Talk:AbuseFilter

Yo Folks,

great job at fighting the zombie hordes everyone. But it is getting a bit tiresome.

So I went (again) and browsed ShoutWiki to see what we can technically do against it. There is still the option to disallow account creation for non-users, but that is something we have to ask the staff to do manually, and I still don't like the idea.

I also found a forum thread with a solution to the old problem that a valid link is on the spam blacklist: There's a whitelist we can edit. But I forgot any examples so that will have to wait for another day.

The new thing is: The extension "AbuseFilter" has been activated for all wikis since I last looked, and that is some powerful (and rather complex) stuff. Our page for that is here, the Mediawiki explanation page over there.

The question is: what should it do exactly? After browsing a bit in the Wikipedia filters I thought we could do something like disallowing users younger than say a day to create pages, but that would run counter to our rule that they should say hello on their user page to prove that they are human. Or we could disallow certain username patterns, say those who contain numbers over 666 or so. ;o)

Ideas? Please speak in RegEx, haha. I'll look deeper into it soon.

I hope you're all well and not too much in trouble because of the meatspace zombie apocalypse.

--CE (talk) 22:07, 21 March 2020 (UTC)


 * On Wikipedia new users are not allowed to create pages. But this does not prevent them from editing or creating their own user or talk pages.


 * Actually we could even disable creating their own pages. We could have a "Welcome new users" page that they should sign.


 * P.S. - Prepare for World War Z -- Petri Krohn (talk) 01:26, 22 March 2020 (UTC)


 * They seem to be learning zombies. So maybe we shall eliminate those whose numbers are less then 666 too. --Resup (talk) 10:04, 22 March 2020 (UTC)


 * You're right, only one of the just kicked seven would have fit that pattern. Coincidence?
 * Petri, the idea with a special page to sign is good, but we must have a way to change their permissions after they did it. So we would have to add them to a new user group with different rights. Which is nothing we can do here on ShoutWiki as far as I can see. This is stuff only they can do for us, so we would have to think it through before we ask them to remove some rights from the normal user group and create a new group that adds those rights. Looking at the (lack of) activity on the main site and forums, I guess those changes could take some time to be done by someone. Disallowing creating accounts would be done the same way but much simpler: remove the right "createaccount" from the "all" group.
 * Anyway, I think I'll find the time today to get my head around the AbuseFilter stuff and see what comes up as possibilities there. --CE (talk) 10:24, 22 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Maybe the simplest way for the moment is to prevent them from posting links for a certain amount of time after signing up, because it's very rare that they edit their created pages (and surprising that it happens at all) - usually the process of creating a page and posting a link is a single one. That should be possible with AbuseFilter. --CE (talk) 10:32, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

That looks good already. See the adventures of my evil twin! :oD - --CE (talk) 14:33, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

I simplified filter 1: We don't want to prevent real users from starting with their edits immediately after they sign-up, so now it just checks "edits with links by users younger than a day". Seems to work fine, only that it still doesn't do the autoblock (which it did in the beginning). But I think I found the problem: It gets marked a potentially harmful because it hit a too high percentage of recent edits. So my prediction is that it will eventually do it again after we made more edits. Let's wait and see.

Then I made a second filter to catch Zombies: "edits with links by users older than a day with an edit count of zero".

Those two should catch anything but new accounts that do nothing (and those that do an edit without links on the first day and after that day spam links, which I don't think is very likely for a bot). We could delete them manually or let them stay in their graves.

Is that logic sound? --CE (talk) 16:21, 22 March 2020 (UTC)