User talk:Thrace

In the context of obstruction
Why am I blocked from https://themys.miraheze.org site? I have not done any editing here. I hope you will reply. Thank you — Preceding unsigned comment added by SHEKH (talk • contribs) 08:16, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * We have had issues with vandalism and the creation of spam bots in the past. Since the wiki exists only to be used by members of the project and we were fearing another vandalism spree due a large uptick of users joining the wiki, we took measures to prevent it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Thrace (talk • contribs) 10:29, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You have the right to protect your wiki from vandals, because if I ever detected vandalism on your wiki (or on any wiki for that matter), I would've reverted them anyway with no issue. DarkMatterMan4500 (talk) (contribs) 13:07, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you for unblocking me on that wiki. I understand why you were randomly blocking users. You were only trying to protect the wiki from vandalism and spam-only accounts. DarkMatterMan4500 (talk) (contribs) 15:41, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * While I understand your reason, I think this was taken merely because you were not aware of other counter-measures you could take. Rather than take this rather strict and heavy handed approach, particularly considering users have no choice to opt out of their accounts being automatically added to wikis merely by visiting them, can I instead offer you several less drastic alternatives? Firstly, you could protect your wiki's  namespace at , requiring users to have had an account for at least four days and to have made at least ten (10) edits before they can edit in your wiki's primary namespace (the most common target for spam only accounts). Alternatively, could you consider enabling the Moderation extension? This is one of the most effective spam and vandalism thwarting tools in that all proposed edits by non-automoderated users go into a queue (via a special page) for moderators or administrators to review and approve or reject. There's even a heuristic learning algorithm that automatically detects and rejects known spam pages, too. Because these are proposed edits, they never count as contributions unless they are approved. As such, you would have a very good idea rather quickly who the spammers/vandals are and who are good editing users. Finally, another option to consider is to removing the   user right from the   user group on your wiki. This would prevent non-registered users from creating an account on your wiki, but since most spam only accounts create accounts on the wikis on which they spam, this would likely be quite effective as well, and you could direct your wiki's users to Meta Wiki to create an account. Let me know if you're open to trying those options. Thanks. Dmehus (talk) 16:17, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much for the suggestions, I will inform the other moderators of the wiki and we will certainly do something. The reason we resorted to such an approach to begin with was that we found out that users that didn't belong to any group were still able to edit articles despite our attempts to restrict it to confirmed users only. Most of us who work as moderators there have close to no experience with moderating a wiki so we were not able to find another solution at the time. Thrace (talk) 18:22, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, thank you. That sounds good. Keep me updated by replying and ping me on reply. If you'd like, I can take a look at your wiki's blocked users list and identify which ones are not, or not likely to be, spam only accounts and/or vandalism only accounts. Additionally, you may also find mh:themys:Special:AbuseLog on your wiki helpful for identifying most spam only accounts. They will usually hit the global anti-spam and external links on user pages abuse filters. If you find that you see lots of hits by such accounts, you can contact any  on your wiki (or via Stewards on Meta Wiki), and we can check to see if there is any open proxy or web host abuse by such spam only accounts for you. Dmehus (talk) 18:38, 5 January 2021 (UTC)