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Hi FrJohn, I'm working on an Edit Throttling Mediawiki extension. I've seen you guys have faced a lot of vandalism in the past. I tried to install Bad Behavior, but it didnt work on our wiki. We were vandalized again using a Move flood (lots of Moves in a short time). I've also seen BB denies some legitimate users. Have you been vandalized recently and what else are you using besides Bad Behavior to stop vandal bots and human vandals, while not causing inconvinience to legitimate users? thanks! --[[User:JohnK|JohnK]] 18:34, November 5, 2006 (PST)
:Hi FrJohn, thanks for response. Today I finished up writing the Edit Throttle extension and have put it into place for testing. I think it will work well, even for your problem:
::Basically, the only problem that remains is when a human agent creates an account with a temporary email address and then blasts us.
:In my ET extension, if a user is not on some "safe lists" (which can be edited only by SysOps like any Mediawiki page [just like in the SpamBlacklist extension page]), he will get blocked automatically if he tries to make more than for example 5 edits in 1 minute, or 20 edits in one hour (these numbers can be adjusted). Our wiki also requires people to login so thats also one help. Although maybe later I'll change this but with lots of alterations to make sure people's IP addresses dont become public etc. I did the login thing primarily so our IP addresses arent put out in public (really not wise of Mediawiki developers to get this idea of throwing out people's IP's for the world to see). I'm testing this extension and its working great for now. I even adjusted the Spam blackList so it only scans for spam, if a user is not on those safe lists. The theory behind all of this is simple: Except for WikiPedia, all wikis are usually edited by a small group of people. That makes it possible for this extension to do its job nicely. I might ask you sometime more detail on the other extensions/utilities you've installed - if the ET doesnt work well. If it works well for me after I've tested it nicely, I'll let you know if you would like to have it to (it will proably not be coded best, but atleast it works). I love the idea of these safe lists. This is perfect for wikis like ours, where a small number of people edit the wiki. Even if a user is not on the safe lists, he can still edit, but more strict limits will be imposed on his editing, just to make sure we dont have a vandal at large. I even have a function in there, which detects lots of edits from people who are not on the safe list, and then it locks the wiki, allowing only "safe list" users to edit the wiki. This is useful if vandals use anonymous proxies with different IP's to make a flood that way, or if a group of vandals decide to attack a wiki at the same time. Safe list users get free tickets. Others have to be scrutinized. With the control of the Safe lists only in the hands of Sysops, its easy to control access. Doing that saves a lot of headache, where we're either fearing when the next attack is going to happen or reverting the attacks. There's another list "Frequent editors". That list has special people on it like Sysops, or people who we know edit the wiki a lot. To them, no limits of any kind are imposed. I'm excited and cant wait for our first vandal to attack to see what happens.--[[User:JohnK|JohnK]] 22:06, November 12, 2006 (PST)
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