Editing OrbiterWiki:Village pump

Just a page for general OrbiterWiki discussions (for keeping the [[Talk:Main Page]] related to the main page). 

View archived discussions for [[OrbiterWiki:Village pump/Archive 2005-2007|2005-2007]], [[OrbiterWiki:Village pump/Archive 2008-2010|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...
--[[User:RaMan|RaMan]] 12:50, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

: Updated to MediaWiki v1.16.2; a couple of extensions got upgraded too. --[[User:RaMan|RaMan]] 03:54, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
: Enabled Vector skin. [[Media:SkinOld.png|Old skin]] vs [[Media:SkinNew.png|New skin]]. Hope you like! --[[User:RaMan|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!). 

[[User:Urwumpe|Urwumpe]] 18:23, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

PS: Yes, that means that new users should better not use this name pattern, if they would like to prevent getting under general suspicion here. It is not nice, but since 2 hours of reaction time is enough to infect a few thousand PCs with malware, a fair price IMHO. "JohnSmith" would still be legal. "GJohnSmithj" would be dubious.

: I suppose this sounds reasonable. No problem with this. Good effort noticing this! [[User:RaMan|RaMan]] 13:34, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

About another special customer here, can I suggest being a tiny bit more unfriendly to IP addresses belong to [http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=hostnoc.net hostnoc.net]? They are getting a bit annoying and banning them for one year would be long enough until things escalated far enough to remove these guys from the IP range. [[User:Urwumpe|Urwumpe]] 07:07, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

==Increase Autoblock time==

I just noticed that the automatic IP block when blocking a registered user and his IP is just 24 hours, which explains why it was so ineffective against spambots in the past. I would suggest increasing this timespan to a week. That is still pretty short for our cases, and should also work against retries from dedicated hosts. [[User:Urwumpe|Urwumpe]] 17:52, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

: OK, I think I've changed it now - let me know if this doesn't seem to have effect. By the way, do you want to receive an email every time someone edits anything at all? That's a lot of emails, but nothing a filter rule can't fix :) --[[User:RaMan|RaMan]] 22:07, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

:: The RSS feed for Recent Changes does the job well for me. :D [[User:Urwumpe|Urwumpe]] 23:59, 24 February 2012 (UTC)