Talk:Admin tools development

Volunteering: Jack Phoenix
I'm not overly familiar with what a Project Manager does, nor with the AbuseFilter extension or git, but this is definitely an area where I'd like to help out! I've worked on some anti-spam/anti-vandalism extensions (ProtectSite, SpamRegex, regexBlock and Phalanx, to name a few) before and I know from experience that this area of MediaWiki is in need of love.

MediaWiki needs to have some sort of anti-spam mechanism in core, and this would also give me a nice excuse to clean up Phalanx and release it. Let me know if I can be of use. --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 12:42, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi Jack, we're in the process of defining what exactly we want this person to do, and how particular we want to be about choosing someone to do this. The biggest reason to be particular is because we want someone who can say, with some level of authority, "issue A is more important than issue B" given any particular issue A and B that affects admins.  Since there's likely to be disagreement on this, I think it'll be important to deputize one person for this role as the tiebreaker.
 * Anyway, if you've got a little time to help out now, the most pressing issue is probably finding all of the bugs that fall into this category, and linking them up with the list we created (adding new items as appropriate). If there's any high priority items, ping us directly in email or on wiki.  Thanks! -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 19:31, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, if that's what you're after, Jack Phoenix would indeed probably be quite helpful if you'll give him a chance, being both a wiki admin on several projects as well as our favourite resident dev some vague place I can't mention... and he's here. That helps. Right? -— Isarra ༆ 21:09, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Let me be clear here....we're not presupposing a candidate, and from what I've seen, I think Jack would be awesome. I just don't want to presume that Jack is going to be the only person to come forward, and I want to make sure process is not "Jack just happened to notice the wiki page at the right time and responded first".  But, we can deputize Jack for a short period (say the next 2 months), and then work out a process for how we want to do this moving forward.  This is really a very nascent idea to even do anything like this, so we don't have a lot of the details sorted out.  Does that make sense?  -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 21:49, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm just hoping that we can get the ball rolling and stuff done sooner than later; we can wait, but it doesn't mean that we should, because I'm sure that the spambots wait for no-one. All that being said, this is just something that I know pretty well and hence why I want to be a part of this project and the team.
 * Being first to edit or speak definitely shouldn't be a criteria for anything! Like I said to Chris earlier on when we spoke about admin tools, the current status of things and how they should be improved, project management definitely isn't my speciality, but I'm always willing to learn new and useful skills.

That is bad for everyone involved.
 * Protecting MediaWikis everywhere &mdash; not just the WMF sites &mdash; against automated spam and vandalism benefits everyone, both in the long and short run. Not too many weeks ago I saw a MediaWiki site, which was on a legitimate domain (the main site was about sustainability and green ideas, if I recall correctly), but since it was openly editable, running an older version of MediaWiki and had no extensions installed, and the owner/admin was inactive, it had been turned into a spam relay that was being spammed on.


 * I want editors to be able to focus on editing &mdash; content creation, tweaking, fine-tuning... &mdash; instead of having to play whack-a-mole against spambots and vandals all the time. I have plenty of experience in playing whack-a-spambot, and I'm hoping to use that experience to improve WMF sites and also third-party sites (because really, core has to have some anti-spam mechanisms; plenty of third-party users are somewhat reluctant to look into all the (anti-spam) extensions and install them). --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 22:29, 31 July 2012 (UTC)