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Our recent wave of spammers have been using real names in the ’Author’ field. That doesn’t help them that much since the Automatic Spam Detector (aka Tim Porter) is (allegedly) Turing Complete. Even the massive attack on Azimuth (with over 300 pages affected) only ended up costing a small amount of time (and now that I know what to do, wouldn’t cost that again).
However, once the page has been cleaned this new practice of using real names does still leave a trace. The “authors” list goes solely by the name, so if someone uses a fake name then the fake name appears to have edited the page. I can’t imagine many people who would like their name associated to a spam entry. Of course, everyone would know what had happened, but it still makes the authors page that bit less usable.
We have a semi-unofficial policy of not deleting stuff and simply rolling back spam pages works fine as far as their content is concerned. But it doesn’t change the author name in the history.
I propose that if an edit is said to have been made by a regular contributor (by which I would define a member of the nForum) but which is not made by that person (and that person would need to say so on the nForum) then I would be allowed to edit the database so that their name was no longer listed as the author of that post.
An alternative proposal would be to apply that any post clearly identified as spam (we’d need to spell out exactly what that meant; my initial definition would be an edit that added links to external sites which were then removed once a regular member had spotted them). (These proposals are not mutually exclusive.)
I’d choose a neutral name, maybe even the eponymous AnonymousCoward, though she’s made some very good edits so it might not do to sully her name by association.
What do people think? If there’s serious disagreement we could put it to the steering committee, but I thought I’d try it in the open first.
I agree with both versions of the erasing proposal.
I’m okay with either proposal. Thanks, Andrew.
Yes, either or a combination is fine by me.
This sounds fine.
Sounds fine to me. Why not use a name like “Spammer” for spam edits?
No disagreement from my side, of course.
All good by me.
6: and only we would know that this is the code for a non-spammer ?
Zoran: I don’t understand.
@Mike Well, a spammer could pick it up and use it, the way our (well, some people’s) names have been used.
Why should we care if a spammer signs their edits “Spammer”? I thought the point was that when they sign an edit as one of us, we change the signature to be something else.
I like ‘AnonymousSpammer’. Maybe ‘PseudonymousSpammer’. Is there a nice Greek-derived word ending with ‘onymous’ that means a real name used fraudulently by another person? That would be ideal!
Anyway, I have no objection whatsoever to the version of the proposal where the true bearer of the name publicly disavows the edit. Of course it’s OK to change it then!
The version where you judge that the edit is spam could be more problematic. However, as you have described it, I have no objection.
Either way, I’d like to hear about it on the Forum when you do this, at least initially, if only for curiosity.
Either way, I’d like to hear about it on the Forum when you do this, at least initially, if only for curiosity.
Given that there would be no record of this in the database, this seems an eminently sensible thing for me to do.
Regarding the name, I would prefer something that really was neutral. I’d like it if I didn’t have to evaluate the contribution to decide whether or not it was spam. Namely, if someone’s name gets assigned to an edit that they didn’t do and they complain about it in the forum then I want to be able to change the name without having to evaluate whether or not it was spam. It’s unlikely that the edit will be something other than spam, but not completely impossible. Suppose someone came along who had the same name as a regular contributor. Then the regular contributor might object. If the newcomer decided to join the community then we’d negotiate an alternative “signature”, but if not, it might still be good to change the name but to something neutral.
So I’d like something a bit like “Not who they said they were” (though even that isn’t quite neutral enough) and the relevant page would say something like “A post signed with this name was originally signed with the name of a regular contributor. That regular contributor did not make that edit so the name was changed.”.
I wouldn’t use AnonymousCoward for this because it should be easy for everyone to see which contributions were genuinely anonymous and which were changed.
Okay, makes sense. “AnonymousImpersonator”?
Is there a latin version like Nemo? just to be POSH!
Could call it “Odysseus” after what he called himself in his adventure with Polyphemous.
Go for it!
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