User:K6ka/drafts/sims/Forum:Abuse filter policy

Community discussions Working silently behind the scenes of The Sims Wiki is a small army of around 40 or so abuse filters that do a variety of tasks, mostly to track down potentially problematic edits. In the past, they were used to stop vandalism, and some filters are still used to that extent today. Now, however, abuse filters are starting to take on the role they have on the English Wikipedia, which is to help track and tag edits that may contain problems or errors in them, even if made in good faith. One example of such a filter is the Nowiki tags filter, which tags edits that insert  tags. This filter was not intended to catch bad faith edits, but rather tags edits that may have contained unintentional errors introduced by VisualEditor.

Abuse filters are poorly documented on Wikia and are not really documented at all on The Sims Wiki. It is not an extension that is enabled by default on Wikia; it is only enabled on request and given to a wiki that has demonstrated a need for it. The Sims Wiki has had abuse filters for a long time now, and it is time we created a few pages on it and set a few policies.


 * Some things to consider


 * Abuse filters are maintained at Special:AbuseFilter.
 * Abuse filters are viewable by everyone (Unless they're marked as private, in which case only administrators can see them).
 * Abuse filters can only be edited by users with the  user right (on The Sims Wiki this includes administrators)
 * The abuse filter log can only be seen by registered users.
 * Abuse filters are coded based on a set of rules similar to C/Java/Perl. A list of rules can be found here.
 * When an incoming action matches the conditions/code in a filter, that filter is "triggered" and a number of actions can be taken. By default, the filter writes a log entry in the abuse filter log, and this cannot be turned off. A list of actions can be found here.
 * Filters can be useful, but they can also cause a lot of damage if used improperly. In addition, enabling too many complex filters can slow down the rate at which edits can be saved to the wiki.


 * Proposed abuse filter policy


 * All filters are to be made public unless doing so would either 1) Defeat the purpose of the filter; 2) Expose potentially harmful or unwanted material to the public; or 3) Allow a user engaged in long term abuse to study the filter and circumvent it.
 * Filters should not be allowed to automatically block or rangeblock users, nor should they be allowed to automatically revoke autoconfirmed status.