Process for removing spam users

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

On 02/25/2013 05:47 AM, Mike Burns wrote:
> This came up over the weekend and I handled it (somewhat).  There was a
> user that was confirmed and got an account created on the wiki.  Their
> user page was then made an advertisement for some SMS related thing that
> had nothing to do with oVirt.  On request, I deleted the page and
> blocked the user[1].
> 
> As I've done very little wiki administration in the past, I wanted to
> make sure that we have a consistent process in place for handling
> situations like this in the future.

How about:

* If content seems somewhat suspicious, we use the [[User talk]] page to
ask questions of the user, and send them email using the MediaWiki email
system.
* Put a watch on their page(s) to see what happens; do they fix the
problem or start doing worse?
* If it's very suspicious, block the user & page(s). Then email the user.
* If it's clearly spam content, just block the user.
* After the above is done, and it's clear the user is spamming, then
delete the user account and rollback their changes.

I don't see any good guidelines out there to follow, but I haven't
looked very far.

I would say it's clear this user was trying to spam - I put up a request
for justification of the user page content, and that was not responded
to, but a link was added to the page.

I'm not sure that we ever actually delete users in MediaWiki, because of
the way content integrity is tracked in the history.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Project:Support_desk/How_i_can_delete_User%3F

I think what Mike did is what we can do - delete spam pages, fully block
the user permnanently.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Analyst - Community Growth
http://TheOpenSourceWay.org  .^\  http://community.redhat.com
@quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'  gpg: AD0E0C41

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