I think it would be a good idea if there was a “Troll Patrol” bot that patrolled for vandals, trolls, and maybe even spammers. It would notice constant edits by one person on a certain page that keep getting reverted, constant profanity by one person on talk and discussions pages, block usernames that are extremely similar to active users, and maybe even remove constant spam, add it to the blacklist, and block the user. If a user had been previously blocked, it would give them a longer block. Maybe during testing or its first few days it would be programmed to leave an automated message on the ANB instead of actually blocking users. Maybe there could be multiple bots that each patrol for their own thing. What are everyone’s thoughts?
system
2
This looks like a good idea…
Oliver
3
ehm… ehm… I think that’s exactly what admins do, and there’s a reason a bot doesn’t do it. It would be damn near impossible to tell the bot what exactly is vandalism, what isn’t, what profanity is, things like that. That’s why there are admins to block and RC Patrollers to notice.
Maniac
4
That basically sounds like making a few bots take over recent changes. I know Wikipedia has bots patrol but they work on such a larger scale than wikiHow does. I’m a proponent of bots on wikis to do some of the more troublesome or burdensome tasks but to almost entirely take over recent changes doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. Too many things could go wrong having a bot block users that the bot THINKS are vandals, among other things. If RC was always extremely high and users weren’t able to keep up then I might agree with this. However, since RC is rarely above a few hundred edits (unless a user’s patrols get pushed back, and those are usually taken care of quickly) I don’t really think wikiHow is having an issue keeping up with patrolling right now to require a bot to supplement the humans.
We don’t need to pay for another bot.
system
7
Can I swear in Klingon? Ghuy’!
After seeing the the copyviocheckbot thread
I pretty much take this idea back. I can’t imagine how long it would take to train a “Troll Patrol” bot.
Constant profanity is a blockable offense? Damn.
