Editing The Wandering Inn Wiki:Spam

= Combating spam =

This page is to help Wiki Admins and staff to combat spam.

Spam is like crelers. Remember that.

== Preventing spam ==

We've installed some tools to help prevent spam. Here's how to use them.

=== Abuse Filter ===

Abuse Filter ([[Special:AbuseFilter|link here]]) is a powerful tool that allows preventing edits and blocking users automatically if they meet the conditions. Some rules are already into place, edit as you see fit. See [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter Abuse Filter documentation] for more information (it can be a bit tricky.)

=== Title Blacklist ===

You can [[MediaWiki:Titleblacklist|modify the title blacklist]] that will prevent users from creating some pages. 

It won't prevent spammers from creating spam revisions on existing pages, but it should keep them from creating pages with that keywords. 

This supports regular expressions : this is better than adding complete title pages since spam titles can vary, but some words are always in there. To ban titles containing those words, a regular expression is often better. Regular expressions are very powerful. [https://www.sitepoint.com/learn-regex/ Learn more.]

For now, we use abuse filter (see above) to prevent spam in specific conditions without impacting normal users, but if abuse filter proves ineffective, this could be better and simpler to edit for admins.

=== QuestyCaptcha ===

A QuestyCaptcha has been put in place for creating accounts and editing pages as anonymous users. Logged in users should not be affected.

QuestyCaptcha is a set of questions and answers. Users must provide a valid answer to one question to be declared human. 

List of questions and answers is not editable from the Wiki. Only a sysadmin (currently Axel) can change them. We always need more questions (and possibly rotate them) so don't hesitate to participate on Discord.

== If spam happened ==

The war isn't lost yet.

=== Smite Spam ===

[Special:SmiteSpam|SmiteSpam] might be faster as it detects spam and provides you a way to easily delete the page and block user in one go. However it also detects some normal pages, so use with caution.

=== Nuke ===

Use [Special:Nuke|Nuke] to remove pages. If you don't provide anything in the search field, all recently created pages are listed, which can be useful when there are a lot of pages to delete. Only select the relevant spam pages and purge them.

=== Block users ===

Use [Special:ListUsers|User List] to list all users. You can sort them by creation date and reverse order to get all new accounts. Blocking them one by one requires a few clicks, as there's currently no easy way to block a bunch of users. Remember to set block duration to "indefinite."

If there is really a high number of spam users to block, Axel can run a script with a list that will block them in one go.