All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XIII

[Bob Schroeck]

I've just given the anonymous user at IP 100.40.35.61 a three-day "Attention Getter" tempban. He's been creating WMG pages by just opening up an editor and dumping text in (without page boilerplate), text That Has No Markup And Every Word Capitalized. He's been adding stuff to existing WMG pages the same way.

After fixing one page and discovering he was making more, I decided to head him off at the pass. I've left an extensive note on the IP's talk page about why he was tempbanned and what he should do for future contributions. It would be nice if folks kept an eye out for both a response and for any future edits he might make.

EDIT: Oh, and also, I suspect this is actually an odd vandal with a strange obsession (every WMG he's added so far is about characters in a given work actually being aliens of some sort). Just so you know.

[Black Aeronaut]

Man, all these vandals must be pretty disappointed when they discover that the wiki is actually watched over rather carefully.

[Bob Schroeck]

<nod> I think it's been quite a while since an instance of spam or vandalization lasted more than 12 hours before being undone.

[Bob Schroeck]

I need a second (or more) opinion on a new page. "HornyLikeIAmA14YearOldGirl" has created a page for Avengers: Endgame, but I'm concerned that the main text is too close to TVT's page for the film. (Interestingly, the tropelist text seems to be sufficiently different, if my random sampling is any indication.) Given how we treated Jade Shauni's sentence-by-sentence rewrites of TVT pages, is this different enough from TVT that we needn't be concerned?

[Bob Schroeck]

Say, Rob, that page you flagged for deletion today -- GoAnimate!/WMG -- that was created, if you didn't notice, by our anonymous friend at 100.40.35.61, who either hasn't seen or is ignoring my message to him. I'm giving him a new tempban for a week; let's see if that gets his attention. If it doesn't, I think we should ban the IP for six months or so.

[Bob Schroeck]

About ten minutes ago:

(User creation log); 16:34 . . User account Toys.shop (talk | contribs | block) was created ‎

It's a no-brainer that we need to watch this one. If we don't see spam in the next 12 to 24 hours, though, it may actually be a real user.

[robkelk]

Say, Rob, that page you flagged for deletion today -- GoAnimate!/WMG -- that was created, if you didn't notice, by our anonymous friend at 100.40.35.61, who either hasn't seen or is ignoring my message to him.  I'm giving him a new tempban for a week; let's see if that gets his attention.  If it doesn't, I think we should ban the IP for six months or so.

I noticed... and, IIRC, "inserting false information" is a bannable offense.

[Bob Schroeck]

Although in this day and age I think it's unlikely that there's anything in the way of a work that we're not going to find in a Google search, I'm giving him/her/it the benefit of the doubt one last time.

[Bob Schroeck]

Because I keep asking, and no one but me and the forum software remembers the answer, the UploadCheck extension (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UploadCheck) forces users uploading images to add a description and pick a license. If I could remember my Phabricator login I would have gone there and asked to have this installed this afternoon; it will have to wait until tonight unless someone else beats me to it.

[Bob Schroeck]

Can someone please post a Phabricator ticket about the busted alert system? About the only thing that sets the alarm and signal icons these days is getting a thank you for an edit. Why?

Between my current projects at home and my inability to get my phab login password reset (my request appears to go into the bit bucket no matter what Phabricator says) I haven't been able to so myself, so I'd be very grateful if someone with reliable access passed the word on. And maybe requested the UploadCheck extension while they're at it.

Thanks.

[SelfCloak]

I posted the two Phabricator tickets: Install UploadCheck on allthetropes.org and Alarm notifications don't work properly on allthetropes.org.

[Bob Schroeck]

Thank you!

EDIT: As it so happened, it turns out my ISP's spam filter had been trapping my password reset links from Phabricator; I managed to straighten that out this morning before I left for work. So now, at least, I can follow these issues as a registered user instead of an outsider.

[robkelk]

Hmmmmm...

I don't know the work in question well enough, so I have to ask: is this edit in accordance with Rule 2 of the Policy for Wiki Staff?

[Bob Schroeck]

Outside of a couple character designs I'm unfamiliar with the work as well. That said, I can't see how rule 2 applies here. DocColress's comment on the edit is strictly about the criteria for a Complete Monster and makes no reference to any particular contributor, and the passage in question is Doc's own contribution from July 16, 2017. How does rule 2 come into play?

[robkelk]

I hadn't had time to look through the page history - I thought he might have been deleting somebody else's contribution.

False alarm, then.

[Bob Schroeck]

Guys, have I been demoted for some reason? I seem to have lost a whole lot of privileges, including the right to edit my own user page.

EDIT: Special:User Rights says I still have POWER UNLIMITED on the wiki, but something else is limiting it. I also note that I'm missing the Admin links... unless I'm on the user ban page.

EDIT 2: And I see Rob is affected by the same thing. Judging by Recent Changes it had to have happened somewhere between 4:34 and 4:44 Eastern time -- like, ten minutes ago.

[Bob Schroeck]

And it looks like it's been fixed within the last half hour or so.

[Bob Schroeck]

And the anonymous user at 100.40.35.61 is back, has dumped out two more WMG pages with insufficient markup and Every First Letter Capitalized, and has not replied to the existing admin message. He's getting the six-month ban I promised him at the beginning of the month.

[robkelk]

Is there still a technical reason why we aren't accepting new nominations for Featured Articles? The question arose in this thread.

Oh, and new User:Mohamed Saed appears to be upset that I referred him to the Forums for asking questions about the wiki and deleted the "Village Pump" page he created without asking whether the wiki needed yet another place for questions to be asked. I'll let somebody else decide what if anything needs to be done there.

[Bob Schroeck]

I've got some serious concerns about this guy. When I first spotted him just after his registration he'd already made changes to a few of the wiki templates -- nothing harmful, but damn if I don't get a feeling of entitled arrogance off this guy, like we ought to be grateful he's graced our pathetic wiki with his awesome presence. I also don't like the way he deals with people. I'm not inclined to cut him any slack.

[Bob Schroeck]

On a different topic entirely, I got an alarm off an @ping Rob put in a message. Maybe the alerts etc. are back?

EDIT: The Phabricator ticket hasn't been updated since I added an expanded description on the problem a week ago, so it's hard to be sure.

[robkelk]

FlowMention appears to work now, but other alerts are still iffy. That's why I'm pinging folks when I want to make sure they see my posts - which is usually when I have the Mod hat on.

[robkelk]

I do believe somebody *cough*Bob*cough* was looking for speech bubbles for the Speech Bubbles page. How close did I get using nothing but CSS?

EDIT: Yes, I did try putting the Deadpool example inside a little yellow balloon. It was a little too distracting, IMHO. RE-EDIT: So they went on Deadpool's own page instead.

[Bob Schroeck]

Mohamed Saed is acting like a dick. He put a post on SelfCloak's page basically demanding for his bot to be unblocked, acting like a petulant kid. And in a message he posted to LongRunner and then apparently deleted (or is maybe LongRunner's user talk page glitchy?), he wrote

LongRunner, I’m sorry that you got blocked. [[User:Robkelk|Robkelk]] can be bad sometimes. Don’t worry. Mohamed Saed at your service.

I think we need to ban this guy because he's a major asshole to the staff and seems to think he owns ATT and we're thwarting his god-given rights to do and say what he wants.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, folks, Mohamed Saed is starting to concern me. He's added a couple of javascript files (here and here) and a CSS stylesheet that have my username or Rob's in them, and while they look relatively harmless with a brief glance, I don't know what he thinks he's doing.