Talk:Countervandalism development

Overlap with Admin tools development

There seems to be a lot of overlap with this page and Admin tools development. Is it possible the two efforts could be consolidated? Legoktm (talk) 09:39, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Possibly, although it looked like the focus of that page was more on WMF-like environments where there's a shared backend for a wiki farm, while this is more focused on tools for third party wikis. I do want to avoid reinventing the wheel wherever possible; it's always demoralizing to find out that, due to insufficient research, one's project unnecessarily duplicated someone else's. Leucosticte (talk) 09:45, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

PanicButton

MediaWiki core already provides this functionality which is however presumably rarely used/configured. The "siteadmin" permission allows to lock and unlock the wiki's database for write actions. This functionality may probably be enhanced to provide an interface like the one protecting pages and to allow selectable time spans. Easier access to this could perhaps be added via the AdminLinks extension. --[[kgh]] (talk) 15:54, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

RevertBatch

I think this is a good idea. So far the hardest part is to undo/revert the actions by bad meaning authors efficiently and fast once harm was done. Probably this idea could be merged with the BlockBatch extension and allow for either just blocking or blocking and reverting. An interesting enhancement to this could very well be to specify a minimum timestamp.--[[kgh]] (talk) 16:02, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

I started writing it, but then lost interest (although not due to the idea's lacking merit). It could be used not only to revert vandals but also yourself, e.g. if you misconfigured a bot and it made a lot of bad edits. The SQL looked like this:

CREATE TABLE revert_range(
-- Primary key
rr_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
-- user.user_id of the user to revert
rr_user INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
-- user.user_text of the user to revert
rr_user_text VARCHAR(256),
-- Starting timestamp for the revert (default: 12:00:00 AM, 1 January 1970)
rr_start varbinary(14) NOT NULL DEFAULT '19700101000000',
-- Ending timestamp for the revert (default: 11:59:59 PM, 31 December 9999)
rr_end varbinary(14) NOT NULL DEFAULT '99991231235959'
);

Leucosticte (talk) 16:20, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I may use this to undo my bad action, too. This is indeed a valid reason. --[[kgh]] (talk) 16:47, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

File spam

File spam is thankfully not that frequent, though it happens. Ways to efficiently nuke the uploaded and/or reuploaded files are currently not there. However, I think this is not a front burner thing to focus on. I do not think that image blacklisting is worth the effort. --[[kgh]] (talk) 16:08, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

If you have 500 images on your wiki and they all get reuploaded as goatse by a vandalbot, it isn't fun to revert and delete all of those. Leucosticte (talk) 16:20, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Ouch, never seen a problem this size on a wiki. Well, in this case ... --[[kgh]] (talk) 16:46, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

It won't happen to the average wiki. Only if someone has a reason to hate you or your wiki will you typically get that kind of attention and be treated that way. I've only had such a thing happen once, and I caught it before they'd gotten very far, but their intent was clear. If I'd been taking a nap, they probably would have hit all my images, but I was at the computer and seeing the notification emails come in, so I only had to revert eight of them. The same or similar people had done several hundred acts of vandalism a few days earlier, though (page move vandalism, etc.). I think it was 4chan. Leucosticte (talk) 16:59, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Blacklist open proxies

An efficient way to do this will be great. I remember that in the early days of WikiAPIary something like this was in place but had to be deactivated since it made the website inoperable with regard to performance. The problem was that back then there was no efficient way to make this work. I believe this is still the case. Probably the best will be to ask Thingles about this and his experience. --[[kgh]] (talk) 16:14, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

It would be interesting to know what tool they used; we might have a better one now. Leucosticte (talk) 16:20, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Phalanx

ShoutWiki and Wikia operate with something like the Phalanx which integrated different tools useful for countervandalism. Probably there is some inspiration there, too since they have quite some traffic. --[[kgh]] (talk) 16:16, 18 March 2014 (UTC)