User talk:KasperVld

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Revision as of 03:08, 6 February 2016 by VariousMetals (talk | contribs) (More spam)
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Spambots

Hey Kasper, just wanted to give you a heads-up on the spam bot situation. I've been bugging Umbral about this and he's been awesome about banning these spambot accounts, but I figure you're probably in a position to do more about this than he is.

This account is new, has not been banned and also has a (blanked & delisted) spam page hanging out:

These are the accounts that have been banned but still have spam pages hanging out (I've blanked the content on these pages and delisted them from search engines):

These accounts have been banned and all of their spam pages have been deleted:

The spamming started on the 17th of January at 08:23 (server time) with User:Pk969837, and the most recent spam page I see was created by ‎User:Dkattyperry on the 18th of January at 20:36, so this has been going on for over 36 hours now. In total, it looks like they've created 295 spam pages, and we've deleted 36 of the pages so far. I believe that I have blanked and delisted all of the pages that have yet to be deleted, though I did just find some that I had missed when I looked at Quick14's contribution list.

I suggested to Umbral that we may need additional spam restrictions, especially for new accounts since that seems to be the new strategy here. For example, after all the other spam accounts got banned, Dkattyperry was created and started making more spam. I'm not really sure what our options are at the moment, but I figure you're probably in a better position to make that call than me or Umbral are. -Kerbolnaut (talk) 22:15, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

I suggest some kind of questions about the game for allowing the creation of new account. For example: "What is the name of the fourth planet from Kerbol?" NWM (talk) 15:56, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Spambot saga continues

New spambots are:

As usual, I've marked all of them as spambots and blanked their spam pages with added tags to delist them from search engines. This has now been going on for two and a half days. I'll second NWM's suggestion of asking questions based on the game to create new pages. Any chance of increasing spam restrictions, or at least making me an admin so I can clean this up properly? -Kerbolnaut (talk) 22:40, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

More spam

New spammer/spambot accounts:

As usual, I've blocked their pages from getting indexed by search engines, but I think it would be best if we were a little more proactive about this. Maybe reporting their IP addresses and the phone numbers they posted to the FBI? -Kerbolnaut (talk) 21:17, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

No need for anything drastic like that, really, but I agree that time would be better spent on preventing future attacks than undoing the damage afterwards:
This wiki already has the AbuseFilter, ConfirmEdit, and SpamBlacklist plugins installed, the first of which has definitely been intercepting quite a bit of spam that never ends up making it to Recent Changes. I would highly recommend installing the TitleBlacklist plugin, which is included in new Mediawiki installations by default. Since all of the recent spam is consistently added within newly created pages with obviously non-constructive titles, the plugin should detect it with the default configuration. That should at least help clear up the annoying titles listed in the edit logs.
The abuse filter is probably the best defense available against general spam, but it needs to be continuously updated as threats change. On this wiki, only administrators, of which there are really only a few active right now, are allowed to modify the abuse filter. A better solution might be to create a new user group similar to Wikipedia's Edit Filter Managers user group, so that admins can assign that user right individually to trusted users with regex experience.-VariousMetals (talk) 03:08, 6 February 2016 (UTC)