Summary

The number of active bureaucrats / moderators appears to be 1. 2!Property "Summary" (as page type) with input value "The number of active bureaucrats / moderators appears to be 1. 2!" contains invalid characters or is incomplete and therefore can cause unexpected results during a query or annotation process.

Discussion

Of the listed bureaucrats and moderators, it appears that only 4 have been active in the past year and only 2 (including Short Circuit) in 2016.

Don't get me wrong Rdm is doing a great job cleaning up after spammers, but he seems to be the only bureaucrat logging in regularly lately.

Please appoint some new bureaucrats / moderators, or at least set up a low permissions user group that can do a 24 hour editing block on users who are spamming the site until a higher perms user can make a decision on what to do. There have been several occasions in the past few weeks where I was actually logged on the site while a spam attack was in progress but could do nothing to stop it or even slow it down other than delete page content and mark the page for removal. Meanwhile the spammers continued to just make new pages. Very frustrating.

For what it is worth, I would volunteer for such a role. I have been active on the site for over 5 years and have made hundreds of edits so I have a track record. Thanks. --Thundergnat (talk) 18:00, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Turns out I have sufficient rights to bump up your privs, so I'm making you an admin. Thanks for the efforts. Let me know if you (or other helpful folk) need further rights. Thanks again. --Rdm (talk) 09:45, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the vote of confidence. It is very satisfying to be able to actually shut down the spammers. I know AndiPersti has expressed interest in helping with spam in the past. (See the bottom of your talk page.) Horsth has helped by marking pages as spam on occasion. I don't know whether (s)he would be interested in doing moderation though. --Thundergnat (talk) 20:36, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

If you need another helping hand I'm still interested. --Andreas Perstinger (talk) 06:35, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm not interested in getting moderator.I thought, marking as a soon as possible as spam, would keep spammers from doing so.But would it be not much easier to filter the title of a new created site after spam-buzzwords like "phone" "support" "800" "+1" "001" etc and let those site to be approved by one of the admins? --Horsth

That would not deal with PH0NE, *p*h*o*n*e* and so on... That said, currently, we're doing just fine, though it probably is worth thinking about how we are going to deal with the next attack. Just having more people ready to stand against them helps, of course.

From a wikisoftware point of view, the tools I was wishing for had to do with making it easier for me to clean up the mess, and making it harder (but not impossible - impossible is impossible to achieve, and a waste of time - also, people make mistakes even if they are administrators) for them to spam us. For example, it would be great if I could just delete a user and have all their contributions removed also. This would need some limitations (exercising that against a useful contributor would be awful, and more than once when I was looking at user contributions and seeing a bunch of spam pages at the top, I belatedly noticed that these were "marked as spam" edits, that would have been bad...). Still, the pattern seems to be that spammers use throwaway accounts (they kind of need to, since they are dedicated to making their welcome go away), so something focussed on removing history from recently created accounts would probably be a good thing. --Rdm (talk) 14:29, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

In my opinion the key to fighting spam is to move the burden of effort towards the spammer. The only way I can see that happen is when we disable automatic account creation and invite serious new contributors to drop us a line or meet us for a chat session. There are only a handful of serious new contributors per month, I think, the others are bogus, so the burden for admins would likely be less. Making regular contributions to Rosetta code will take many hours. Surely a serious contributor should be willing to deal with a small threshold. Fwend (talk) 14:45, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Maybe have prospective members submit a solution to one of the tasks by form so that we can have a quick look at it before their account is enabled. This should be easy for a serious contributor because that's what they intend to do anyway, but quite a burden for the spammer. Fwend (talk) 15:04, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Is it known why the other 2 admins, Paddy3118 and Mwn3d, are not active? Fwend (talk) 14:18, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

I presume they are busy. Contributing here is a voluntary activity, and sometimes people need to deal with other things. I know I've gone and been busy elsewhere sometimes for months at a time. Real life is like that sometimes... --Rdm (talk) 14:29, 12 March 2016 (UTC)