Wikipedia:Edit filter/Requested

This page is for people without the abusefilter-modify permission or people without sufficient knowledge about the coding involved to make requests to enact Abuse filters. Please add a new section at the top of current requests using the following format:

===Filter name===
*'''Task''': What is the filter supposed to do? To what pages and editors does it apply?
*'''Reason''': Why is the filter needed.
- ~~~~

Bear the following in mind:

• Filters are applied to all edits. Therefore, problematic changes that apply to a single page are likely not suitable for an abuse filter.
• Each filter takes time to run, making editing (and to some extent other things) slightly slower. The time is only a few milliseconds per filter, but with enough filters that adds up. When the system is near its limit, adding a new filter may require removing another filter in order to keep the system within its limits.
• There is a limit to what filters can check for. More complex, non-essential tasks, such as those that need to perform a more in-depth check of the page or fetch information that the filter system does not have access to, are better served by separate software, run by an individual user on their own machine or dedicated server such as the Toolserver, rather than those used to actually host Wikipedia.
• It used to be called the abuse filter for a reason. Contributors are not expected to have read all 200+ policies, guidelines and style pages. Trivial formatting mistakes and edits that at first glance look fine but go against some obscure style guideline or arbitration ruling are not suitable candidates for an abuse filter -- quite apart from performance concerns, if it doesn't harm the project, it is best not to hassle new contributors because of it.
• To prevent the creation of pages with certain names, MediaWiki:Titleblacklist is usually a better way to handle the problem - see MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist for details.
• To prevent the addition of problematic external links, please make your request at the spam blacklist.

Current requests

Log use of .onion links

• Task: The filter should tag edits that add links to Tor hidden sites, identified by .onion addresses.
• Reason: Due to recent events involving these sites, such as security and validity (see the discussion on Talk:The_Hidden_Wiki#The_Hidden_Hacked_Wiki_and_misleading_external_link), plus many hidden services may contain or otherwise host content in violation of Wikipedia guidelines, policies, and laws of the United States (such as copyright infringing material and child pornography—I had to have revisions deleted on articles related to Celebgate that contained URLs to hidden services distributing the images). Wikipedia should not assist in the dissemination of such content, so we should monitor the use of these URLs. ViperSnake151  Talk  06:21, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Extend filter 554 to Draft

• Task: In filter 554 change "article_namespace" to cover both 0 and 118 (draft)
• Reason: Spam links are inserted indirectly to mainspace after page is moved. It's also a security issue: Move article to draft, add spam links, move back. - Magioladitis (talk) 12:00, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I would like also to ping @Kww: for this one. pi -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:04, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm currently testing for namespace 118 hits with my test filter. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:42, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Hijacking

• Task: Tag edits where all or most page content is removed and replaced by different content.
• Reason: To flag up possible cases of "hijacking", where genuine articles are replaced by unrelated promotional material, such as this or this: Noyster (talk), 22:22, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

  Agree, and this should operate in all namespaces - example. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:10, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

  It seems impractical - it's possible to filter for the c\total length of all modified lines; however, as far as can tell, there's no way to chjeck if the line was changed completely, or just a typo fix occured. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:30, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Warn about accidentally pasting in code

• Task: Warn users when they try to submit an edit containing the addition of <%= item.timeFlag %>.
• Reason: I've seen <%= item.timeFlag %> appear in article references several times (e.g. [1]); I guess it's caused by accidentally pasting in more than one meant to when filling out the |title= parameter of a reference.

- It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 21:42, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

'YOLO' and 'Swag' in Article namespace

• Task: Please add both of the words 'YOLO' (not case sensitive) and 'swag' (not case sensitive)
• Reason: , huge amount of vandalism done to mainspace recently using both words. example. Even if it was just a warning, it might cut back on the amount of the relevant vandalism.

- ♥ Solarra ♥ ^{♪ 話 ♪} ߷ _{♀ 投稿 ♀} 05:04, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

There is a filter named ""Yolo Swag" Vandalism". Why is it private? It's just common vandalism. @MusikAnimal: Can you make it public (considering that we've many other public filters for usual vandalism)? --Glaisher (talk) 09:50, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

You're right, no reason for it to be private. It's public now, see at Special:AbuseFilter/614. I intentionally did not filter the words "yolo" or "swag" by themselves, as at least during the first few days in log-only I got several false positives. On the contrary, something like "swaggg", "yolololo" or "yolo swag" is almost always going to vandalism. I will try to tweak the filter and put it back to warn/tag mode rather than disallow. Increasing the edit_delta might catch more instances as well. Thanks — MusikAnimal ^talk 14:25, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

DOI Citations

• Task: Tag when the doi= paramater changes in Templates {{Cite journal}} and {{Cite doi}} in the main namespace.
• Reason: As part of a reimplementing User:Citation bot, for Sginalling Open Access Project, whenever an Open Access reference is cited, we want to import the article to Wikisource, and give the Citation a special badge. Right now that is done by polling these templates for changes, so the reaction time is about 30-60 minutes. With this tag, we could make it happen almost instantly.

- Maximilianklein (talk) 19:20, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Ref desk protection

• Task: Prevent edits from specified IP ranges to the reference desk pages, including its talk pages
• Reason: The ref desk is unique in that page protection defeats the purpose of the project. Recent persistent trolling from the "Venezuala troll" has caused the desks to be repeatedly protected, the very thing we don't want to do. Range-blocking has proved ineffective as the range available is much too big to shut him out and the more range blocks that are done the more the collateral damage grows. However, an intersection of IP range and ref desks would have very little to zero collateral damage. SpinningSpark 00:19, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

• I have created a filter myself (filter 618) which is currently running in logging mode only. Any checking you can do on it would be welcome. SpinningSpark 09:42, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Twin City vandalism

• Task: The filter should identify all edits by anonymous users form certain IP ranges in the main name space where the edit summary contains "Twin cities", "Sister cities" and the like. Eventually, I'd like these kinds of edits to be forbidden, but for starters, logging them would be OK. The most recently active IP ranges were 78.53.0.0/18, 85.176.0.0/14 and 92.225.0.0/16, for a full list see the documentation page below. FYI: A similar filter is in place in the German wikipedia as well as the French (private) and Italian ones.
• Reason: See documentation page: meta:user:Controlling/Twin City Vandal.

Thanks, - Controlling (talk) 16:30, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Has this been a problem on English Wikipedia? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:31, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, for examples the the contribs of this IP or this one or see my edits, which are almost exclusively rollbacks of this sort of vandalism. --Null Drei Null_{formerly Controlling}^talk 14:15, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

I checked it with my test filter; not one hit since I did it - and the current version dates back to Sep. 4th. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:40, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

First, thanks for your help. While the vandalism has been quite persistent, it's not a daily occurrence and it has indeed become less frequent recently. Again, see my edits for an estimate on the frequency ('though I probably don't catch all of them). If that's not enough for an edit filter, then I guess I'll have to keep trying to ctach it manually. --Null Drei Null_{formerly Controlling}^talk 15:53, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Oversight

• Task: Identify an edit containing the word "oversight" and pop up a warning that if they are requesting an oversight, that they should be at Wikipedia:Requests for oversight, not posting onwiki. It should apply to the WP space, and user talk, but not article space. If this idea gains some traction, we can discuss the other spaces. It should initially apply to all (optionally, remove admins), but have a check box opt-out option,so if they have seen it once, it won't show up again (allows them to discuss the concept without getting the warning).
• Reason: Many editors identify a need for an oversight, but request it on wiki-either at the talk page of an oversighter, or ANI, which makes the request overly prominent, exactly the opposite of the goal. I saw two such requests today, more than usual, but see one every few weeks or so.

- S Philbrick(Talk) 17:46, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

I think that would have way too many false positives to be useful. Jackmcbarn (talk) 19:47, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Redirects to badimages

To deal with socks of 1abacada (talk · contribs) who have discovered that they can redirect pages to files on the bad images list, a filter is needed to prevent this, at least for autoconfirmed users (though I can't see a reason for anyone short of an admin to do this). Acroterion (talk) 02:51, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

@Acroterion: I've created a filter definition that will stop this behavior and emailed it to you. To enable it here, first add yourself to the abusefilter group at Special:UserRights/Acroterion. Then, go to Special:AbuseFilter/import, paste it, click "Import data", then click "Save filter". Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:50, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Replacing text with repeating characters vandalism

• Task: To disallow editors that not only add repeating characters to an article but also remove content.
• Reason: I did a check on the recent changes page that all of the most recent edits that remove content under the "repeating characters" tag filter are vandalism.

- Minima© (talk) 22:06, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

John Galea

• Task: Prevent creation of pages using the text of the deleted page John Galea. I'd suggest filtering on anything containing the name "John Galea" (although he's not been averse to mis-spelling his own name in order to get around create protection).
• Reason: The page has been repeatedly recreated under multiple alternate titles by a veritable army of socks. Salting and rangeblocking are not effective measures against this user.

- Yunshui 雲‍水 15:19, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

ServicesCleans filter

• Task: Prevent frequent vandalism related to "www.servicescleans.com‎" and "www.nicolascleans.com"
• Reason: The domains "www.servicescleans.com‎" and "www.nicolascleans.com" have been consistently spammed on Wikipedia every couple of days since 2009, by a large set of IP addresses. I have attempted to compile a list of the problem which can be found in one of my sandboxes. Note that the IP addresses tend to have been abused on more than one day, and that the list was retroactively compiled and is thus extremely likely to be incomplete due to the difficulty of finding these edits after a couple of years (Or even months).

Other measures against these edits have had little effect. Both domains are present on the spam blacklist, but since the added content is plaintext the blacklist does not prevent the edits. IP blocks have been used throughout the problem's history but due to dynamic IP address and the editors persistence, these measures tend to be stopgaps at the very best. Due to several (somewhat active) ranges being used a set of longterm range blocks is not a feasible solution either. Excirial ^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 21:17, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Excirial is this still a problem? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:26, 3 July 2014 (UTC).

File:http//

• Task: Warn new users trying to add [[file:http://...]] to any page.
• Reason: Help users to do the right thing and prevent some useless edits. This would help avoid inline linking of images. A discussion of how this is a problem is at Wikipedia:Bot requests#MissingFilesBot .3E see Category:Articles with missing files. See Wikipedia:Edit filter/Requested/Archive 2#Image:http:.2F.2F for a similar application. - tucoxn\^talk 03:31, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

We already have Special:AbuseFilter/220 to do basically what you're asking for. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:49, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

I noticed. It's not catching everything that it should. Here are several diffs it didn't catch on 9 January alone (I can find more, especially for other days): 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 which is a page creation. I've noticed some edits that have the summary "(Tag: Incorrectly formatted external link or image)" but those listed above don't have that. Also, It doesn't seem that the filter is deterring this improper way of inserting files into articles (see Es Bua log 1 and Es Bua log 2, showing an edit going through after the filter caught it). Please correct me if the abuse filters are not supposed to provide deterrence -- I'm learning still about them. Thanks for your help! - tucoxn\^talk 08:05, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

It looks like File:|Image:| should be added right before both occurrences of <img. Jackmcbarn (talk) 15:24, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

• I can't say whether or not that's the correct change but it might be worth a try. It would also be good to upgrade the warning. The notes say "Kill warning, it can be fixed later -P". After correctly implementing the File:|Image:| change would be a good time to try this repair -- or if the warning was re-implemented (Changes) a stronger warning would be better. Thanks! - tucoxn\^talk 02:31, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
• See these diffs (certainly 1 and 2; but also 3, 4, and 5 which might not get caught by this new code) for recent examples of hot-linked images that editors tried to add to articles. Users making constructive edits are still waiting for an edit filter manager or an administrator to implement this change.... Thanks in advance! - tucoxn\^talk 01:02, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
• This is still happening and implementing the filter change would help. See the following diffs (and these come just from today's edits): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Thanks in advance for your help. - tucoxn\^talk 12:46, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

G-Zay

• Task: Prevent edits of libelous information added to WP:BLPs and video game articles by User:G-Zay, specifically on Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura and Square Enix-related articles
• Reason: See User_talk:G-Zay/Source_problems for article details. After his community ban back in April, and a lengthy and extensive cleanup on articles he had edited (which I took part in), this individual has pretty much continuously come back as an IP-hopping sockpuppet; while occasionally he has made fake accounts, in general the pattern is that an IP pops up, edits a couple pages to promote his agenda, and then, after a few reverts where they plead that they are not G-Zay, the pages get locked and the IP vanishes. A couple weeks later, a new, slightly-different IP appears on a different, related article, and the cycle continues. His latest tactic is to make a grandiose statement about how he has done, as he has accomplished what he intended to. The IP editors continue to act in the exact same method as the sock puppeteer. G-Zay's most recent IPs are 78.146.18.7 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) and 193.109.199.11 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) which are located in the United Kingdom. However, I am concerned that he will cause more problems if he continues to abuse IPs to circumvent his ban. I would like the edit filter to have this user's edits permanently prevented until the bot is shut down. Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 06:04, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
• Also, here's some history on the individual. Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 04:32, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Removal of HTML and extension tags

• Task: Detect the removal of all HTML markip, including MediaWiki extension tags which resemble HTML.
• Reason: Most weeks I come across edits like this: every markup tag has been removed, whether they be pure HTML like <small>...</small> or <br /> or a MediaWiki extension, like <ref>...</ref>. One way of easily distinguising these from simple removal of refs is that the text inside the <ref>...</ref> is left alone. It seems to be accompanied by the alteration of entities like – and   to their character equivalents. I don't think it's wilful vandalism, but some browser bug. Usually, the only way of repairing the page is to revert, because finding the intended change amongst the mess is difficult - in this case all I could find were two changes: the insertion of the phrase "are used by Virgin Trains and" into the sentence "Platforms 1 and 2 were left without barriers, as they are mostly used by long distance express services with a high proportion of passengers carrying heavy luggage."; and the rewriting of "Operates an hourly service to London Euston and a two-hourly service to Birmingham New Street via Carlisle, Preston and Crewe" as "Operates 2 trains per hour to London Euston via Carlisle, Preston and Crewe and Birmingham New Street".

- Redrose64 (talk) 16:21, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

I reported that problem. Not willful on my part. It means that I can't edit, as I REALLY don't want to trash the rest of the article. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 18:12, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

7&6=thirteen is referring to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 121#I am having a problem editing, which was raised four days after I filed this request. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:20, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

found this Process.Start() and ShellExecute() fails with URLs on Windows 8. Does that relate? I'm using 8. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 18:42, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

However, this edit did nothing but harm (see the table under Services), so I reverted it as vandalism. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:38, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

I used many forms of antivirus and malware removal. It did not solve the problem.

I upgraded to Windows 8.1 from Windows 8 which did not solve the problem.

I then switched from Firefox and Internet Explorer to Google Chrome, and the problem is resolved. I am back. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 15:38, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

And the problem returned with Chrome. I am completely out of ideas. Other than to use another computer. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 16:16, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

The problem was resolved by resetting my browser settings to factory specs. Here. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 00:31, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Edit Warring warning

• Task: Warn before breach of 3rr.
• Reason: Currently lots of people get blocked for breaching the three revert rule. Many of them are surprised and annoyed by this. If the edit filters gave them a reminder and required an extra click to breach 3rr then the amount of edit warring should fall. This would benefit the community, the edit warrers and assist us to cope with our declining number of admins ϢereSpielChequers 20:50, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
  • I think this proposal would require substantial discussion before it could be implemented, and I'm not sure we could even make it effective (it's not always easy to detect an edit as a revert) for all edits.--Jasper Deng (talk) 06:36, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
    • From a technical standpoint, this isn't hard at all. An edit filter could be set to warn when edit summaries begin with "Undid" or "Reverted", throttled by user and page. This would catch everything except manual undos or where the edit summary is deliberately changed. Jackmcbarn (talk) 15:41, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
      • That's the problem though. Also, it would be hard to distinguish between vandalism reverts and normal content reverts (or other reverts exempt from 3RR, such as blatant BLP violations).--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:59, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
        • If all the filter does is warn, does it matter if it catches 3RR-exempt reverts once in a while? Jackmcbarn (talk) 02:00, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
          • Not if these reverts are urgent (like reverting libel or fast-paced vandalism).--Jasper Deng (talk) 02:19, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
    • @Jasper Deng, a partially effective warning system would be better than nothing. The wording is of course important, it does need to say please ignore this warning and go ahead with your edit if you are reverting vandalism or a BLP violation. "Only click save if you are reverting vandalism or a BLP violation" might do the trick. ϢereSpielChequers 09:51, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Spam links on disambiguation pages

• Task:

When unconfirmed users edit disambiguation pages, prevent them from adding any external links (unless a link includes the four letters "wikt").

• Reason:

I once was editing the OCN disambiguation page, and I noticed that a COI user had added an inappropriate link to the page. (Diff.) And surely similar problems have happened on other disambiguation pages too. Is this a systemic problem? I don't know. Dear all: Please provide your input.

The relevant guideline says that external links (except to Wiktionary) are inappropriate. So you should only allow external links to wikt:example or wiktionary:example or http://wiktionary.org/wiki/example.

—Unforgettableid (talk) 01:13, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

• Support. Disambiguation pages are intended to function solely as navigational devices to guide users to the right Wikipedia topic; an external link is no more appropriate on a disambiguation page than it is on a redirect page. Note, however, that any restriction will have to allow links to Wikipedia pages in other languages, as we do allow those. bd2412 T 20:49, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Strip invisible characters

• Task: Strip certain unicode characters from every edit:

  Unicode Character 'ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE' (U+FEFF)

  Unicode Character 'LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK' (U+200E)

  Unicode Character 'ZERO WIDTH SPACE' (U+200B)

  Unicode Character 'LINE SEPARATOR' (U+2028)

  A less preferable alternative is to block edits with those characters.

• Reason: These characters add no visible change to the page but can make things (links etc) behave unexpectedly. A BRfA has come up to strip these characters, and it would be redundant if they never appeared in the first place. — Josh Parris 01:10, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

The abusefilter can't change the content of an edit, it can just reject them (or warn). Legoktm (talk) 01:25, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

I think Josh is requesting that these unicode characters not be allowed to be inserted. Wifione ^Message 09:32, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

You both understand correctly; I want something I can't have, but I'm willing to accept edits with these characters being rejected outright. Josh Parris 09:19, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

I think these characters could be useful in rare cases (such as on pages describing them), so maybe a warn+tag would be better. Jackmcbarn (talk) 15:52, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

 Not done Users will not be able to see these marks, confusing them when they try to save their edits. Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:05, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Would it be worthwhile to enhance the abusefilter to let it change the content of an edit before it is saved? —Unforgettableid (talk) 01:13, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

No. This would quickly create more problems (and drama) than it solves. Jackmcbarn (talk) 02:27, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

This is a job for the "post edit transform" if anything. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:12, 2 July 2014 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: What is the "post edit transform" you speak of? Do you mean the pre-save transform? Jackmcbarn (talk) 22:29, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

That'll be the one! All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:18, 14 July 2014 (UTC).

Large IP talk page creation

Task Log under the following conditions:

1. creation of a page of more than 100,000 bytes, or adding more than 100,000 bytes to a page
2. Editor: IP
3. Namespace: User talk (presently IP talk pages and subpages, but he may go on to work with inactive editors.)

Reason There is a problem with a certain blocked editor, the "Michigan Kid", editing as IPs, creating large "notes" pages recording what he has done, usually on the IP talk page, or subpages, or talk pages of other incarnations, or subpages. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 19:29, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

How frequent is this? If it occurs relatively infrequently, I can't really justify creating an edit filter for it. Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:06, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

It seems to be at most 2-3 times a day. It's only one person, and he only does it once per IP, for the most part, although an incarnation on November 19 (PST) did it twice. Perhaps an edit filter isn't the correct approach, but those are things the edit filter can look for. User talk space is unGooglable, so I can't just search for relevant strings (which I am not going to name here). — Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:24, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia's built-in search engine (Lucene) has many features which Google lacks. If you know how to use the fancy parts of Lucene's syntax, then IIRC it can do proximity search, stemming, and all sorts of other things. (But I'm not sure if there's any way to make Lucene rank pages according to how many inbound links they have.) What is it about Lucene which doesn't meet your needs? All the best, —Unforgettableid (talk) 07:53, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

The particular search (IP Talk page or subpage over 100000 bytes) doesn't seem likely to be available. How about an IP talk page or subpage containing certain strings? (I'm not going to name the strings here, per WP:BEANS.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 05:56, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm no expert on Wikipedia's search engine. But it might work to search for those strings, and to add prefix:User talk:1 or prefix:User talk:2 to the very end of your Wikipedia search query string. Does this solve your problem? Cheers, —Unforgettableid (talk) 21:06, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

It's "intitle" rather than "prefix", and there were some in 68., 99., 108., and 141. I've had some success by choosing unique search strings and restricting to user talk. (Again, WP:BEANS in regard the unique search strings.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:16, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Archive.is message

• Task: Give the archive.is filter a more specific reason as to why the link is disallowed.
• Reason: A lot of users ending up posting FP reports because they have no idea what happened.

Jackmcbarn (talk) 18:29, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

YOLO swag

• Task: Prevent addition of the exact adjacent words "yolo swag" (any capitalization) by unconfirmed users and IPs.
• Reason: This is a common slang term that has quickly become a popular vandalistic addition to any article or page of any subject. I can't imagine a situation where such an addition would be considered constructive, unless we were documenting the term itself, hence why I recommend applying the filter to unconfirmed users. Our RCPs generally quickly remove this vandalism, but why bother when we can prevent it with a filter?

Thanks — MusikAnimal ^talk 16:49, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

• Note the existence of User:YOLO Swag. He's not edited since January, but he's been around since 2006, and he sometimes will go on months-long breaks and then return, so we shouldn't assume that he won't be back. We definitely don't want to prevent people from talking about him in pages outside of mainspace. Nyttend (talk) 21:50, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

• Good point, I'd say prevention solely within the article namespace will suffice. — MusikAnimal ^talk 15:02, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

 Done Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:12, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

@Reaper Eternal: How about this edit in portal space? -- John of Reading (talk) 17:03, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

 Not done I am still seeing this get through from IPs and unconfirmed users. Examples [2] [3] and my own test edit when logged out with [4] — MusikAnimal ^talk 16:38, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

It's still appearing. [5] Epicgenius (talk) 15:42, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Still happening if we can also add yolo and swag themselves as protections in the main article space, it would be fantastic :-) ♥ Solarra ♥ ^{♪ 話 ♪} ߷ _{♀ 投稿 ♀} 07:35, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Joshua Hawkins fakearticling

• Task: Block edits from adding "Joshua Hawkins"/"Josh Hawkins"+"Motorsports" or "Joshua Hawkins"/"Josh Hawkins"+"MedIevil"/"Medievil" or "Joshua Hawkins"/"Josh Hawkins"+"IndyCar"
• Reason: This is a serial sockmaster; see Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of MrJoshThehawk. All of these accounts are "throwaways" that appear, create a user talk page with a WP:HOAX/WP:FAKEARTICLE team chart for NASCAR or, in one case, IndyCar that has "Joshua Hawkins Motorsports" with "Josh Hawkins" as a star driver (and before it was salted creating a hoax bio at Joshua Hawkins with articlespace links to same), and then vanish before, a month or two later, popping up under a new account to do the exact same thing. Given the serial nature here blocks are useless; therefore I believe an edit filter is appropriate for putting a stop to this the next time they try. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 11:35, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
  • This is still continuing. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 15:17, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
    • And this has happened again. [6]. A filter is needed. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 00:29, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Inexperienced users removing amboxes

• Task: Sometimes, inexperienced users try to remove article maintenance tags (amboxes) from articles. Every time an IP or unconfirmed user removes a {{notability}}, {{news release}}, or {{COI}} ambox from any article, please tag the edit.
• Reason: This filter will help us to notice edits such as these.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] It's happened many times on Wikipedia that COI users have wrongly removed such amboxes. Often, they use a blank edit summary, making the damage hard to catch. Tagging the edits will make it easier for us to notice and undo the damage.

(Dear Wikipedians: Please freely edit and improve this filter request.)

Thank you. —Unforgettableid (talk) 00:43, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Not done. Detecting each and every tag that gets removed would put a severe strain on the server resources. Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:13, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

I thank you for your reply.

1. OK, we could watch only for the removal of {{notability}} (perhaps the most important ambox) and ignore all other ambox removals.
2. Let me suggest some non-obvious optimizations (besides the obvious "look at user groups first"). For one thing, we could only look at edits where edit_delta is between -10 and -100. This is an imperfect heuristic, but would save time. Next, we could look only at edits where the edit summary is blank: if there's an edit summary, then this is probably either a section edit or some other non-tag-removal edit. Okay; by now we've already eliminated a huge proportion of edits. Next, we could look at the first byte of either old_wikitext or removed_lines: if it's not '{', we can stop now. Finally, we could search through the contents of removed_lines. We could use contains "otability": a literal search is probably faster than a glob or regexp search. Would such a filter still be too CPU-intensive? And if so: which condition would be the biggest problem?
3. This filter is non-crucial and non-private. If the client has JavaScript on, we could theoretically design the infrastructure to offload all non-crucial, non-private filtering work to the client; if the client has JavaScript off, we could just skip those filters.

—Unforgettableid (talk) 07:53, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Page deleted, then identically-named page created

• Task: Say a page has been deleted, then a non-sysop with an editcount under 5,000 later creates another page with the same title. If this happens, please silently tag the page-creating edit with a tag. The tag should say that a page with that name has already been deleted X number of times.
• Reason: This will help Wikipedians to more easily notice when a formerly-deleted page has been recreated. This will help make it more obvious to them when they should nominate "new" pages for deletion. It will also make it more obvious when a page title should be SALTed.

Thank you, —Unforgettableid (talk) 08:38, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Unless I'm mistaken, the edit filter can't see the deletion log for a page being edited, so this isn't technically possible. A bot would be better for this. Jackmcbarn (talk) 13:51, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. AnomieBOT (talk · contribs) runs a task called NewArticleAFDTagger, which tags recreated AfD-deleted pages with {{old AfD multi}}. AFAIK there is no bot which tags recreated PROD-deleted pages or recreated speedily-deleted pages. Where is the best place for me to request that someone provide that functionality? (In vaguely-related news: bugzilla:10331, which requests a page-creation log, is still unfixed despite five years and one patch.) Cheers, —Unforgettableid (talk) 06:03, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

That would be Wikipedia:Bot requests. Jackmcbarn (talk) 16:37, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

OK, thank you. So it's best that I go there instead of contacting User:Anomie directly? —Unforgettableid (talk) 19:14, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Can do both. Wifione ^Message 19:34, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

I requested a {{old prod full}} tagger bot at Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 57#Bot to tag "PROD Survivors" and "Recreated Articles", and put a {{talkback}} template at User talk:AnomieBOT, but (despite one empty promise I got) nobody coded anything. Many have thought about writing such a bot, but nobody has ever written a practical one; I explained the matter further in my request there. I didn't create a bot request to tag recreations of CSD-deleted pages, but someone else is welcome to do so if they like. —Unforgettableid (talk) 07:53, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, I just had an idea for how this can be implemented:

(action = "delete") | (action = "edit" & old_size = 0)

with a per-page throttle.

However whether this might be worth it or better suited for a bot is another question. Triplestop (talk) 03:53, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

That's an interesting solution. I hadn't thought of using the rate limiter like that. It looks like it would work, but it seems a bit hacky and would have a few FPs and oddities, such as tagging the deletion of a newly-created page, and tagging undoing of page blanking. Jackmcbarn (talk) 12:45, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguation links

• Task: Inform editors when they are about to make an edit that creates a link to a disambiguation page in article, template, category, file or portal space, and ask them to either link to the correct target page, or (if the link is intended to point to the disambiguation page instead of an article) to pipe the link through a "Foo (disambiguation)" redirect.
• Reason: Since July 4, 2013, there has been a sudden sharp increase in the number of new disambiguation links being created. This may be related to the rollout of VisualEditor, or it may have any of a number of other reasons or contributing factors, but whatever the cause, it needs to be stemmed. bd2412 T 14:54, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Note: In the time since I posted this request, the number of disambiguation pages with links has increased by over 1,100, despite an extensive campaign to find and fix these links. This is a significant and widespread problem and should be addressed as soon as possible. bd2412 T 14:34, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

I note that another editor has now made a proposal similar to this at the Village pump. bd2412 T 00:12, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

This isn't possible to do with the edit filter. It doesn't know anything about where links point (it can't even differentiate between redlinks and bluelinks). A new extension would be required to do that. Jackmcbarn (talk) 01:58, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Question, then. How does the edit filter know when blacklisted external links are being added? It has a list that it checks them against, right? Could something like that be done with, for example, a few thousand of the most problematic disambiguation pages? bd2412 T 02:47, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

That's not the edit filter. That's the spam blacklist, and it only works on external links. The closest thing that currently exists is probably MediaWiki:Bad image list. Instead of checking against a list and disallowing, the code could (relatively) easily be tweaked to check if a page is a disambiguation page and issue a warning (though it's still new code). Jackmcbarn (talk) 02:51, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

• Surely it is better to accept such a goodfaith edit and subsequently improve the link? After all links to dab pages are not wrong, merely suboptimal. The problem with an edit filter warning on this is that it would come at the wrong point, much better to save the edit and then fix the link. If you try and do it before you save you risk losing the rest of your edit unless you know to open a new tab. ϢereSpielChequers 10:03, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Plot summary copyvios

• Task: Display a warning message (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:MER-C/Sandbox&oldid=565314175) to those adding a section called "Plot" or "Synopsis" to an article, or editing a "List of [...] episodes" or "[TV show] (season X)" article.
• Reason: See [23] and [24]. (I am still considering whether an editintro is also necessary). MER-C 12:21, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

• (Non-regular comment) All users? This could get annoying for experienced users who know better. Also simply editing a TV show article doesn't mean they will (or even probably will) be adding copyvio. A bot to search for and/or remove copyvios would probably be a better solution. --Jakob (talk) 13:44, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Bold headings

• Task: Tag edits that contain new bold headings, like this:

=='''Some heading'''==

• Reason: For some reason, I've noticed spam pages tend to do this a lot.

- 71.199.125.210 (talk) 19:08, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

The elevator vandal

• Task: Block creation of vandal talk pages of subpages of Portal:Current events, referring to elevators.

• Reason: Since August 2012, an IP-hopping editor, known as "the elevator vandal", has been repeatedly creating pages with titles of the format Portal talk:Current events/2005 March 10, Portal talk:Current events/2009 August 29, etc. These pages contain trivial little stories, virtually all of which refer to riding elevators, and contain one or both of the words "elevator" and "elevators". All the IP addresses that I know of are listed at User:JamesBWatson/The elevator vandal. They are registered to the ISP Canaca-com, in either Ontario or Montreal. Almost all of them start 66... or 67... or 69..., but there is also 173.248.236.19, - JamesBWatson (talk) 11:45, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

 Doing... I will work with JamesBWatson and John of Reading on implementing this. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 04:56, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

I live in Ontario. I don't think http://www.canaca.com/ is an ISP: it looks like it's a webhost. Have you tried phoning them up and speaking with their abuse department? Or, could you block anonymous edits from that entire webhost's IP range? (Note: There exists a small ISP with a similar name, "Acanac". But as far as I know, Canaca-com is not an ISP.) Cheers, —Unforgettableid (talk) 07:08, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

The netblocks are registered to Canaca-com Inc., but many of the IPs are registered to acanac.net/acanac.com which provides DSL and cable modem service. I believe this vandal is using the DSL service. I plan to have the edit filter deny certain edits from the netblocks. I have no plans to phone or contact the ISP, because, well to be honest, I really don't want to talk to anybody about it. I know that there are people that have tried to contact ISPs, but I can't really see this being a high priority for an ISP, especially since they won't be able to see the "abuse" in question. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 05:17, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

@Gogo Dodo: He's back! See Portal talk:Current events/2007 September 21. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:24, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

@John of Reading: @JamesBWatson: Thanks! The filter has now been written as Special:AbuseFilter/596. Filter is set to log-only mode to make sure the filter is working properly. Once the next IP is picked up by the filter and there are no false positives, I will set the filter to deny the edit. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 06:13, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. We'll see what happens. I know very little about regexp, but it looks to me as though this one may only look for the word elevators in the plural, not singular elevator. Is that right? If so, it might be a good idea to change it. Or have I misunderstood the working of "rlike"? JamesBWatson (talk) 08:11, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

It looks for both. "rlike" is a regexp and the "?" means that the previous character is optional so it looks for "elevator" or "elevators". Technically it matches a little more than that since I didn't use any word boundaries, but at the point it is doing the word matches, the lack of word boundaries should be fine as the chances of a false positive are pretty slim. You can use the debugging tool to see what a statement matches. If you test "elevator" rlike "elevators?" and "elevators" rlike "elevators?", you will see that they evaluate to 1. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 18:34, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. As I said, I know very little about regexp, and it seems that it was the ? that I didn't understand. JamesBWatson (talk) 12:14, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

 Done @John of Reading: @JamesBWatson: After the first hit on the filter and with no false positives for the past few days, I have set the filter to disallow edits. Hopefully that will put at end to this. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 06:47, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

@Gogo Dodo: He's back again after the filter was disabled: Portal talk:Current events/2007 December 15. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:32, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

 Done @John of Reading: @JamesBWatson: I thought this might happen with how long he has been at it. I re-enabled the filter. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 06:09, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately he's switched to portal pages diff. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:15, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

@John of Reading: @JamesBWatson: Interesting. That corresponding Portal talk page is one that I protected from recreation. I adjusted the filter to handle the target shift. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 23:12, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

I hope you haven't accidentally blocked genuine news items about elevators. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:52, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

It shouldn't be a problem. -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 05:35, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

IPs breaking brackets

• Task: Apply a filter to articles flagged by BracketBot which are made by IP editors.
• Reason: I've noticed that 80-85% of these edits are done by vandals.

BracketBot just started up this week. The bot flags an article and notifies the editor that the edit caused a bracket to become unbalanced. An example would be a missing [] on a reference or wikilink. I've noticed that the cause was vandalism 80-85% of the time. - Bgwhite (talk) 20:29, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

(Non-administrator comment)I don't think this is technically feasible, because it's too late for an edit filter to apply once BracketBot sees the edit. --71.199.125.210 (talk) 04:04, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Could you get BracketBot to add the words "Note: probably vandalism" to the history of the article in question? Cheers, —Unforgettableid (talk) 07:08, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree with the addition but only in the case of anonymous IPs. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:58, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

BracketBot doesn't edit the article, so it can't put anything there. If the filter can match non regular expressions (i.e. nested brackets) then it might be an idea to have the filter apply a tag to IP edits. As it stands, BracketBot uses the same headings as counter vandals, in the hope that they will notice the notifications and revert if also vandalism. 930913(Congratulate) 22:19, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Okay. There are a few ways BracketBot could alert Wikipedians to the fact that the edit may be vandalism. It could make a dummy edit and add a note to the edit summary, "Note: the previous edit by IP 111.222.333.444 was probably vandalism." Or it could add some HTML comments (maybe about vandalism) to the article and a similar note to the edit summary. Or it could write on the talk page, "==Possible adverse edit by IP 11.22.33.44== Hello, I'm BracketBot. Unregistered users sometimes make edits which leave unpaired brackets on a page. About 80% of the time, such edits are adverse edits. I have automatically detected that JohnDoe's edit to Example article may have created unpaired brackets. Dear editors: Was this edit vandalism?" Cheers, —Unforgettableid (talk) 22:34, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

@Unforgettableid: It already does this, albeit not so pointedly, by putting notifications under the same heading as that of vandalism warnings. 930913(Congratulate) 09:54, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Mullingar libel

• Task: Deter certain libelous statements. Probably sufficient to apply to page Mullingar, IP editors only.
• Reason: Repeated additions like this from various IPs over a number of years, usually aimed at the same person. Please see history of Mullingar for further instances (though some have been oversighted). If you have a better way to achieve this than edit filtering, that's good too.

- Certes (talk) 18:18, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

• This doesn't seem like something that fits the scope of an edit filter. At least, in the sense that this is largely a one article issue, and can be solved with a watchlist; Saving that extra few milliseconds per edit that make the difference between robust and just meh server provisioning. -T.I.M^(Contact) 22:23, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Dear Certes: Would Wikipedia:Requests for page protection work? If not, why not? —Unforgettableid (talk) 06:46, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for taking an interest. Page protection has worked temporarily in the past. The problem is that it is short term, because other IPs occasionally make positive contributions to this page. For several years, this vandal's pattern has been to reappear every few months after protection has lapsed. This tiny quantity of vandalism is trivial by the scale of Wikipedia, but it does make serious allegations against a person who is real and has reported the matter. An edit filter probably isn't the ideal solution either; better suggestions welcome! Or maybe we should leave it as a watchlist item and just accept that, once in a while, a search for the person's name will come up with an unfortunate result. Certes (talk) 12:29, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Voobly

• At Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Spam#Voobly_spam_again I'm told this site is already blacklisted, and I should come here. IP addresses are still spamming links to Voobly.com in articles it has been removed from over the months/years multiple times. I listed some, but certainly nowhere near to all, of the cases of that happening at the Wikiproject for spam. If its on the blacklist already, shouldn't it automatically be in the filter? Dream Focus 22:07, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

The blacklist isn't stopping those edits because they're not creating external links. The blacklist will only prevent you from creating an external link to that particular site. It won't, however, stop you from inserting the text "voobly.com" outside of a link. For that you would need an edit filter, and in this case, I think it would probably be warranted. If I have some time later, I'll try to add one. (But if someone else has time before I get to it, feel free to jump in.) ‑Scottywong| squeal _ 22:31, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

 Done Special:AbuseFilter/535. King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 08:25, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

• What about the IP addresses that only post spam to other related sites? Like this guy [25] did to http://www.gameranger.com/ and http://www.e-warzone.com/ ? For years now, GameRanger spam has been going on. Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Spam#GameRanger_spam. If its not on the blacklist yet, do I have to wait for someone to add it to it? And does this only affect those who post it with a .com behind it, or does it stop IP addresses from adding the name to dozens of different articles every chance they get? Dream Focus 11:59, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Joy Richard Preuss

• Task: Prevent edits containing the name “Joy Richard Preuss” and this persons bank account number (which can be seen in the [now-oversighted] edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Balancing_test&diff=next&oldid=541649751)
• Reason: Joy Richard Preuss is an, apparently mentally ill, aspiring something that spams the web with promotional nonsense (and his/her bank account information). We have a filter that prevents this on dawiki, which has been very successful at stopping him/her, but it appears that he/she has started spamming enwiki as well. Also, perhaps the edits he/she has made that contains his/her bank account information should be hidden, despite it being quite public already (it's all over the web due to the aforementioned spam). --Cgtdk (talk) 00:00, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

• Special:AbuseFilter/534. Log only for now. Someguy1221 (talk) 11:27, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
• Cgtdk, have you found any more edits recently? Over the last year I have requested oversight of all the ones I could find that give away personal information, although it's hard to find them in article histories (most get reverted quickly by other editors). There was a big batch which Someguy1221 very helpfully dealt with in the last day or two. bobrayner (talk) 13:34, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

I just rolled back a JRP edit, but it did not contain any sensitive information. Other than that and the one I posted in my original request, I have not seen any recently. --Cgtdk (talk) 13:46, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Creating pages with speedy deletion tags

• Task: Catch speedy deletion tags insrted while creating pages (at least in article space).
• Reason: These are most likely recreations of speedy deleted pages (for example when the creator copies the page wikitext with the speedy tag on it when notified, and then pastes the same text after the page is deleted to recreate it) or are test pages where the creator wants them deleted as soon as possible after they are created. There are very few valid reasons, if any, for a speedy deletion tag to be applied on a page when it is created. jfd34 (talk) 14:01, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

"Magical Item" disallow

• Task: I would like a filter to disallow any edits to Pretty Cure (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) that insert the Japanese text "関連アイテム" and the romanization of "Mahō Aitemu".
• Reason: I recently dealt with someone who was edit warring on the previously stated article and during the edit war they inserted the aforementioned text into her edits. As the Japanese text and romanization are actually erroneously matched ("関連" is read as kanren) and the only person who would be inserting it into the article is this individual who has resorted to sockpuppeting, I do not believe there will be any issue with false positives.

—Ryulong (琉竜) 18:12, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Lions at Cat Creek

• Task: This filter would disallow all edits that add the words "Lion"/"Lions"+"Cat Creek" to any article, and disallowing any addition of the word "lion" that is not "mountain lion" to Cat Creek, Montana. Disallowing edit summaries including "ROOOOOAAARR" in varying levels of capitalisation and number of letters would also be good but might be more difficult.
• Reason: The saga can be seen at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Catcreekcitycouncil/Archive. Basically, it appears some students at a California high school (as this article is also a target of different vandalism by the same group of socks) are determined to add the fact "there are lions in Cat Creek, Montana" to the article of the community in question. They were engaged, claimed one book 'of which only a few copies exist' was their source (and that all American naturalists were wrong, and that no, it wasn't the archaric useage of "lion" for "mountain lion"), and it finally resulted in a massive sockfarm being unearthed and the article full-protected...and over the last year has seen the article full-protected several times again as these trolls repeatedly game the system for autoconfirmation. The final straw came today, when, with the Cat Creek article locked, they started adding the "there are lions in Cat Creek, Montana" 'fact' to several other articles. Given this behavior it's clear that an edit filter is needed to curb this particular group of sockvandtrolls. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 08:50, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
  • They've struck again. Semiprotection is ineffective due to gaming the system and the vandalism is spreading to other articles. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 01:33, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Any ROOOAAARRR filter would have to be employed with care for fear of Bishzilla's wrath. Otherwise, this seems like a simple tweak. Acroterion (talk) 02:27, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
    • Heh. Well, the first part ("Lion/s+Cat Creek") is the more important one here. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 17:13, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
      • Can somebody please take a look at this? The "lions in montana" trolling is spreading. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 06:51, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
        • I'm on it. Looks like they came up with methods that Special:AbuseFilter/58 simply can't handle. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 09:16, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
        • I have created Special:AbuseFilter/547 and am working on refining it. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 08:17, 15 April 2013 (UTC)
          • Much thanks. Now to keep an eye out for evasion via leetspeak. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 19:02, 15 April 2013 (UTC)
            • And speak of the lion. Sigh! "C@T", "C@t" and "c@t" probably need to be added... (and perhaps also "lyons+montana"). - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 21:20, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
              • OK. Also, could you email me any proposed changes in the future? The workings of the filter should be kept from the vandal's eyes. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 21:27, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
                • Alrighty. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 21:36, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
• @King of Hearts: @Reaper Eternal: They're back, and once again gaming the system to get around semiprotection. The edit filter really is needed unless we're going to permamently lock down every article related to lions, Montana, or "cat creek". - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 22:28, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Filter name

• Task: Prevent specific vandalism, which appears to have started in June 2012 by User:125.239.195.150. Repeated vandalism by many meatpuppets on the 1272 article (see page history), and after that page was protected the vandalism has occurred on the 1372 article. Possibilities are prevent these phrases being used in year articles, and prevent all use of certain combinations of phrases.
• Reason: Better than protection as it could prevent the bad edits, and on a wider range of articles.

- Peter James (talk) 01:04, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Retard

• Task: Filter redirects to pages like Mental retardation.
• Reason: Very likely an attack page.

- FrankDev (talk) 02:41, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Language speaker data

• Task: Filter the 'speakers' parameter of {{Infobox language}} for changes, similarly to how changes to height and weight in bio boxes are tagged. (If possible, filter 'date' and 'ref' under the same tag: these are all elements of the population figure.) Should apply to editors without advanced permissions.
• Reason: Population inflation is a chronic problem with our language articles, and isn't easy to detect if you don't see it happen. Although this wouldn't catch changes to the text, vandals and POV warriors normally change the info box as well. This isn't just a problem with IPs, but often with signed-in POV editors. The date may be changed to make the data look recent. If 'date' and 'ref' can be covered without increasing server load significantly, please include them; otherwise 'speakers' is the main problem.

— kwami (talk) 00:28, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

XSS Filter detect

• Task: Block Internet Explorer 8+ users from saving edits that triggered the XSS Filter (Bug 32013). The XSS Filter transforms periods, bracket, and parentheses to the Number sign. One simple implementation might be ##[^{|}<\n>[\];:*]{5,255}?##
• Reason: Because IE is extremely sneaky doing this after show change displays everything correctly and devs refuse to send the header to stop the filter. We've had many complaints about this.

— Dispenser 06:11, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Sockpuppeteer

• Task Modify Special:AbuseFilter/483. It already records users creating their own user page, but it needs to record those creating it with their signature.
• Reason When he creates a new sock, a prolific sockpuppeteer and WMF-banned editor almost always creates its talk page with his signature. The filter would provide an easy way of locating any socks which CheckUser cannot detect. I understand that the four tildes are not edit filter syntax, but it surely must be extremely easy to add a condition to this filter which pays attention to 2012, the current year in the new text. WilliamH UK (talk) 16:49, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Actually, I think it is the reverse. The filter will detect the four tildes but not "2012 (UTC)". Sole Soul (talk) 14:18, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

That is correct. Reaper Eternal (talk) 03:06, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Preventing example text

• Task: Make it so that an edit to an article space page that includes the text '''Bold text''', [[File:Example.jpg]], and the other default text for various markups will be flagged by the filter. I suppose there are situations in which these things should be added, so please make it give the editor an "Are you sure you meant to do this?" message but please don't make it prevent them from making the edit if they say "Yes"
• Reason: It's easy to leave stray text by accident. I often see these pieces of text in articles, and while they're occasionally vandalism, they're normally left by people who probably clicked the button and didn't notice that they'd done anything. Example. These aren't "Trivial formatting mistakes and edits that at first glance look fine but go against some obscure style guideline" — except for vandals and occasional editors who might find a good reason to add them to articles, nobody will intend to add them to articles, since in at least 99% of cases, they're pretty obviously against good English usage.

- 2001:18E8:2:1020:14CA:926D:7D1C:85A5 (talk) 19:39, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

When we tried filtering out all of these the hit rate wound up being far too high and kept out too many otherwise constructive edits. There is currently a bot that watches for such edits and reverts them if only such content is present. Otherwise it logs the edits here, and the backlog on clearing that page out is usually less than a month. If you have any suggestions for improving that bot, you might want to ask 28bytes. Someguy1221 (talk) 23:49, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Obscenities in AFT5

• Task:Prevent the posting of obscenities through the Article Feedback Tool.
• Reason: at the moment we've got filters 460, 472, 474 and 475 working in conjunction to try and skim obscenities and vandalism out of AFT5. They were adapted from the similar filters from edits, and are working relatively well, but there's some stuff they don't get. As a first step, it would be really great if someone could meld them so we don't have multiple filters doing what is essentially the same task. As a second, we should look at expanding the obscenities it covers :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 08:48, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, it looks like those 4 filters each do their thing in a different way, so merging them would take some work (and actually may not be ideal, I'm not sure). As for refining them to catch more vandalism, it would help to have as many examples as possible of vandalism that they're not currently catching. Also, the users that have been working a lot on these filters include User:Fabrice Florin, User:Rsterbin, User:Wifione, and User:Someguy1221, so they might be better people to ask than me about these particular filters. -Scottywong| gab _ 18:25, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

They can all be merged and will probably work better because of it. I haven't looked deep into the hits, though. Is there much overlap? If they are catching distinct sets of vandalism, merging won't make a huge difference. Also, 474 is a resource-consuming beast and could use some work. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:44, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

They're basically the same thing (obscenities redux) - any help anyone can offer on this would be most appreciated. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:47, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Russian Beatles copyvio

• Task:A highly dynamic IP and an occasional named sock account (FreedomRome (talk · contribs) is the latest sock of the master Crazy1980 (talk · contribs)) has been plaguing the OTRS noticeboard and other pages with spurious statements of permission to upload Beatles songs or to link to a Russian copyright-violating host. Typically includes a link to britishcouncil.org, which I'd rather not have blacklisted the usual way, and statements like "Team of the volunteers of the British Council gives the permission to use these materials", "The Beatles for Cultural Diversity" and all IPs are from Russian ranges. See [26], [27], [28], [29], [30] and so on.
• Reason: Obviously Apple Records, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the estates of George Harrison and John Lennon will disagree with the idea that somebody at the British Council has given permission to Russians to upload Beatles songs to WP or to link to Russian copyvio sites, and given the incredible persistence of this user, a filter might be helpful - it's been going on for months. No actual uploads that I know of, but the spurious permissions are becoming tiresome. I believe the copyvio host has long since been blacklisted.

- Acroterion (talk) 01:58, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

@Acroterion: Is this still needed? — This, that and the other (talk) 12:58, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I haven't seen any activity of this kind in the past few months, so I'd let it drop unless they start up again. Acroterion (talk) 13:35, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Update: they're back, Russian IPs on Jimbo's talkpage, so I'd like to pursue this again. See [31], [32] and [33] and User:Music1245's contributions. Acroterion (talk) 00:43, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

The word 'cocksucker'

There may be some valid use cases for adding the word "cocksucker" (case-insensitive, singular and plural) to articles (pornography articles, perhaps, as well as reported speech), but it probably ought to be filtered in the article namespace for non-confirmed users or even just IP users. —Tom Morris (talk) 21:49, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

 Done Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 06:21, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Replacing interwikis with ?

• Task: Tag the edit when a user unintentionally replaced interwikis with ???, because their computer doesn't support Unicode well. example
• Reason: The tag will make it easier to fix it.

- Makecat 05:52, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

The problem is more general than interwikis. I've got as far as Preview with a bunch of ?s replacing someone's carefully crafted CJK characters. Unless it is already covered by another filter, I would warn about replacing anything a text editor might zap, perhaps [\U0100-\UFFFFFF]+, by \?+. Can we also trap the substitute character which looks like □ U+25A1 White Square but may be some other code point? Certes (talk) 13:36, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll try to create a filter for this. Unfortunately the Abuse Filter's regex match does not support \u. See [34]. Triplestop x3 05:19, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

This is not a talk page. Please add new requests at the top of this section, not here at the bottom. Thank you!

Completed requests

Racist vandalism against Lewis Hamilton

• Task: Prevent editors adding the word "baboon" to articles containing the text "Lewis Hamilton"
• Reason: The racist vandal who prompted the creation of edit filter 311 a while ago is apparently back. For the past few days they have amused themselves by adding "baboon" in the vicinity of the text "Lewis Hamilton" in the 2014 Formula One race articles ("baboon" is a racist slur against Hamilton, who is black) under a variety of accounts (Rosberg the great (contribs), Errscord (contribs), Tokenanab (contribs)) - as one account is blocked they simply create a new one. I think reviving edit filter 311 and tweaking it to prevent the addition of "baboon" (instead of "black baboon") should fix the problem. - DH85868993 (talk) 06:10, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

 Reactivated with a couple changes. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 09:14, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Tag articles moved from sandboxes to mainspace

• Task: Tag when an editor moves an article from their sandbox into mainspace
• Reason: Blackhat paid editors frequently create articles in sandboxes and then move them into mainspace in order to avoid NPP and even in some cases use other accounts to patrol them see for example: SPI 1 and SPI 2 (the Wiki-PR socks used the same trick). If we had a filter to tag when new accounts (say >100 edits) move articles into mainspace we might be should be able to spot these edits more easily. It's difficult to know how many false positives there would be, but if the filter could somehow be restricted to BLPs and company articles that would reduce these to a minimum. SmartSE (talk) 21:38, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Testing it with my test filter (using a higher limit, since your intended targets can see the number you wrote here), to see how this looks. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:20, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@Smartse:Still testing, but you may want to take a look at Lambda architecture, Duong Dynasty (An Nam), NewsWatch TV, and Septum (cell biology) - I believe that these are all proper hits. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 02:54, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

 Done as filter 630. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:01, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Dishonest edit summaries filter

• Task: Flag edits as "possible vandalism" or "possible false edit summary" (or whatever other label seems most fitting) IF the edit summary includes the phrase "fix typo", "fix grammar", "fixing typo", "fixing grammar" or variations thereof AND the editor is non-confirmed (IP or new editor) AND the edit changes the article's size by more than, say, 200 bytes.
• Reason: Many vandals and trolls (particularly, IP-vandals/trolls and vandal-only accounts) try to slip in disruptive edits by labelling them as "typo fix" or similar. While the combination "fix typo" and a relatively large change in article size tends to attract scrutiny on its own, this relies heavily on the edit in question being noticed, which does not quite always happen. By having these edits tagged, not only are they less easily overlooked, it also gives an easy way to search for these edits. While the occasional actual typo-and-grammar-fixing resulting in such a large change exists (for example, this edit by me), it is very, very uncommon. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 20:37, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

  Example: this edit to today's FA. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:50, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

  • • One likely exception: if a user tries to add a substituted template, and either mistypes the template name to the name of a non-existant template, or mistypes the word "subst", fixing this may result in a big diff size; it would also fit all the criteria mentioned above if done by a new user. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:24, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
    • An other quite reasonable exception: A user does multiple things in a single edit, amnd states all of them. One happens to be a typo fix, and an other changes the length of the page significantly. As a single edit, it will be a hit if done by a new user. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:51, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Testing now at my test filter. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:40, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

 Done as filter 633. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:27, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Dan Howell

• Task: Flag insertion of "Dan Howell" and be able to disallow the edit if necessary.
• Reason: A flood of throwaway accounts and IPs have been inserting references to Dan Howell into random articles, with particular focus on Delia Smith (see history), then moving on to random articles after that was semi-protected. Inappropriate article creation, general silliness from a wide range of UK addresses. Since the entire meme depends on Dan Howell, it should be easy to filter for it. "Dan" alone would be harder to deal with. An emphasis on "Maltesers" is presumably significant to Dan and his entourage. See [35], [36], [37], [38].

- Acroterion (talk) 00:51, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Added to filter 58. Sole Soul (talk) 03:00, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks: it's intercepted three accounts. You might want to add "Phil Lester" for the time being, since that's showing up in the meme too. Acroterion (talk) 14:25, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

More coming in: see Milkshake, Falling (accident), Phan. "Daniel Howell" will need to be intercepted. Acroterion (talk) 16:12, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

 Done Reaper Eternal (talk) 16:32, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, glad to see this "danisnotonfire" might be a good term to add too. Mark Arsten (talk) 17:21, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

 Done too. Reaper Eternal (talk) 17:26, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Oh thank heavens!! --Sue Rangell 03:51, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Dan Howell (2nd request)

• Task: Filter "Dan Howell" / "danisnotonfire"
• Reason: We need to double check the "Dan Howell" / "danisnotonfire"-related vandalism filter. I was told this would be a good thing to request since it is already supposed to be filtered out. --Sue Rangell 03:43, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Nobody has replied to you for a year. I think this is because we don't understand your request. 1. Is the vandalism still ongoing? If so: 2. Are you requesting that a new filter be created? 3. Or are you requesting that a change be made to an existing filter? 3a. If so, do you happen to know the filter number? 3b. Are there certain edits which the filter is failing to catch? 3c. Could you please provide diffs? 3d. Who told you this would be a good thing to request? 3e. Could you please point us to the discussion? I have just dropped you a {{talkback}} template to point you here. Cheers, —Unforgettableid (talk) 23:24, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

It's been too long. LOL. I no longer remember the incident that prompted this. Feel free to mark this issue as closed. Thank you.--Sue Rangell ✍ ✉ 18:29, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Delete Article Feedback filters

• Task: Disable and mark deleted the following filters:
  • 458
  • 460
  • 463
  • 472
  • 473
  • 474
  • 487
  • 520
  • 521
  • 604
• Reason: The ArticleFeedbackv5 extension has been removed, so no filters in the "feedback" group have any use anymore.

- Jackmcbarn (talk) 19:29, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

 Done Legoktm (talk) 20:25, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Filter 380: Multiple obscenities

• Task: Change \b(p|P)ussy| to \b(p|P)ussy\b|
• Reason: Wikipedia:Edit filter/False positives/Reports#204.62.61.56

- Jackmcbarn (talk) 19:56, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

 Done. Sole Soul (talk) 12:03, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Recursive redirect

• Task: Warn when pagetitle of a redirect matches redirect target.
• Reason: Similar to Filter 163. Today I cleaned 9 such cases.

- Magioladitis (talk) 16:35, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

 Done Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:24, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

nowiki in main namespace

• Task: The filter would look for <nowiki> tags in the main namespace, and tag the edits with a 'nowiki' tag.
• Reason: There is seldom any reason to insert nowiki tags in the main namespace. This filter will allow users to track edits where nowiki tags were added by the user by mistake (with the wikitext editor toolbar) or automatically by VisualEditor. This will be particularly useful to track "dirty diffs" generated by VE. guillom 09:51, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

I think something like this should work:

article_namespace == 0
& "<nowiki>" in lcase(added_lines)

Kudu ^~I/O~ 02:59, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

FYI, there's now such a filter on the French Wikipedia: fr:Spécial:Filtre antiabus/171 (in case it's useful). guillom 17:05, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

 Already done This is Special:AbuseFilter/550. — This, that and the other (talk) 12:45, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Exempt confirmed users from Filter 34: New or unregistered user blanking someone else's user or user talk page

• Task: Make Filter 34: New or unregistered user blanking someone else's user or user talk page not apply to users in the "confirmed" group.
• Reason: Wikipedia:Edit filter/False positives/Reports#KudpungMobile and Wikipedia:Edit filter/False positives/Reports#KudpungMobile 2

Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:21, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

 Done Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:15, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Feedback: Adding email addresses

• Background: It's about this filter (Feedback: Adding email addresses): At November 20, 2012 the filter was public visible and the german wikipedia copied it because of their introduction of AFTv5.
• Task: consider replaceing "\b[a-zA-Z0-9_]{2,20}@[a-zA-Z0-9_]{2,20}\.(co\.)?[a-z]{2,3}\b" with "\b[a-zA-Z0-9_]{2,20}@[a-zA-Z0-9_\-]{2,20}\.(co\.)?[a-z]{2,3}\b" (but i have only little knowledge about regexp)
• Reason: We've discovered that domains like t-online.de (with a hyphen) were not detected.

- Se4598 (talk) 20:39, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

 Done Thanks, Triplestop (talk) 03:59, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

• Just FYI: There is a regexp for email addresses at the WHATWG HTML5 specification. It can catch things the above regexp does not catch (for instance, the use of + or - in the local part). --cesarb (talk) 01:46, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Detect (and warn) insertion of "unknown" symbol U+FFFD

• Task: This filter should detect when the Unicode symbol U+FFFD: � is inserted into an article, for easy cleanup later. If possible, it could display a warning before save.
• Reason: See this discussion at VPT.

Thanks, Ignatzmice•talk 00:59, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

 Done Special:AbuseFilter/590 Triplestop (talk) 04:01, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

OverBlood

• Task: This is really a request to move a filter from one article to another. The original filter was intended to curb a persistent stream of vandalism at this article where the vandals change the name of the main character from "Raz Karcy" to "Wienerless Steve". Because these vandals are often poor spellers the term "Weinerless Steve" ("ei" rather than "ie") is often used and filter end-runs like "Steve without a Wiener" are also frequently used. I'm not sure how the old filter works, but it should be enough to filter for the words "wiener" and "weiner" in any context. Anyway the request is to move the filter from "Overblood" (the old name of the article) to its new name, "OverBlood" (capitalized "B" in "Blood").
• Reason: The old filter is protecting a redirect and the new article has no filter on it and has become the subject of renewed vandalism since August. This whole issue has been going on since January 4, 2011 (close to 2 years). The logs for the old page show a long history of ineffective page-protections. The filter was the only thing that worked. -Thibbs (talk) 16:54, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

 Done I finally got to the root of this issue myself. It was very difficult since I'm not an admin and I couldn't see from the logs what the filter's number was nor did I have access to the filter details once I knew its number, but an admin at the Village Pump (technical) tracked down the editors who maintain the filter in question and although one of them is on semi-retirement, the other was able to restore functionality for this filter which had failed 7 months ago. Thanks for all the support. This takes a lot off my mind. -Thibbs (talk) 21:19, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Denied requests

The Wikipedia Adventure, autopatrolled

The Wikipedia Adventure, new page patrol

• task: Mark only those userpages and userspace subpages created automatically through TWA, with the edit summary New Message (simulated automatically as part of The Wikipedia Adventure), as autopatrolled
• reasons: For the past 18 months we've been building an interactive guided tour for new editors called The Wikipedia Adventure (TWA). We just finished our beta test (10,000 editors invited, 600 played) and had some very nice results, both quantitatively and qualitatively. One issue has come up and I'd like some guidance. The TWA game takes place in an editor's userspace, at user and user talk subpages. This allows a modicum of verisimilitude--it looks and feels like Wikipedia--without actually burdening articles with test edits and vandalism. So that's good. The challenge is that these new userspace pages are still patrolled by some hardworking editors, and they have asked if it would be possible to mark those pages as autopatrolled. These pages are generally created using a mediawiki guided tour that pushes an edit through the mediawiki API. In other words, it's the editor themselves making an edit, but the TWA guided tours engine actually puts it on Wikipedia (it shows up in the page history as though the editor made it themselves, but is edit-summary tagged as part of TWA). After these pages are created, the editor is asked to interact with and improve them, as part of the learning process.
• The Wikipedia Adventure
• Phase 1 impact metrics and results
• Mission 1 (the mediawiki code including the API)

Cheers! Ocaasi ^{t | c} 14:13, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Edit filters can't mark pages as autopatrolled. You'd need a modification to MediaWiki to do that. Jackmcbarn (talk) 19:31, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Change to Filter 479

Special:AbuseFilter/479, designed to help "noobs", should be changed to make an exception for image examples included inside infoboxes. As most know, commented-out image syntax is sometimes included in infoboxes because there is no consistent way that images are included in an infobox. Some infoboxes want the "File:" namespace prefix, others don't; some want square brackets, others don't, etc. 67.100.127.22 (talk) 03:58, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Since it does not disallow such edits, but merely warns and tags, I don't think this is a frequent enough occurrence to be a big deal. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 05:02, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Template vandalism

• Task: Preventing such edits as this (admin only) from multiple templates earlier today. Black Kite (talk) 22:19, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
• Reason: obvious when you see what the edit did (WP:BEANS). Black Kite (talk) 22:20, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

I've added filter 482 in an attempt to deal with this. It's currently in a log-only mode and won't prevent these types of edits yet, because I'd like to make sure there are no unintended consequences from the way the filter works. If everything is ok in a day or two, I'll switch it on. -Scottywong| yak _ 19:02, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Nevermind, there are too many false positives with the method I chose to find these types of edits. I've deactivated and deleted the filter. We'll have to find some other way of ignoring comments. This should really be a function that is built in to the abuse filter extension itself, rather than having to be coded into each individual filter. -Scottywong| babble _ 13:44, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

 Done Reaper Eternal (talk) 12:50, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Make that not done for now; the wiki exploded. Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:40, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Richard Daft

• Task: Refer Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Richard Daft and Archive. Various keywords and categories of articles applicable which I am reluctant to post here right now. Grateful if you can give feedback if this sort of this is within scope, and if so I can work on the specifics.
• Reason: Long term harassment of User:BlackJack, various attempts at outings, and vandalism of articles frequently related to 18th century cricket.

- Moondyne (talk) 13:58, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Request removed. Moondyne (talk) 01:46, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Long-term subtle vandalism

• Task: Block addition of the following names to any artilce.
  • James Couch
  • Al "Oatmeal" Edwards, Al Edwards Oatmeal
  • Mike Geselbracht
  • Adams Hambüger-Hatt, Adam Hambüger-Hatt
  • Adams Madrid, Adam Madrid, Adam Gama-Madrid
• Reason: Long-term subtle vandalism by IP hopping vandal (mostly from CitiCorp IPs) as reported by Axolotl Nr.733 (talk · contribs) at the village pump here. Thanks. 64.40.54.97 (talk) 11:29, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

An alternate would be to tag edits with these names as possible vadalism so that RCPers could have a closer look. 64.40.57.126 (talk) 18:09, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

An admin could just perform a rangeblock on the IPs. Hghyux (talk to me)(talk to others) 22:36, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

A rangeblock really wouldn't be feasible for an IP hopper. You'd have to nail so many unrelated users that the collateral probably won't be worth it. Reaper Eternal (talk) 00:45, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Agree with RE, a rangeblock is inapproriate here. I've gone throught the range contribs (links here) and I'd guess about 90% of them are helpful, useful additions. An edit filter is a much better tool for this problem. 64.40.57.189 (talk) 05:03, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity: Is anyone having a look at this? It seems no such vandalism has occurred in the meantime, but as I had demonstrated, it had gone on for years. Btw, it would be totally sufficient to block just any addition of the name "Hambüger-Hatt", as there quite likely is no-one of that name. On the other hand, I'm not so sure about blocking additions of "James Couch", the vandal had added that name only three times or so, and some valid contributions might be blocked that way. --Axolotl Nr.733 (talk) 09:44, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

"Is anyone having a look at this?" Yep, the edit filter managers look at all the requests but often don't comment. There are several things to weigh before enabling a new edit filter. Such as; how big is the problem, how often does it happen, etc.. That's because the edit filters work on all edits. A few hundred edit filters on thousands of edit per hour takes up a lot of computer time, so they have to determine if the processor time is worth the problem it solves. Best regards. 64.40.54.81 (talk) 18:23, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

 Not done I'm withdrawing the request as it no longer seems to be a problem. 64.40.54.83 (talk) 10:49, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Disable page creation throttle filter

• Task: Disable the filter which throttles page creation by new users.
• Reason: There are lots of reasons to create more then 8 pages in a minute.

- S/s/a/z-1/2 (talk) 12:54, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

MediaWiki software does that, not abuse filter. It can be changed by a configuration variable (wgRateLimits). You'll need community consensus for that to be changed and it limits all edits (and that includes page creations), not only page creations.--Glaisher (talk) 13:19, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Also, from what I see of your 35 page creations, there have been only two occasions where you're created two or more pages in the span of two minutes or less: User:Ssaz 12/Draft, User:Ssaz 12/Draft/Draft 1, User:Ssaz 12/sandbox between 06:07 and 06:09, 1 July 2014; and User:Ssaz 12/PROD log, User talk:Somya Ranjan Mahapatra at 08:42, 4 July 2014. That's well short of hitting the page creation throttle. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:51, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

 Not done not an edit filter issue.--Salix alba (talk): 09:01, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Indian URLs added by new or IP editors

• Task: Mark edits that add links with Indian top-level domains
• Reason: I've noticed, particularly on articles on electronics and the like, that IP editors sometimes linkspam non-reliable Indian websites as citations in articles, often to gleefully tell us that its now available in India as long as you have enough rupees (a violation of the recently expanded WP:NOTCATALOG). I'm not saying all Indian sites are unreliable or spam, but I've just seen it quite a bit.

- ViperSnake151  Talk  18:39, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

 Not done These sites should be added to the WP:Blacklist. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:08, 1 July 2014 (UTC).

Villegas filter

• Task: Prevent the creation of pages where the title contains the string "Villegas" or "Vilagas" AND the content contains the phrase "Filipina child actress".
• Reason: See Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Katrina Villegas. Whilst this filter won't completely prevent abuse from this user, it should take care of their most common practice.

- Yunshui 雲‍水 14:33, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

 Not done seems to have died down. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:20, 3 July 2014 (UTC).

Titleblacklist override

• Task: Require confirmation when an admin attempts to create a page that's subject to the title blacklist.
• Reason: See the "Corbet's Couloir" section of the current revision of WP:AN. We admins can create pages with blacklisted titles, but sometimes we create such a page when we shouldn't; I can't remember what it was, but I know I've done this and had to go back and delete the titles in question. I came here after reading a related Bugzilla thread, at which someone suggested using the Abuse Filter for this purpose. The thread originally consisted of a request to add an "Are you sure?" clickthrough whenever an admin attempted to create a blacklisted title, although it never got implemented because of inactivity. As someone there said, "This would be a particularly useful feature to have, as it should hopefully result in faster response times when administrators screw up the title blacklist and block creation of all pages with spaces in their titles, and are blissfully unaware of the situation themselves." When offering advice to non-admins, especially newbies, I'm always frustrated by the fact that my userrights make it harder to remember what other users can't do. If I had to click through in order to create a title, I'd have an easier time remembering non-admins' limitations and less likely to suggest that they do things they're unable to do. Nyttend (talk) 21:44, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

The edit filter and title blacklist are totally unrelated. Using it for that purpose might work, but it's a bad idea. I'll try to throw a proper fix together in gerrit. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:48, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

This is simply  Not possible. Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:07, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Filter 30: Large deletion from article by new editors

• Task: Make filter 30: Large deletion from article by new editors not apply to mobile edits.
• Reason: Exceptionally high rate of FPs. Example: Special:AbuseLog/9062564 appears as blanking, but the diff corresponding to that edit isn't. There are many more examples of this in filter 30's log. It looks like this happens because of a bug somewhere makes mobile edits only show the filter the new wikitext from the edited portion of the page. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:03, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Withdrawn. The bug causing this has long since been fixed. Jackmcbarn (talk) 04:21, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Not

• Task: This filter would warn tag edits by all non-autoconfirmed users that are simply inserting the word "not". It would also tag all edits that fit the criteria so that users can identify them and take action if necessary.
• Reason: Many IP and new users simply add "not" to an article as sneaky vandalism.

- The Anonymouse (talk | contribs) 06:47, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

• • There is probably too much potential for collateral damage, and it might get in the way of non-autoconfirmed users reverting vandalism that removes "not".--Jasper Deng (talk) 06:53, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
    • Are you saying that warning is too much? If so, than how about just tagging and not warning? The Anonymouse (talk | contribs) 07:00, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
      • A warning probably will cause too much collateral; I'll leave it to a more experienced edit filter manager to see about tagging, although I don't know about its effectiveness because again it may be part of a vandalism revert.--Jasper Deng (talk) 07:07, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

 Not done Many also remove "not" as another form of sneaky vandalism, and this filter would stop the reversion of that. There also would likely be many false positives associated with this. Reaper Eternal (talk) 11:37, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Adding QuickiWiki

• Task: Check for addition of "QuickiWiki Look Up" and give a warning explaining the cause and how to avoid it.
• Reason: Users have problems identifying the cause and keep inadvertently making edits adding "QuickiWiki Look Up". Special:AbuseFilter/345 checks for addition of this and other strings, but only displays a generic message at MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-codespill. After discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 103#QuickiWiki Look Up - Error I suggest a filter specific to "QuickiWiki Look Up" with a message saying something like this:

If this filter is made then QuickiWiki should be removed from Special:AbuseFilter/345. All posts I have seen identify the cause of adding QuickiWiki say it was WikiTweak. I don't know whether external links are used in edit filters but WikiTweak might link to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/wikitweak-wikipedia-enhancer/ and "disable" to http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-remove-add-ons. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:38, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't see why we should split it out. That just creates more work and more server load. Reaper Eternal (talk) 20:06, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

The filter log shows Geez-oz triggered the filter 72 times before being told the cause at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive_103#QuickiWiki Look Up - Error and disabling WikiTweak. Other users might give up editing if they only see the generic message MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-codespill with no mention of WikiTweak. But the filter is triggered rarely and I don't know how costly an extra filter is. Maybe MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-codespill should just mention that if the added text is "QuickiWiki" then the browser extension WikiTweak is probably responsible. Can an edit filter pass a parameter to MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-codespill to indicate whether "QuickiWiki" was found? PrimeHunter (talk) 21:37, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

 Not done Checked for by Special:AbuseFilter/345. Logs show this is no longer a frequent term so does not need a special filter.--Salix alba (talk): 09:01, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Change some filters to public

• Task: Change the following filters to public visibility:
  • 34 New or unregistered user blanking someone else's user or user talk page
  • 68 Pagemove throttle for new users
  • 242 Redirecting a substantial existing page - new user throttle
  • 247 Adding emails in articles
  • 261 Page creation throttle for new users
  • 320 "Your mom" Vandalism
  • 364 Changing the name in a BLP infobox
  • 463 Feedback: Adding email addresses
  • 483 Users creating own talk

Also, possibly these, but I'm not totally sure if they do anything that's private for a reason:

• 354 Promotional text added by user to own user(-talk) page
• 527 bug 32234: log/throttle possible sleeper account creations

• Reason: It's obvious how these filters work based on their descriptions, so keeping them private only serves to make it more difficult to patrol the edit filter log.

- 71.199.125.210 (talk) 03:32, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

These are private for reasons such as long-term abuse, spammers/spambots, and similar reasons. (Except for 247 and 463: the reason why these are private is "to protect logs from being crawled by spambots". And I think the same goes for 527: to keep the log private.) I am pretty sure none of these filters will be made public. — This, that and the other (talk) 11:32, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

What's being hidden by keeping them private? That's what I don't see. --24.131.230.174 (talk) 01:58, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

After reviewing them, I can tell you that each of them is private for some reason, such as hiding the log from spambots, containing tunable parameters that could be exploited if made public, and/or targeting some malicious behavior which is not obvious from the title. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 03:23, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

 Not done Per above Triplestop (talk) 03:56, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

I've checked them and IMHO there's no benefit in keeping 68, 242, 261, 483 private; for the first three the benefits of transparency are particularly high as they are of the "disallow" kind. --Nemo 12:01, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Common misspellings

• Task: The filter should flag, warn or prevent an edit containing common misspellings. This list could be used. It applies to the article namespace and to all editors.
• Reason: I came across this epic struggle and discussed how to ease that task. Although it would be trivial to detect "comprised of", there seems to be quite an effort to correct misspellings. Google engine may be better than Wikipedia's to search for misspelled words; however, searching is not enough and those human resources should be devoted to more creative contributions.

- 84.127.80.114 (talk) 05:39, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I see a very long list. While it could be made into a regular expression for warn and/or tag (there may be legitimate reasons to use the misspellings, so no preventing), I don 't think that it would be worth the use of the condition limit. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:11, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Preventing is an option, since legitimate misspellings can be marked: e.g., {{sic|hide=y|misspeling}} and <code>if copywrite then</code>. I propose this:

1. Assume there is a list with the 100 most common misspellings.
2. Prevent or warn.
3. After some time (e.g., one week) evaluate if the filter has reduced the load on spell-checking users.

Would this be acceptable? 84.127.80.114 (talk) 23:33, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

We don't allow bots to fix typos without human supervision, so I don't think we should allow them to disallow edits that probably contain typos. Remember with AWB there is very little effort needed to correct those of the typos that need correction, and without losing the rest of the edit they are part of. A typo is not a typo if it is a genuine quote or a file name - several of the words I patrol for are in multiple urls used on this site. Many "typos" are real names, for example try searching for Thrity. I would be OK with an opt in feature that spell checked your edit before you made it, but then I have that as part of the Firefox browser. But a warning that didn't highlight the word that needed changing would be an irritant to editors. ϢereSpielChequers 12:15, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Filters are not bots; bots correct, filters prevent. This filter is targeted at good faith mistakes. I am not talking about every possible typo, but the 100 most common misspellings. Is "Thrity" in that category?

Has this solution ever been tried and failed? 84.127.80.114 (talk) 04:41, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I do not see any way to pass the matched word to the warning message. Let us try something easier: the one most common misspelling. That would indicate whether this filter is useful. 84.127.80.114 (talk) 05:37, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

 Not done Lack of support. 84.127.82.127 (talk) 17:48, 30 October 2014 (UTC)