Author: taw
Description:
There's a pretty serious spam problem at http://pl.wikipedia.org/ now.
One (banned) problem user pastes links to his flames on talkpages of many users.
The spam is of course quickly reverted, however the spammed users still see
"You've got a new message".
So they naturally check their talkpages, and not seeing anything new, they go to
history to check what's going on.
That way, a lot of users loss time, and a major portion of the spam gets
through, in spite of reverting, as it's seen via history links.
There are 2 solution that I think are easy to implement:
- Remember which edit was last seen by the user (obviously done now in some
form, for newtalk flagging to work). And when the newtalk flag is positive and
the "You've got a new message" is about to be displayed, check once more - if
the current version is exactly the same as the last seen version (= spam was
reverted), clear the flag and don't report the new message.
- Option of nuking edits, instead of just reverting them. Add a sysop option to
throw the edit directly to the archive for deleted edits, and pretend it never
happened. Whether it's easy to implement or not depends on database schema. It
would be very easy if we just considered the version with the most recent date
that has not been deleted to be the current version. In 1.4 we didn't. I'm not
sure about 1.5. Anyway, I think the first solution is the preferred one.
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
URL: http://pl.wikipedia.org/