OrbiterWiki:Village pump

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Revision as of 18:23, 30 January 2012 by Urwumpe (talk | contribs)
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Just a page for general OrbiterWiki discussions (for keeping the Talk:Main Page related to the main page).

View archived discussions for 2005-2007, 2008-2010.

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Server move and stuff

  • OrbiterWiki has moved servers. Please report any and all issues you observe, preferably by email.
  • I am planning to upgrade to the most recent MediaWiki version shortly. Will notify when that's done.
  • I'd like to try out the new default MediaWiki skin, which is the skin Wikipedia uses now. Any objections should be expressed here.
  • I'm still hoping to switch case-insensitivity for titles back on. One day...

--RaMan 12:50, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Updated to MediaWiki v1.16.2; a couple of extensions got upgraded too. --RaMan 03:54, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Enabled Vector skin. Old skin vs New skin. Hope you like! --RaMan 18:00, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Loose gun policy for bans from a special subnet

I just noticed some more similarities among the recent spambot activity here: Ten spambot accounts with two name patterns since December came from 118.101.0.0/16, one half of the Internet provider "TELEKOM MALAYSIA BERHAD" (There is no spam from the other /16 of this provider). I suspect that we have a single source behind varying IP addresses there. Since this still means a 640/650 chance that somebody is not a spammer from this network, I would propose the following guideline for next 3 months: All new user accounts that are registered from this network with the pattern

<Letter> + <Random First Name> + <Random Common Family Name> + <Letter>

should be banned instantly and for infinite time. IP-Bans should be avoided, since a /16 network of DHCP addresses seems like a poor target for IP-bans. Better target the business model and prevent search engine optimization. I don't see any reason to use this user name pattern here anyway. Another pattern had been the "-Steamer" type, but I don't think this alone is a good way to identify a spammer. If it comes from the same subnet though, it would be with very high certainty a spammer. We have no legal edits from the whole /16 subnet (Booo!).

Urwumpe 18:23, 30 January 2012 (UTC)