me about the vandalism on the Main Page articles is the fact that the vandals don't appear to be drive-by vandals, but rather users who know who to use the right tags and summaries to mask their activities and inflict the most damage. Not to be the pessimist here, but we're clearly dealing with a professional vandal who knows how to beat the system. We need to take action against this person in particular, if that is possible, because once we block one avenue, (s)he'll just find another.
-- Tariq Ab- Jo- Tu-
Steve Summit wrote:
NSLE wrote:
...problems we've been having with the TFA each day on the main page (vandals inserting shock images into transcluded-on-transcluded templates).
[This is armchair speculation by a reader who is not as expert in these matters as he might be; apologies if I'm completely off-base.]
If nothing else, this indicates another reason why nested- transclusion is problematic, and why complexity like this ought perhaps to be avoided. (But of course this observation does nothing to solve the current problem.)
This strikes me as a problem that might be amenable to a technical solution. Perhaps we need some new, more-stringent form of protection which is automatically honored not only by the protected page, but by any other content which it includes, transcludes, or otherwise references. Or, perhaps there should be a "recursive protect" button, which applies (normal) protection to every page included by a given page.
(I don't know enough about how the various inclusion mechanisms are implemented to be able to say how easy or hard either of these solutions might be, but I suspect they wouldn't be impossible.)
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