CFD-Wiki:Administration guide

From CFD-Wiki

Introduction

This 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 spammers are using more and more advanced techniques. It is now common with spam-bots that automatically edit many pages. Spammers also often have access to many different proxies and IP addresses. This makes it increasingly difficult to prevent spam. Due to the advanced spam techniques used by the spammers it is often necessary to ask for help from an administrator to block and efficintly remove spam.

Spam removal action-list:

When you find spam do the following:

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 user, IP address or IP address range can also be manually blocked from the blockip 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 hold down control while you click each "block" in order to block in parallel on different browser tabs).

2. Blacklist all spam addresses

Most spam contains external links where the spammer wants people to go. 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

A page can be delete by clicking the "delete" tab as you visit the page. If the spammer created many pages you can mass-delete them all by entering the spammer's user name on the mass delete page.

4. Revert all spam edits of already existing legitimate pages

Edits can be reverted 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 - go to the spammers User page (or find him via the user creation log) and then click on "Contribution" in the toolbox menu down to the left.