StrategyWiki:Staff lounge

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Welcome to all users! This page is where you can ask StrategyWiki-related questions to the staff and senior community figures, and they will do their best to answer. If you want to raise a topic for discussion (rather than just ask about it), please use the community issues forum instead. New issues are entered here, with the most recent at the bottom of the page. If your question does not pertain to editing StrategyWiki (e.g. asking for hints or game-specific information), please ask on the guide's talk page or on the forums.

Please review the Table of Contents to see if your issue has already been raised; also check the archives (to the right) in case it was discussed some time ago.

To facilitate ease of browsing and replying, please:
 * 1) Place your question at the bottom of the list.
 * 2) Title the question (by placing the title between equals signs: ==Title==).
 * 3) Sign your name and date (by adding four tildes: ~ ).

Hello
I am SyntaxTerror on Wikipedia, with about 15,000 editions and 102,000 with my bot.

I contributed mostly on Wikipedia.fr and a few on WP.en as my mother language is French. I speak English quite fluently.

I have a good knowledge of wikicode and templates. I can also use the bot AutoWikiBrowser and batch upload images with MultiUploader.

I created this account mainly to correct little mistakes and typos, but I may write some walkthroughs in the future. Feel free to contact me if you need help with templates or mass edits.

Regards, Şÿℵדαχ₮ɘɼɾ๏ʁ 23:00, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Finished Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen
It took a long time (perhaps too long, I went into hiatus for quite a while), but the guide is finished. All available Pokemon in the game are accounted for, and all secrets revealed. Props to Prod and Procyon for their advice and help.

It feels good to see this project end, and I look forward to starting a new guide soon! (perhaps KOTOR 2? There are rumors of it being exported to iOS, and so it looks like a good project to pursue.)

See you around!Orion35 00:17, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Congratulations, and thanks for all the hard work. If you feel that the guide is complete, please feel free to upgrade the completion status of the guide.  Simply edit the Header Nav of the main page and change the "num=3" to "num=4".   Pro  cyon  14:02, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Looks like it was the most popular guide last week! -- Prod (talk) 16:35, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Recent spam attacks
I have noticed a number of spam pages being created on StrategyWiki over the last few days. They are all attempts at SEO'ing the phone numbers of technical support scammers. While Procyon has been deleting the pages and blocking the users as they come up, this is at best a game of whack-a-mole, as the spammers can always create new accounts and/or pages until and unless something more stringent is implemented.

I do not know this wiki's politics too well, so feel free to rebut my suggestion, but will the something like Wikipedia's Edit filter work here? I see few legitimate uses for including phone numbers in articles (the only one I can think of is Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, which uses them as cheat codes). In that case, edit filters can be programmed to allow edits from certain users (such as admins) that would ordinarily be forbidden; Wikipedia uses this feature all the time to perform legitimate edits that were blocked only because they were attempted by a new user. Could this be considered? Although the spam is mostly hidden (I can only see it in the Recent Changes log), I don't want it to get any worse.

Thanks! Wjk (talk) 22:48, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Always open to suggestions! I've looked at mw:Extension:AbuseFilter and was considering installing it, but I'm not sure how hard it is to administer. Do you think we could do something with SpamBlacklist? -- Prod (talk) 03:08, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I have no administrative experience on Wikipedia (nor any editing experience there, either), so I cannot make a truly informed comment about how hard AbuseFilter is to administer. However, that being said, it shouldn't be that hard. The doc page for AbuseFilter that you linked contains cut-and-paste directions for how to install it, and best-practice guidance regarding permissions. In addition, I am professionally a computer programmer; to me, AbuseFilter syntax is incredibly easy. :) If you ever need technical help, feel free to ask. Unfortunately, SpamBlacklist won't work, as it can only filter actual links, not random text. For example, http://www.apple.com/ would be examined by the filter, but www.apple.com would always go scot-free. (Linkspammers on Wikipedia often take advantage of this deficiency.) Hope this helps! Wjk (talk) 23:28, 2 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the offer Wjk. We've taken the draconian step of preventing unconfirmed users from creating new pages.  It's not what we'd like to do, but it's definitely stemmed the tide of the attacks.  At some point, we'd like to turn that off and see if things go back to normal.  If they don't, then yeah, we'll have to adopt a measure like AbuseFilter.  Both Prod and I are programmers as well, so between the three of us, we should be able to get something going.  Let's see how things shake out over the next week or two and reevaluate then.   Pro  cyon  02:30, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
 * The installation itself isn't the problem, it's getting the filters configured and tested without impacting normal users. We also have MediaWiki:Titleblacklist which should work for page names. -- Prod (talk) 17:31, 5 August 2017 (UTC)