Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-25428589-20181007231724/@comment-10502460-20181010044823

I'll repeat two suggestions. Make people wait before making their first post to the wiki and especially before making their first edit to someone else's work. Your first suggestion is not a good idea in my opinion. I suspect a large percentage of our contributors post their first stories in a moment of spontaneity, and making them wait a couple days could turn good users away from this wiki forever. Imagine, a high schooler on a caffeine high from cramming for examines decides they want to post a story here. They're really excited about it, but they find out that because we had a couple mass spammers in the space of 12 months, they now have to wait or have the story manually confirmed by an admin. Couple days go by, they get focused on other things, enthusiasm wears off, and we could potentially lose a would-be contributor forever. Not worth it. In cases of severe repeat spamming or a massive raid, we could put your first suggestion in place on a temporary basis, but having it be standard procedure would be counterproductive.

As for your second suggestion, I don't believe there is a way to restrict users from editing other people's pages but not their own.

I think a couple of days for the former and a couple of weeks for the latter should do. Spammy Sammy wants instant gratification. Maybe he'll come back in a couple of days but he probably won't. And again, we may find the same to be the case for legitimate contributors.

< Also, limit the number of new posts and edits per day, and make those limits quite restrictive for a couple of weeks. Fandom has a class of users called "non-AC users", which refers to accounts that are less than four days old. The filters Underscorre and I are suggesting would limit daily page creation to 100 pages for all users, and daily edits to 250 for non-AC users.

I don't really think it's necessary to limit daily edits for confirmed users. Active contributors do sometimes go on editing binges that can go over 250 edits in a single day, and as long as their edits are legitimate and they are careful not to mess anything up I don't think it's worth it to limit them.

As for the page creation limit, 100 pages a day is admittedly very high and it's highly unlikely that anyone who's not a spammer would try it. I suggested this high limit so that spammers would not figure it out as quickly and turn to socks, and also because it's easier to use the Wham tool to mass-delete contributions from one account than a dozen sock accounts. Furthermore, say someone has 25 pastas on Creepypasta ZYZ and wants to upload them all at once on this wiki? What if they have one more than 25? What if they have 30? I figured 100 is a nice high number that is sure to catch only spammers if it is hit. The purpose of these proposes filters is basic target-hardening of this wiki, not to prevent every spam attack that will occur. While I'm at it, I'll make additional suggestions. The number of IP addresses referenced by TOR isn't infinite. Most of the time, people actually hit a few dozen servers. Why not have us register through Tor and then ban the IP of every one of these accounts? We would name them Tor001, Tor002, Tor003, etc. I grant it's more than one login per person but it's in a good cause and the purpose is to get rid of people using multiple accounts. If desired, we could even identify ourselves in the account name. Tor001DrBob, Tor002BloodySpaghetti, Tor003L0cked334, etc. This is almost certainly something Fandom staff would have to be involved with, and I'm not sure to what degree they would be able or willing to help us with that.

Would it be possible to distribute reasonably widely the authority to implement a 24 hour ban on an account and ONLY that authority? Add all the rollback people to this list and if that isn't enough then some other long term people could be considered. Someone starts doodling ugly porn on everyone's story - BAM - they are gone.

I'd say maybe introduce the moderator position and, since moderators would be in charge of deleting spam pages and our ban length for spam is three days, give them the authority to give three-day bans for spamming and leave all other bans to admins. At any rate, I think Fandom staff would have to approve giving ban rights to non-admins.