Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-25428589-20181007231724

Hey guys! In response to the recent uptick in wide-scale vandalism, we've been experiencing, and the time delay in dealing with some incidents, I've been trying to think through some solutions. I've got three proposals to share with you guys, the first two of which are directly related to impeding vandalism/spam, and the third is related to the wider operation of the site.

Please note: This is a long post. There is no need to quote it in any responses.

Content Moderators
In 2016, Wikia/FANDOM introduced new user rights, Discussions Moderators and Content Moderators. While we have promoted a couple of users to be Discussions Moderators in the past, we've never made real use of either role. However, I think we could adapt the Content Moderator role to suit our needs.

Currently, the "front line" of our response to wide-scale vandalism is our rollback team. and have been especially dedicated in this regard, recently. However, the only major user right they gain over regular users is the quick rollback of edits. They can't block users or delete pages, so they've had to sit back and wait for admins to come on while vandals made 100s of bad-faith edits and uploaded a metric shit-ton of strange creepypasta hentai. While our admins are more than capable of handling these issues, it's not fair to interrupt their lives/studying every time a twelve-year-old discovers how to use Tor. I can't speak for other users, but I know that I personally would trust some of our regular users with deletion/block tools to use in the event that a vandal is active while the admins are away.

The Content Moderator right would work really well here, in my opinion. From the list of group rights, you should be able to see they can remove pages/images/comments. In combination with the right to block users, which Wikia could add to the user group at our request, this would be the perfect, limited set of tools to immediately halt vandals until an admin can come online to assess the situation and take further action.

Why not just promote these users to administrators? As I envision the moderator right, it would not constitute the same step-up in "authority" that adminship confers. Admins have the authority to review new stories for QS, to deal with more complicated site issues, etc. The purview of moderators would be strictly limited to spam/vandalism cleanup - no review of new stories under the quality standards, not even deletion of clearly unfinished/blacklisted pages. This right would function solely as a utility for keeping the wiki clean.

Users might not want the added responsibility & activity expectations that come bundled with adminship but may also want to actually be able to do something about vandalism, rather than just watching vandals' edit counts creep higher and higher. This right would be considerably easier to apply for than adminship since the only real requirement is trust that the user won't abuse the right, and I feel that many users who currently have no rights/just have rollback already possess. It could also be a useful stepping stone in demonstrating one's viability for the admin role.

Anyway, I'm interested in hearing some feedback on this.

tl;dr: Start making people content moderators (deletion/blocking rights), with the authority to delete obvious spam/vandalism and block users who upload these things, but nothing more.

Abuse Filters
has shared some ideas on the Discord about implementing some rate-limiting abuse filters for new users, and I would like to "formally" propose their implementation. If you don't know, our abuse filter checks every edit that's submitted to the wiki against a set of rules. If the edit matches those rules, the filter prevents it from being made. We currently use it to catch blacklisted subjects & spinoffs every time a new page is posted. However, the filters can do more than this.

Through rate-limiting, we can prevent users from creating a certain number of pages/uploading lots of images in one day, or making lots of edits very quickly. Some ballpark estimates for limits could be as follows: Users can't create more than 100 pages per day, non- users can't make more than 250 edits per day. In my opinion, these may even be too loose as they stand, and we'll need to have a discussion about what limits would be appropriate.

I've got some experience creating/managing the filters and would be happy to take care of building these new filters if need be.

tl;dr: Abuse filters could allow us to limit the number of pages users can create within a day/the number of edits new users can make within one day.

Administrators' Noticeboard
BONUS ROUND!

This is far less directly related to the goal of tackling vandalism, but it could help to ease the task the admins have to tackle.

I'm not sure if any of you frequent Wikipedia, but they have a system called the Administrators' Noticeboard. Users post any ongoing incidents which need admin intervention (e.g: an active vandal, user conflicts, etc.) and any admin can then tackle what's been posted. While this is necessary on Wikipedia due to the volume of edits obscuring problems from the admins' view, you may think this is far too much bureaucracy for a wiki of our size. I personally think, however, this could be very useful to us in speeding up the process of dealing with problems.

Currently, the system for notifying admins is pretty much to either leave a message on the talk page of someone active or to say something in Discord. Both of these have issues - if the admin you message is inactive, the next admin to arrive could completely miss your message, and you may not be a fan of Discord (which definitely lends itself to less detailed reports). Having a centralised location that admins can quickly check when they come online for anything that needs immediate attention could definitely make things easier. As an example, if a user was to blank their talk page multiple times, being reverted by a non-admin each time, an admins' noticeboard could be a simple way to let admins know without much effort - the addition of a single line could be all that's necessary. This is most similar to wikipedia:WP:ANI.

To be clear, I'm not proposing that admins spend less time looking at the context of a situation and just act on whatever appears at the noticeboard. I just think it could form a useful "jumping off" point to address immediate issues/users that need to be blocked/etc.

tl;dr: ANI, but less bureaucratic

Vote!
So yeah, if you think any of these would be a good idea, feel free to leave a vote below. You can vote on each one individually, or all together. Thanks for reading :)

 