Thread:User talk:Inquisitor Ehrenstein/Category:Spammers and whatnot

I noticed that you created Category:Spammers and some related templates in your userspace yesterday. As is the case with websites that allow contributions from the general public, be it forums, guestbooks or wikis or whatever, spammers are a rather common nuisance nowadays.

However, it's worth noting that MediaWiki.org is not the English Wikipedia; our main focus is documenting the MediaWiki software and things related to it. As such, I believe &mdash; and I think I also speak for the majority of our developers and admins when I say this &mdash; that denying recognition is the best possible approach. We don't need templates and categories "glorifying" this kind of counter-productive behavior.

I had a similar discussion about the same issue with Jasper Deng in May; you might find it interesting.

All in all, any and all anti-spam and anti-vandalism work is and always will be appreciated! However, it's best to be somewhat discreet about it. If you feel that a steward should perform some CheckUser queries or whatnot, feel free to approach them on the #wikimedia-stewards IRC channel on the freenode network.

Likewise, if you have any questions regarding this particular issue, please don't hesitate to contact me (via IRC or my talk page) &mdash; many MediaWiki developers and MW.org administrators are in the #MediaWiki IRC channel.