CFD-Wiki:Administration guide

From CFD-Wiki

Revision as of 22:08, 13 December 2005

Introduction

This is guide is not finished yet. It is intended to be a guide for CFD-Wiki administrators. So far it is mainly focused on how to deal with spam in the Wiki.

Spam

Wiki spam has become very common and the spammers are using more and more advanced techniques. It is now common that spammers use automated bots to edit many pages automatically. They also often have access to many different proxies and IP addresses. This makes it increasingly difficult to fight spam. Due to the advanced spam techniques used by the spammers spam control often needs to be done by an administrator.

Here is a small check-list on what administrators should do when they find spam in the Wiki:

1. Block the offending user

This is most easily done by clicking the "block" link in the recent changes list. Use an infinite expiry time. A specific user, IP address or IP address range can also be blocked on the block page page. If a bot was used to register many users you can identify and block them all quickly by using the user creation log (in Firefox you can hold down control while you click each "block" in order to block in parallel on different tabs).

2. Blacklist all spam addresses

Most spam contains external links where the spammer wants people to visit. An effective way of preventing future spam is to blacklist these spam addresses. To blacklist an URL address just add it to the spam blacklist. Once an address has been blacklisted it is impossible to add it again to the Wiki.

3. Delete all new pages created by the spammer

If there are one or a few new spam pages you can delete them manually by clicking the "delete" tab as you visit the page. If the spammer created many pages you can mass-delete them all with a few click by entering the spammer's user name on the mass delete page.

4. Revert all spam edits of already existing legitimate pages

If just a few pages have been edited you can revert the edits by clicking the "Rollback" link which you can find either when you click "diff" on the recent changes list or when you make a comparison between two page versions in the page history. If a spammer edited many pages it might be more effective to instead rollback his edits from his contributions list. When doing this it is also wise to mark the actions as bot actions. This will hide them from the recent changes list so that other users are not confused by them.