Wikipedia talk:Disruption
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This page was listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion and the consensus was to keep: see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Wikipedia:Disruption
"click on the "Page History" link at the bottom of the page" does not (at least for me) sufficiently explain how to revert a page to a previous revision. The only way I could find so far is by looking at the diff and manually undoing the changes. Certainly that can't be the way you're thinking of? -- Timwi 19:30 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- From the Page History page you can view any previous version by clicking on its date. If you then click Edit This Page you get an edit box with the old contents, which you can then save. --Zundark 21:05 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)
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- Thanks! Unfortunately, it's not as quick & easy & comfortable as I hoped it would be, and it doesn't auto-generate a summary either, but at least it's better than manually un-doing changes from looking at a diff. :) Again, thanks! -- Timwi 21:52 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)
[edit] Ad bots
It strikes me it would be very easy to write a bot that spammed WP with banner ads on multiple pages.
If it has not been done yet, surely it will be in the future.
Do we have a defense other than reverting? (Might be impossible to keep up with a bot.)
If not, perhaps we should think abut it now. Anjouli 14:40, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- I guess the first line of defense would be to ban the IP of the bot. Then individually reverting the pages. This would only work if the bot attack isn't the massive type (one coming from various different IPs). --seav 16:55, Nov 24, 2003 (UTC)
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- In the event of something serious, a developer could put the wiki into read only mode, and if there are no developers around, there are a number of contributors here with a list of their phone numbers to inform them of an emergency situation. Angela 20:22, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
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- Presumably the database is checkpointed at regular intervals, and one could roll back to a checkpoint. orthogonal 22:43, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
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- Yes, wikipedia:replies covers it pretty well. Sorry, I had not seen that. But roll-back and IP blocking responses have their limitations. Roll-back can undo contributions and IP blocking has not worked at all for spam mail. I was thinking of something more like an antispambot that searched WP (presumably by following links, if full-text search were still off) and automatically edited pages to remove known spam text. Probably best run on the local server for speed, although could be run from anywhere. Such a bot could probably be written so that apart from the speed, it would appear no different from a human editor. Anyone see a downside? Anjouli 13:27, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
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- I can see downsides, I'm afraid. The nightmare scenario has not arrived yet ... spammers can send gajillions of emails per day... relatively few people would notice Wikipedia spam relative to this email deluge... so for the forseeable future it won't be a sensible option for spammers. This means that the development time, and our developers have limited time, would be sucked up into a project with no short-term gains. Also the spam-detection would be HARD - look at the anti-spam filter solutions out there trying to outwit spammers and still spam gets through.. an antispam bot hacked in-house is unlikely to fair better. Thirdly such a bot would suck server system resources up. I guess the nightmate scenario is not such a spammer but a vandal bot which could hop across IP addresses. Pete 00:34, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)
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- I agree that WP is not a (yet) prime target, which has perhaps protected us. I do not think that such an antispambot would be hard to write. I am pretty sure I could write one myself without too much trouble - which frees us from the "developer's limited time" problem. And if remotely run, I do not see how it would suck up resources any more than removing such spam manually. Anjouli 09:41, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)
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[edit] Redirect proposal
Since this page contains nothing that is not said elsewhere, I propose it be redirected to the far more detailed page at Wikipedia:Dealing with disruptive or antisocial editors. There were no objections to such a redirect when the page was listed on VfD. The vote, which few people saw since a VfD tag was never added to the page, resulted in one vote to keep, one to delete and one to redirect. Are there any objections to this? Angela. 21:29, Aug 11, 2004 (UTC)
