Forum:AbuseFilter on Narutopedia

It looks like Angela is interested in trying out the AbuseFilter extension on a few wiki here on Wikia. So we're probably going to be trying out the extension here on the Narutopedia.

For a quick overview AbuseFilter is an extension which can apply "rules" to edits. It works using filters on things like text matches on the text that was added, if the page is a new page, how much the user has edited, the article's contributors, what action they tried to do, etc... and it allows automatic actions to be taken such as posting a warning up that they need to confirm, throttling what they are doing, rejecting that edit, blocking them, revoking autoconfirmed status or permissions flags, or flagging their edit so it shows up in various pages like the recent changes with a big marker on it.

For example, on Wikipedia they applied a filter that put up a notice that required confirmation whenever a user a user tried to blank a page explaining why it's a bad edit, and what the user could try doing instead of blanking the page. A large number of those attempted page blanking edits actually became constructive edits to the wiki instead of page blanking. ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Jun 30, 2009 @ 05:01 (UTC)

I'm open to suggestions on things we can put filters on. Right now I'm thinking of notices on things like:
 * Page blanking
 * Adding romaji like Pein, Kyubi, etc... to a page
 * Using incorrect romaji like Hyuuga, etc...
 * Bad MoS links like chidori
 * Some of the types of link bypassing like Sasuke
 * One or two line articles that are not redirects
 * Creation of a User: page from a user who doesn't have many edits
 * A helpful hint for users adding  with File: or Image: tags that the parameter is meant to be a simple image name, not a image tag.


 * How about anonymous users making edits like "eeeeeeeeeeeee or fsdfsfsf" u get the pic...cause i've noticed thats very common in vandalisin....or is that filter a bit hard to put up? ..-- AlienGamer--Talk-- 05:26, 30 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Not as a generic. However, if you see any common patterns in garbage that anons add to pages regular expressions can be used to match stuff like it and filter out those edits. For example, if you specifically saw a lot of "eeeeeeeee" edits, I could do something like 'new_wikitext rlike "e{5,}"' which would filter the edit if the new wikitext being saved contained 5 or more consecutive "e"s in it. I think I can also do specifics for anons vs. editors. So for something harsh I could completely reject anon edits that look like bad edits and tell them "If you are trying to make a legitimate edit please sign up for a quick account and try the edit again". ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Jun 30, 2009 @ 05:38 (UTC)


 * Awesome...And another idea..how about anonymous users removing large sections frm pages....they sometimes dont go to the extent of blankin the article, but will remove sections of that article..-- AlienGamer--Talk-- 06:04, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Is writing headlines with "filler arc" included? Jacce | Talk 12:13, 30 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Ok, we could flag those to see if it would be a good one to put up messages for. ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Jun 30, 2009 @ 16:52 (UTC)


 * I'm open to suggestions on things we can put filters on. Right now I'm thinking of notices on things like:


 * Page blanking

Obvious


 * Adding romaji like Pein, Kyubi, etc... to a page

'''Less obvious. In places where the romaji makes sense, like in a translation template, this could cause problems.'''


 * Using incorrect romaji like Hyuuga, etc...

'''Similar to the above. Though I understand this here is less of an issue.'''


 * Bad MoS links like chidori


 * I'm not sure about this one. Is the problem that they made a a Link with the | in it?


 * Some of the types of link bypassing like Sasuke


 * This I disagree with. Cause in some places it is easier to link without going into unneeded words. For example "blah blah blah Naruto blah blah blah" to avoid redirects.


 * One or two line articles that are not redirects


 * Redirects to what?


 * Creation of a User: page from a user who doesn't have many edits


 * Agreed"

The Bolded sections are my comments.--TheUltimate3 (talk) 12:44, 30 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Translation templates shouldn't be much of an issue. Right now I'm only thinking of a few specific ones like "Pein" and "Ky(uu|u|ū)bi". AbuseFilter is very powerful for matching, I can specifically target new text (so editing a page with Pein already on it won't trigger it, but editing a line with it on it will), I can add ands and nots to filters to attempt to avoid matches inside of translation templates. At the most extreme I can just have it ignore these edits on the only page that the romaji should be used in a translation template. Then at the lest we only have to pay attention to bad edits on a single page.
 * Also note that AbuseFilter isn't like SpamRegex, normally at the most filters will be used to log matches, flag edits that look bad, and at the most harsh give a big message to the user why the edit looks bad and force them to confirm they actually want to bypass the filter and save the page (so it's always possible to save despite AbuseFilter catching the edit). The real power of AbuseFilter is to catch patterns that look like common mistakes and without us needing to catch it tell them up front "This looks like a common bad edit, this is why, perhaps you should try this instead? If you have a good reason otherwise feel free to ignore this and continue." it turns a lot of bad edits by people that just don't know the policies into good edits and educates them on the policies a bit.
 * For the bad romaji, I have seen those kind of edits in the past. The nice part here is that we can make AbuseFilter highlight edits that seam to have bad romaji, then all of a sudden we no longer need to pay attention for them, AbuseFilter will kindly shove in the rc "Oi, this edit looks like it has bad romaji in it" so we don't have to look through actual edits watching for it.
 * See the MoS about the links. chidori is bad use of the display text, there is absolutely no reason why someone should be putting this in a page, chidori is correct. The other one isn't about using displaytext . It's about links like Sasuke where editors deliberately over-complicate the text instead of using Sasuke just to avoid the redirect from Sasuke -> Sasuke Uchiha. There's no good reason for it, redirects exist for a reason, so we can use simple links.
 * "One or two line articles that are not redirects" I mean catch new articles that are created with only a line or two of stuff. We get a few of these, they are basically articles that aren't even stubs and just state obvious information, the articles would be better off as redlinks because there is no information inside the newly created page and it gives the illusion that we actually have content on that topic to someone who would otherwise see a redlink and think "Hmm, maybe I'll write this article?" the idea is to bring up a message telling them what's wrong with small articles, and at the least suggesting that they self tag the page with a tag. I just made the note about redirects because a #REDIRECT is a one line article that would be caught by that kind of filter, I just have to add a not to avoid matching redirects with that filter.
 * ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Jun 30, 2009 @ 16:49 (UTC)

Enabled
Thanks for all the comments. I've turned it on. There are currently no filters, so it won't do anything until the admins add some here. Please be careful with it as it does have the potential to slow things down if the filters added are too slow. You can test them first and check how long they take. Anyone can view the log here.

There isn't any documentation of this on Wikia yet, but you can find some instructions, information, and formatting help on Wikipedia and mediawiki.org. You can also export filters from Wikipedia.

This is just a trial here and on Wookieepedia so it might not remain enabled indefinitely. Please post here with any feedback you have about it, and any adjustments you think would need to be made before a wider launch of the tool across Wikia. Thanks, Angela (talk) 05:29, 6 July 2009 (UTC)