Admin tools development/status

Last update on: 2013-05-monthly

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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 focused this month on improving the AbuseFilter extension, which is now working on the Wikidata site after support was added for other content types (as defined using ContentHandler). 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.

2013-02-monthly
<section begin="2013-02-monthly"/>The team worked on a number of areas this month. The interface for Stewards to mass-lock user accounts was completed and will be deployed very soon next month. The support for global AbuseFilters nears completion, with a test deployment to test.wikipedia.org and mediawiki.org; once internationalisation is more complete, it will be deployed for all wikis. The team worked to agree a specification for a global CheckUser tool. Progress was made on a global account renaming tool and XFF-based global and local blocks. The team also worked on finalising the migration to Single User Login, building some metrics to ascertain a sense of the problem.<section end="2013-02-monthly"/>

2013-03-monthly
<section begin="2013-03-monthly"/>We've implemented improved support for blocking users coming in through proxies with GlobalBlocking. Continuing work on identifying accounts that have not been merged with Single User Login, with the goal of merging those accounts starting in April.<section end="2013-03-monthly"/>

2013-04-monthly
<section begin="2013-04-monthly"/>This month the team mostly worked on Single User Login finalisation, after which all user accounts will be global across all of Wikimedia's public wikis, allowing for cross-wiki notifications and better tools for editors. This will require all user accounts to be uniquely named and not conflict with other accounts. The global account renaming tool neared initial completion, and the global and local blocking based on XFF was finished and deployed. Work on designing a global CheckUser tool was postponed due to lack of resources.<section end="2013-04-monthly"/>

2013-05-monthly
<section begin="2013-05-monthly"/>This month the team worked on Single User Login finalisation, which will mean that all user accounts will be global across all of Wikimedia's public wikis, and so allowing for cross-wiki notifications and better tools for editors. This will require all user accounts to be uniquely named and not conflict with other accounts. Some more work was done on the global account renaming tool. The team attended the Wikimedia Hackathon 2013 in Amsterdam where we discussed issues with admin tools and plans for the future with a number of volunteer developers.<section end="2013-05-monthly"/>