User talk:NT

please see Talk:ZZ_001 --John Stumbles 15:42, 21 April 2007 (BST)

Deletion discussion

discussion continued from Talk:ZZ 001 Quotes John Stumbles:

"like the sorcerer's apprentice with the bloody buckets and brooms!"

hehe

"OK he's done that: you and I are now superhero^H^H^Husers :-)."

Let us tread carefully then. Mods are unfortunately the biggest cause of online forum failure.

"I suggest we tread carefully with deleting things:"

I quite agree to that, and suggest we discuss all potential deletions before removing. Except for spam, there is really no hurry, and quick deletions can and sometimes do demotivate contributors.

I'm all for giving people time to respond. If we give all contributors every opportunity it minimises the chance of us causing problems unexpectedly, which mods can all too easily unintentionally do.

Getting a deleted article back is easy if one saves a copy with its wikicode.

Where to discuss potential deletions? How about in the talk page of the article concerned? This is as easy if not easier than anywhere else, it alerts any other contributors to that article, and is the same space as other issue discussion, which may be relevant to the question of deletion sometimes.

agreed

The last question is where to put this discussion! I guess wherever it goes we'll both see it. NT 10:39, 22 April 2007 (BST)

Here will do for starters, but there is also the parallel universe of the DIYWiki namespace (where pages like Project:Copyrights lives). I've created DIYWiki:Test page and DIYWiki talk:Test page which don't show up on Special:allpages unless you select the DIYWiki namespace.

BTW I also blocked a spammer User:122.32.70.165 - not the usual range of IP addresses for Mr Dodgypharms. My guess is that these things are generated by spambots (of the last type) running off compromised users' machines. Considering also that the keymachine.de users were probably on dynamic IP addresses I set up a temporary block for 1 month. Hopefully by the time that's expired the user's IP address will have changed (we'll know when we get the next spam from a different IP!) and I didn't want to leave a block in place indefinitely on what might eventually be an innocent new user's IP.

--John Stumbles 12:08, 22 April 2007 (BST)

Spam

Do you think it might be worth clearing and protecting some of the pages like the disclaimer one that they keep creating? Save having to endlessly delete it?

Also have you noticed we have quite a long user list of fairly obvious spammy user IDs?

--John Rumm 12:45, 23 February 2008 (GMT)

If we protect a page I think they'll just use another one, so I'm not sure we'd be further forward. I did spot an opportunity though: pages that dont show up in Allpages are getting created, and those we could honey trap, any more about which I wont say for obvious reasons. It wont stop people spamming it, but with such page(s) not showing up in Allpages and not getting linked to theyre effectively not visible to readers, plus the spam wont be, so it could saves us significant work.

I really wish wiki had tickboxes on recent changes for fast mass blocking & deletion. Lack of them makes the job take 10x longer.

I'll go check the user id list. NT 13:01, 23 February 2008 (GMT)

Last time we protected a few target pages it took quite a number of months for them to find new ones. It might be interesting to unprotect some of those now and see what happens.

--John Rumm 16:21, 23 February 2008 (GMT)

Quiet round here....

Gosh, a whole week and no spam yet, makes a nice change ;-) --John Rumm 01:04, 17 April 2008 (BST)

Yep, that was an exceptionally good decision! NT 10:09, 17 April 2008 (BST)