Wikibooks:Reading room/Administrative Assistance/Archives/2014/April

Spam blacklist addition
Quiteunusual, or anybody else, could you add 'pornhub' to the spam blacklist? Or tell me how to do so as I'm not quite sure. Thanks.--ЗAНИA talk 19:28, 27 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I'd never dealt with the blacklist, but with a bit of hunting I see the page is MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist, and the documentation for it, such as it is, is mw:Extension:SpamBlacklist.
 * The page is divided up into sections according to which admin add the entries.
 * Pretty much every entry starts and ends with "\b", which apparently means "unless preceded/followed by a letter".
 * I cobbled together something, . --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 21:49, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I had the page bookmarked but failed to read the documentation so was a bit confused on seeing that every entry began with a b.  I thought for a moment that, maybe, we only block spam which starts with the letter b.  At least I know what to do in future.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Estonia.svg|15px]]talk 22:38, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I dimly recall a standup comedian in a routine, some years ago, explaining that his calendar didn't have any threes. He would have called the company to complain, but his phone didn't have any sevens.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:35, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Regex... probably a book on it here you could read :-) QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 08:18, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I admit I was rather turned off by the arrogance of the message on the blacklist page, calling some specific notation "REGEXP" as if only ignorance should prevent anyone from knowing exactly what notation they're talking about &mdash; "regexp" being the standard shortening of "regular expression", thus covering a slew of different mutually incompatible notations (which typically do not denote, mathematically speaking, regular expressions). --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 10:48, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Indeed. I found trial and error and copying previous examples was the only way to make it work. The same form of Regex is used for the Abuse Filter, which has a test capability, so you can sandbox stuff there. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 11:27, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
 * A local blacklisting is actually not necessary as the link is globally blacklisted on all Wikimedia projects. See the global Spam blacklist at Meta. [//tools.wmflabs.org/searchsbl/?url=pornhub.com addition]. --Glaisher (discuss • contribs) 04:33, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Strange, according to meta it has been blacklisted since 2011. I asked about editing the blacklist here because of such vandalism (on the date of my original post above) so not sure how that happened.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Estonia.svg|15px]]talk 12:15, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Adding just pornhub.com, as the editor did, will not trigger the blacklist as it is not recognised as a URL. Adding http:// in front of the domain name will trigger the blacklist. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 13:39, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The functionality is described here on MediaWiki. As it says, "the extension creates a single regex statement which looks like /https?:\/\/[a-z0-9\-.]*(line 1|line 2|line 3|....)/Si (where all slashes within the lines are escaped automatically)." In other words, you can't use the blacklist to catch something that isn't a proper URL. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 13:44, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * That makes sense. Thanks.  --ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Estonia.svg|15px]]talk 13:49, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Abuse filters can be used for such type of edits. --Glaisher (discuss • contribs) 16:58, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

Edit request
MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyright: Please update the license title to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It is currently like this: "Attribution/Share-Alike". See the official website here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Also see m:MediaWiki talk:Wikimedia-copyright --Glaisher (discuss • contribs) 04:25, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅, thanks - QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 07:44, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Special:AbuseFilter/18
Please add an exception for 'autocreateaccount' as this is preventing many legitimate users from having accounts here. See the filter log for a list of false positives. --Glaisher (discuss • contribs) 06:50, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually, I think I have a better suggestion. As the filter is private, I will leave a message at the Notes section of that filter. --Glaisher (discuss • contribs) 07:46, 19 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I have made the change you suggested in your message. I don't really do edit filters often, new fangled things that they are. Any second set of eyes to make sure I didn't make a mistake would be appreciated. Thenub314 (talk) 13:42, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * It is fine. Thank you, --Glaisher (discuss • contribs) 16:21, 19 April 2014 (UTC)