WikiIndex:Blocking and banning policy

Discussion

After staring at the red link to this page for a while, I grew suspicious that we aren't being real consistent in when and for how long we put down blocks on spammers. A cursory scan of Wikipedia's blocking policy suggests the notion that lengthy blocks on IP addresses is a little extreme. For reference I pulled up the blocking policies on a few other wikis: [1] [2] — User:Sean Fennel@ 14:19, 18 January 2007 (PST)

The Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Blocking policy is to block for 24 hours on the first incident, "longer for successive violations". Looking at Special:Ipblocklist and the WikiIndex block log, I see some people at WikiIndex think "infinite" blocks are appropriate. Some people at WikiIndex at WikiProject:Junking bots suggest 3 days for the first incident.

I think we need to balance 2 things:

• We need to make it long enough that we don't have to waste all our time cleaning up after spammers who continue to spam -- over an over again -- as soon as the block period is over. Because we don't want to become grumpy, overworked sysops.
• We need to make it short enough that people who would otherwise be fine, productive, upstanding members of our community, but accidentally make a questionable edit and are (accidentally?) banned by grumpy, overworked sysops, aren't driven away and lost forever. Would you stick around some place that, after you made some tiny little mistake, publicly posted signs accusing you of being a (gasp!) spammer and refused to take those signs down or even let you say anything in your defense -- not even "I'm sorry and I'll never do that again"?

Is there any way to objectively decide whether the "first block time" is too long or too short? --DavidCary 03:11, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

See also

• Spam Control Policy
• AntiSpamMeasures