[Foundation-l] Flagged bots to edit pages containing spam links

Mon Apr 28 18:58:22 UTC 2008

I beg your pardon? Forum shopping on foundation-l? Seems self
contradictory...

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 7:34 PM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:

> Forum shopping for this after the lead developer and CTO has said no
> is not the way to go about it.
>
> From a technical standpoint: I agree with Brion. There are a whole host
> of reasons why an edit might fail (locked db's, protected pages, or even
> the server dying), and the bot needs to be designed to deal with that. If
> your bot crashes, etc. due to an edit failing: well that's your fault as a
> developer.
>
> -Chad
>
> On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 11:17 AM, White Cat
> <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
> > https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13706
> >
> >  Perhaps a community discussion is necessary on the matter, I hereby
> initiate
> >  it.
> >
> >  When a person tries to edit a page that contains a URL matching the
> spam
> >  autoblocker regex, the user is prohibited from making the edit until
> the
> >  spam link is removed. The spam autoblocker was intended to prevent the
> >  addition of new spam.
> >
> >  In a scenario where a spambot adds spam links to wikipedia, then later
> the
> >  spam url is added to the spam blacklist, then a user tries to edit a
> page
> >  that already contains spam added before the spam url is added to the
> spam
> >  blacklist. For a human this isn't much of a deal to deal with, it is
> however
> >  a different story when it comes to bots.
> >
> >  Consider you are operating a bot that makes non-controversial routine
> >  maintenance edits on a regular basis. The spam autoblocker would
> prevent
> >  such edits. If your bot's task is dealing with images renamed/deleted
> on
> >  commons or if your bots task is dealing with interwiki links this is
> >  particularly problematic. Interwiki bots, commons delinking bots often
> edit
> >  hundereds of pages a day on hundereds of wikis. Thats a lot of logs. So
> the
> >  suggestion that I should spend perhaps hours per day reading log files
> for
> >  spam on pages on languages I cannot even understand (or necesarily read
> the
> >  ?'s and %'s) is quite unreasonable. This is a task better dealt with by
> the
> >  locals (humans) of the wiki community rather than bots preforming
> mindless,
> >  routine and non-controversial tasks.
> >
> >  There is also the matter of legitimate reason to include spam on pages
> such
> >  as archived discussion on a spam bot attack where example URLs are used
> >  before these make their way to the spam autoblocker.
> >
> >       - White Cat
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>
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