Admin tools development/status

Last update on: 2013-01-monthly

2012-07-27
Chris Steipp has been generally tasked with working on features related to spam blocking and other disruptive behavior blocking, working with Tim Starling's guidance. Chris Steipp, Andrew Garrett, Tim Starling, James Forrester, and Rob Lanphier met to discuss the scope of this work, charting a broad list of feature requests that are in-scope for this activity, and attempted an initial prioritization of the most important items. We're seeking a volunteer Product Manager to help manage this work.

2012-07-monthly
Chris Steipp has been generally tasked with working on features related to spam blocking and other disruptive behavior blocking, with Tim Starling's guidance. Chris Steipp, Andrew Garrett, Tim Starling, James Forrester, and Rob Lanphier met to discuss the scope of this work, charting a broad list of feature requests, and attempted an initial prioritization of the most important items. Jack Phoenix has volunteered to act as a Product Manager to help manage this work.

2012-08-monthly
Chris Steipp added two new major features to the AbuseFilter extension, global rules and global throttling. Code review was done by Tim Starling and the changesets were merged successfully. These features will allow the creation of filters that apply to all Wikimedia wikis, which is effective for stopping cross-wiki spambots. Jack Phoenix released the Phalanx extension and began working on making it suitable for deployment on Wikimedia servers. During the rest of 2012, the team will work on through their roadmap: CentralAuth mass account locking, improving, stabilizing and reviewing Phalanx, and evaluating the effectiveness of the current CAPTCHA system and possible replacements for it.

2012-09-monthly
The team gathered requirements for Shared User Login (SUL) finalization projects. Chris Steipp worked some more on global AbuseFilter in order to get the feature deployed to the wikis. In October the team will be focusing on SUL finalization projects as well as writing an interface for stewards to mass-lock user accounts.

2012-10-monthly
The team made some progress on writing an interface for Stewards to mass-lock user accounts, but spent most of their time on Wikidata ahead of its launch, and the Wikivoyage migration.

2012-11-monthly
The team's work continued on writing an interface for Stewards to mass-lock user accounts and on being able to use AbuseFilter extension across all wikis at once.

2012-12-monthly
The initial code was committed for interface for Stewards to mass-lock user accounts. For global AbuseFilters, a permission for global rule-writing was merged and the initial code for using WikiSets in the rules was written. Initial code committed for renaming CentralAuth user accounts.

2013-01-monthly
The team mainly focussed this month on improving the AbuseFilter extension, which is now working on the Wikidata project after support was added for other content types (as defined using the ContentHandler functionality new in MediaWiki 1.21). There was some significant work done on blocking abusive proxies and abuse limits, and some additional progress made on global AbuseFilters, user renaming and the interface for Stewards to mass-lock user accounts.