User:Farred

Yes, I agree that anonymous people should not be allowed to crap up Marspedia. If we force them to create an account, that discourages a lot of spam right there. If they actually create an account and log in, it's far easier to get rid of all their crap; JamesG has a script to help mechanize spam removal. Miros1 19:51, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I have to disagree: the anonymous attacks expose their IP addresses and we can deal with them for however long we need to (180 days almost always works): they run out of IP addresses and can't attack anymore until they get new ones -- and then those get banned for 180 days too. When they create accounts they're protected: they can create new accounts continuously, and the longest the IP gets blocked is 24 hours. Give me anonymous IP attacks any day. It's the account-creating attacks that are a problem. If we want to get desperate, blocking account creation would go a lot further towards bringing the situation under control. The WHUMP script is running as I type and has been for quite awhile. I haven't thought of an algorithm for detecting damaging attacks to existing articles (so WHEMP automatically ignores such attacks), but I believe the Bad Behavior extension can help deal with those if we install it. -- Strangelv 20:21, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I replied on Miros1's talk page before seeing Strangelv's comment too. As to blocking IP addresses, I am not sure it does any good. I have checked for deleted contributions from IPs when removing their SPAM and only a couple of times have I found any. In those cases I blocked the IP. It may be that there is some other way of spoofing the system to give multiple IP addresses to one user than using a bot-net; or there may be so many zombie addresses available that the spammer never needs to use one twice. I am certain that I have never seen an over 180 day old deleted contribution listed to an IP. I will mention here too that I suspect a virus in my e-mail account. So I will try not to pass it along as we do what we can. - Farred 22:21, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Now I see that undone contributions do not show up as deleted contributions on Marspedia like they do on Wikipedia. That makes things different than I suspected. I will start blocking IP address spammers more. Changing deleted contributions to include undone contributions might be more trouble than it is worth. - Farred 22:44, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

How do you think about this proposal? Problem is, I do not have permission to do it myself. -- Rfc 18:50, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Whatever article you think would be good as a featured article is likely to be an improvement over leaving the same featured article for years. I have no experience in changing featured articles. I was just given administrator powers when there was a rash of vandalism to the wiki so I could help with that, but I have little technical knowledge about how a wiki is managed. People who disagree with your choice have every opportunity to voice there opinions. I have seen no objections to your proposal so far. - Farred 16:01, 29 November 2012 (UTC)