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)
For minor offenses warnings should be given out the first time. Users who have been warned will certainly see the warning when they get a notice that they have new messages. A short block may be overlooked if the user did not try to edit during the block period. If an offense is repeated after a warning administrators can assume the user knew his/her behavour was unacceptable. Proxima Centauri 13:17, 11 July 2009 (EDT)
- Agree with proxima though spambots that are logged in should be blocked indefinitely but anon spambots have to be checked to see if they are open proxies or zombie computers and if they are, they should be blocked for a maximum of 1 year but if that IP has similar problems on all the other major wikis out there, block should be extended to 3 years as a safe precaution...--Comets 01:12, 12 July 2009 (EDT)
- The key is to not be a target of vandals. Then there are the spambots, which are obvious, I would hope. Block them forever, or for years. PC is right, a short block might go unnoticed by a real person editor, a warning makes more sense. Do you guys get a lot of wandalism here, or just random botting/trolling? At Rationalwiki we really don't much wandlalism, a few trolls, I guess, but mostly no one harasses a wiki that has lots of active editors/sysops (we sysop everyone, pretty much). OK, maybe it's because we're a fairly cool site, trolls prefer to attack loser sites. But it might really be because we are active enough that trolls/spammers see they'd be wasting their time. Hope I helped in some way. Huw Powell 06:23, 12 July 2009 (EDT)