I think an external link, [https://wordpress.org WordPress], would be warranted on Extension:AuthWP, but I cannot add it. Similarly, I cannot set download-link in the ExtensionInstall template to [https://github.com/gonenlab/AuthWP/archive/master.tar.gz Download]. Is there anything that could be done about that?
Topic on Project:Village Pump
You have now made enough edits to this wiki that you should now be able to add external links without triggering the edit filter. That said, (speaking to other users watching this page, not to you), given the frequency with which this comes up, would it make sense to exempt edits to the Extension namespace from that filter, since they are often not spam?
@Hattne: Try again now, it should work.
@Pppery: I would not encourage loosening the filter, because link spamming is a chronic problem and the filter does a very good job of filtering them out.
Works now, thanks all!
I looked at the 100 most recent hits of that filter in Extension namespace (dating back to June 2020):
That totals fifty-nine incorrectly blocked edits and forty-one correctly blocked edits. Are you sure that the filter [applied to the Extension namespace] does a very good job of filtering [link spam] out?
Yes, that still does a good job overall (considering how much link spam was there before), but seeing that most of the supposed false-positives are in the Extension namespace, I am open to, and am fine, with your loosening of the filter to exclude edits in that namespace.
(39% is quite significant nevertheless)
Come to think of it: in the interest of reducing traffic such as this, it may be worthwhile to reword the message presented to the user upon having an external link rejected. I don't recall precisely what it said, but it made me think that is was due to a per-user or even per-instance restriction that would have to be manually lifted by a human administrator. If the message were to indicate that you can't add links until you've got sufficiently many edits under your belt, I would not have started this duplicate thread.
The message is MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-linkspam. I'd be willing to consider proposed rewordings, although of course any advice given there will also be read by actual spammers.