User talk:Seth

Welcome

Welcome, Seth, to BattleTechWiki!

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  • This is really helpful for the admins, as it gives your account that touch of "humanity" that assists us in our never-ending battle with spambots.
• For your first few edits on the wiki, please do not add any URLs (which can be an indicator of SPAM).
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Again, welcome to Sarna's BattleTechWiki!

*******Be Bold*******

Tags

Welcome, Seth, to Sarna's BattleTechWiki and thanks for helping to beef up our fan fiction section. I would ask you to do two things, please. 1) Add the fanon tag to the top of each story by typing {{fanon}} above the story itself. 2) In order to increase visability for your story, please add it to the fiction category, by typing [[Category:Fiction]] anywhere in the edit field (though usually at the bottom). (Edit: #2 has been taken careauto-magically.) Again, thanks for contributing, Seth. --Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 15:54, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Fanon tag

--Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 12:25, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

reCaptcha

Seth, at first look I didn't understand the value of your suggestion, but as I dozed on it, what you're suggesting would cause the editor (including the targeted spammer) to complete two reCaptchas, right? One at registration and one again when ever attempting to post a url?--Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 15:21, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

In short, yes. Anytime anyone adds an external link to a page, they will be asked to enter the captcha in addition to the one everyone has to enter when registering. I understand that it may add an extra step for legitimate editors, but you can move trusted editors to another group with the same rights as a normal user, but not be subjected to entering the captcha ever again.

The first thing I would suggest doing is changing the following from false to true:

"$wgCaptchaTriggers['addurl']        = false;" //true requires reCaptcha when adding external URLs.

That line should be found beneath the line:

"require_once( "$IP/extensions/ConfirmEdit/ReCaptcha.php");". 

Keep it that way for a day or so and see if it even slows the bots down from adding links to their talk pages. I'm not 100% sure it will work because they're obviously able to register in the first place and that requires entering a reCaptcha too.

New User Group

If it does prove to be effective, you can create a new user group for legitimate editors. To create a new group called "Editors", do the following;

Create page "MediaWiki:Group-editor" and enter "Editors" to the content of the page.

Create page "MediaWiki:Group-editor-member" and enter "editor" to the content of the page.

Create page "MediaWiki:Grouppage-editor" and enter "Editors" to the content of the page.

Add the following lines beneath require_once( "$IP/extensions/ConfirmEdit/ReCaptcha.php");

$wgGroupPermissions['editor'] = $wgGroupPermissions['user']; //Initializes the editor group
$wgGroupPermissions['editor']         ['skipcaptcha'] = false; //exempts the group editor from having to deal with the captcha again
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']          ['skipcaptcha'] = false; //exempts system operator 
$wgGroupPermissions['bureaucrat']     ['skipcaptcha'] = false; //exempts anyone you have already added to this group
$wgGroupPermissions['bot']            ['skipcaptcha'] = true; //not the same as spam bots, you only have one bot in this group NicJBot

Go to to your page "Special:UserRights" and enter the name of people you want to add to the editor group. Simply check the box for editor and press save.

To sort through your list of users, go to "Special:ListUsers" and sort by users with edits. That's where you'll find the users you want to add to the editor group. The bad thing is, you have over 900 members with edits. So that's gonna be a project. But if you decide to take that on, you might as well create the user group "spambot" as well. As you go down the list, as the known spambots to that group. After you're done, whoever has access to the database can look for the spambot table and delete those users periodically.

Other ways to fight spam bots

I've been running a MWO wiki since the beginning of November, and I haven't dealt with a spam bot yet (quite unlike the MW4 wiki I made). Right now I am using the following mediawiki extensions;

• Extension:SpamBlacklist
• Extension:SimpleAntiSpam

Sorry about the wall of text!