UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard/Archives/Another Idea of how to Deal with Vandalism

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Another, maybe useful idea.

Hello,

I am here to propose a new idea (as you can see). Instead of having to go to "Recent Changes", spot an edit, go to the page, look at the history, undo the vandalism, and let the vandal be dealt (did I spell that right<?), to deal with vandalism, is it possible for an admin. to be able to do this? Here it goes, if a vandal/editor goes through a page and types a bunch of noticable curse words on it, or if he/she just blanked the page on purpose, it will show up on their edit description automatically - "Added Censored Text" or something of this sort. This will automatically make this easy for recent changes patrollers and/or editors to spot a vandal on site. Then once you hit a link of some type, it will automatically undo the vandalism. Sound good, bad, ugly, in your thoughts, or am I late in the race and this has already been done and I've never known?

I have posted this here because I assume that an administrator must do this. Please leave feedback. Thank You. --Playjex 17:56, 31 January 2008 (EST)

The edit summary already has several of these features. If an editor blanks a page, the edit summary says so; if an edit replaces a page with new text, the edit summary provides information on the replacement text. And there already is an "undo" link when you view the diff of a page which automatically undoes the edit (admins also have a more powerful "revert" feature reserved for use with clear vandalism).

Trying to go any further than that doesn't seem to me like it's worth the effort. First, the type of changes you're talking about require modifications to the wiki software: such modifications can only be done by Daveh, are difficult to implement, and increase our problems every time we upgrade the wiki software. Second, it's going to be unreliable: either the list of "censored" words is so short that it's not useful or it's so long that it in fact includes many words that are legitimate in various contexts. And such a list will never be able to include all the various misspellings, censored-with-punctuation, and other permutations. Which means that we still will end up relying on patrollers to view the actual edit and make an informed decision about whether or not the edit is legitimate.

So it seems to me like a lot of work that ends up not really changing the current situation. --Nephele^Talk 18:47, 31 January 2008 (EST)

Haha, never really thought of it like that, I was in a rush at the time anyway. Thanks for giving feedback though. Have a good night. --Playjex 19:20, 31 January 2008 (EST)