OrbiterWiki:Policy

The Policy is something like the law for admins - it gives guidelines for how to handle situations that appear often. The policy itself is not a fixed law - the final saying on anything has the admin who does the actions. All admins are encouraged to decide which actions are fitting better to a situation. The most important resource on the wiki is content - any activity which brings useful content should be appreciated, any activity which might discourage authors from working on articles should be stopped.

Vandalism

Minor vandalism

• Single nonsense lines
• Deletion of content or replacing it by nonsense.

Minor vandalism are small defacements of articles, which are not more sewere than maybe a single line or so. The best example of minor vandalism is the typical childish prank, like entering nonsense lines into articles.

Minor cases of vandalism by non-registered users should get punished by a one week ban after the second attempt. If the vandalism continues directly after the ban, the ban should be permanent.

In case of registered users, after the first attempt, the user should get warned on his talk page, that he is on the road to a ban, if he continues to vandalize.

Major vandalism

• Spam edits (eg links to Viagras sellers, etc)
• Massive defacements of multiple articles at once
• any attempt to bring pornography into this wiki, may it be by text, link or media.

Major vandalism gets automatically sanctioned by a permanent ban.

Deleting pages

A page must get deleted if

• Its first edit is an act of vandalism (spam, defacements)
• Its last 10 edits have been defacements

Merging pages

If two pages are about the same content (possible as we have case-sensitive titles), its encouraged to merge them into a single article.

Spam bots

Automated Spam bots get instantly permanently banned, unless its visible that the Spam bot hides behind a proxy server.

You can identify automated Spam bots by reoccurring patters, e.g. using a <div> tag for hiding their Spam in the articles, containing many links to doubtful pages. Another hint is the creation of new strange pages because the Spam bots are optimized for either Blog software or another Wiki software.

The primary tool for fighting Spam bots is the OrbiterWiki:SpamBlacklist, a blacklist of servers, which are advertised in the Spam edits of the Spam bots. While IP addresses are abundant in the days of bot networks, the actual servers and customers for these bot networks are not.

If you permanently ban a Spam bot, its recommended to mark his user page (even if he has only an IP) with a {{VAND4|Reason}} template. Also, its recommended to make a reverse DNS query for finding his provider and remember this provider with the {{VAND4}} information. This way its easier later to help users which have to share the IP address space with banned bot network zombies.