[Foundation-l] Spam blacklisting on Foundation wikis

Fri Aug 24 02:58:32 UTC 2007

Any link blacklist will involve a certain amount of arguing and bureaucracy
-- the meta blacklist affects all languages and all projects (the stakes are
higher), and the relationship between people making requests and people
maintaining the list is different. It's my understanding is that local
blacklists allow us to manage things "in house" and hopefully avoid a lot of
the policy arguments from meta -- the restrictive policy of one wiki is not
a huge concern, anymore, if it doesn't directly affect the other wikis, for
example.

If we keep things local, we keep things simple for the "end user" (editor),
which I guess is the way to go. Treating meta as a "last resort" is probably
a bit much, as you've said, but I don't know that we gain anything by using
the central blacklist all that often.

How often do spammers go after multiple wikis? Multiple languages? How
quickly will we notice, if they do? Those questions seem important to me, in
terms of deciding how often to use/consider the meta blacklist.
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of statistics on the first two. As far as "how
quickly will we notice?" I'm guessing we're counting on people to notice
these things (people heavily active in multiple projects and languages,
especially), which probably means not very quickly. It might be helpful to
have some software try and keep track of cross-wiki spamming -- beyond my
ability, but I bet it'd be helpful, here.

Just a thought. Thanks for bringing it up.
-Luna