PathfinderWiki talk:Spam

Please make your comments / add to the discussion here: --Fleanetha 13:19, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Reinventing the wheel

Does anyone know of a suitable policy we could 'copy and paste' from another trusted wiki?--Fleanetha 13:22, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

Some sites of potential use for creating our policy:

Blocking Users

Under what circumstances should we block a user?

Should we have an agreed set of times for blocking for certain infringements or just block any user indefinitely?

--Fleanetha 13:25, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

At the moment we block indefinitely if we find someone posting spam, deleting/graffitying, or creating external links. We haven't had any less-serious problems in a long time. There were a few folks who were posting annoying stuff or just seemed very immature back in the day. We gave them a few written warnings on their talk pages, and when they didn't listen, we banned them. --Brandingopportunity 18:36, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Spam avoidance

Can we document what we do to avoid spammers?

Document User:Aeakett's current defences
consider new ones such as expecting some evidence of Pathfinder awareness from new users in some format

User name policies

From looking back at the logs of blocked users in early February 2012, these have been blocked more than once and have many sleeping userids. So, user names must not:

be fewer than 4 letters long
be tantamount to an advertisement for a company or trade
Must not begin with
- Akyla
- Anna (this one could be more difficult)
- Gts
- Puwok

I would say there is a set of user names that is mighty suspicious - many userids of this style and some that have been blocked once:

Names beginning with:

Angelslayer
Discount
Podpole
TravelSim

Anything ending in four numbers

We should also state the usual about offensive names, etc. --Fleanetha 15:04, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Deleting Users

Do we have a way to delete users as well as just block them?--Fleanetha 19:41, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

As far as I know, there's no way to completely delete a user. Ultimately, it doesn't hurt the wiki to have a ton of registered users who never do anything except for flooding our recent changes page and the potential of some bot logging them all in at once to make a barrage of spam. Still, I'd rather we had only registered users who were actually using the wiki and not all these bots.—Yoda8myhead 20:58, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Fixing broken links

I just tried to fix a broken link on The Hydra's Fang Incident, and found I couldn't because

“

To help protect against automated spam, PathfinderWiki only allows trusted users to insert links to external sites into pages. For more information on our spam fighting practices, and how to become a trusted user, click here for more information.

”

Which is confusing because the linked page doesn't mention "trusted users" and how to become one! So how do I go about fixing broken links? Hairy Dude (talk) 23:02, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Just a thought. How about allowing links to paizo.com by default and flagging them for review by a moderator? Not having adminned a MediaWiki site, I don't know how feasible this suggestion is. Hairy Dude (talk) 23:04, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

The trusted user thing was something we added before we restricted edits to registered users only. We should turn that off now that everyone gets vetted before being made a registered member. In the meantime, I'm making you a trusted user. —

Yoda8myhead (talk) 00:55, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Adding links to Paizo.com

I'm trying to update Ydersius and cite the Paizo.com post by James Jacobs, which runs afoul of the external link prohibition. I'd be happy to become a trusted user, but I'd also recommend a "white list" of sites that anyone can link to. The list might have as few as just the one entry: paizo.com

Thanks. -- JHunterJ (talk) 18:09, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

That's a good idea, JHunterJ, I'll see if that can be done. In the meantime, I've added you to the "trusted" group. --Brandingopportunity (talk) 18:19, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Updating Pathfinder Society Scenarios

Hey there. I was trying to add the cover art for 5-10 and 5-11 so they aren't the "Coming Soon" art and I wasn't able to add the website to point to the scenario on Paizo's website. It says I wasn't a trusted user. Is there a way I can become a trusted user? I have been recently updating all of the Pathfinder Society information and trying to keep it up to date. --Sarrick (talk) 19:20, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi Sarrick, I thought we had eliminated that category, so something is wrong. Let me look into it. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. --Brandingopportunity (talk) 20:45, 13 January 2014 (UTC)