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Abuse Filter
I wasn't sure whether to put this here, in a forum post or on the Admin Portal talk page but I felt the community deserves a say in this too. In the wake of several recent spam/vandalism attacks, I contacted Wikia asking that provided we gained consensus, we could be allowed to have the Abuse Filter activated here. It is a MediaWiki extension and a tool which can prove valuable if configured correctly. I received a reply stating that as long as we have users here with experience with the tool (I myself have a little bit of experience in addition to a few IRC users I know), we can have it enabled.

The tool can be used to block suspicious edits, which we can limit by a specific usergroup if we wanted to, tag suspicious edits on Special:RecentChanges and in the page history, such as section blanking, without actually stopping them, block/warn a user who triggers a specific filter based on how we set it, throttle certain types of edits, for example, if someone went to say blank a page, they would be stopped the first time around and they would trigger a term listed in Special:AbuseLog (which doesn't exist here yet as we don't have the AbuseFilter) and Administrators can check this to see if the user in question has triggered the filter and so forth. How it works depends on how we choose to configure it.

For us we could say, program it to combat gibberish page names/edit summaries (which one particular spammer has used frequently) and many more things - it is a powerful tool. This and this show what the AbuseFilter has been programmed to do on another wikis and I feel it could be good for us too and is better than locking down a whole wiki just because of one spammer. I realise most of our administrators may be new to this tool and over time, we'll become more acustomed with it. If anyone needs help with the tool, they can always ask around on Wikia.

Given how powerful this tool is, I would like to know if the community would be comfortable having this tool enabled via a community discussion. I think that it would be very beneficial and I don't see any major downsides to this. I'll reply to an email I received from Wikia depending on how the consensus went down. What do you guys think? 10:21, May 30, 2012 (UTC)
 * As long as the Abuse Filter is not abused, I believe it can prove valuable in decreasing vandalism, but when it comes to its use, we should not overreact. By this I mean it should be used only when dealing with major spammers and vandals rather than a single vandal who creates a few spam pages. In that case, good old revert-block-ignore can prove more useful and easy. But anyway, I support. Andronikos sig.png 10:36, May 30, 2012 (UTC)
 * FWIW, we can actually configure it against everyday problems, such as blanking a whole page, meaning if someone tries it - it won't be allowed. I'll also suggest that if the feature is enabled, we don't set it to block users for every little thing - there's no point setting it to ban someone who tries to do something when they couldn't actually do it. It's all very customisable - it's best to wait until we actually get it (if we get it) before pre-emptively deciding on what extent we'll use it. Though I do agree it's not worth adding everything to the filter just because some forms of vandalism/spam vary; AbuseFilter performs best with the common things. 10:47, May 30, 2012 (UTC)