User:AP 499D25/LTA Tracking/Xselant

Comprehensive edits analysis XTools Timecard

Xselant is a user from UK (approx. Northern Ireland) who was blocked indefinitely in August 2022 for edit warring and personal attacks.

Since Xselant was blocked, they have went on to create 8 sockpuppet accounts as well as use at least six different distinct IP addresses/ranges (as of March 2024) to evade blocks on their original account and continue pushing disruptive edits on various articles.

Topic interests
Xselant's topic interests may seem vast and wide-ranging at first, but upon a closer look, their interests are actually quite narrow and rather specific:


 * Computer hardware and technology, especially from AMD (such as RDNA (microarchitecture), Zen 4, Ryzen; Raptor Lake, Sapphire Rapids, GeForce 40 series)
 * Actors and actresses (such as Danny Ramirez, Britt Baron, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Sabina Higgins)
 * Politics and politicians (such as George Santos, Nancy Pelosi, Vente Venezuela, Oulu (parliamentary electoral district))
 * Video games and books (such as Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, The Light We Carry)
 * Movies and TV series (such as Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, The Distinguished Gentleman)

Keep in mind these are not strictly the only topic areas they edit in; they do edit closely and loosely related topics as well, but these are the common topic areas the user edits in.

Common behaviour

 * Prefers templates over HTML tags for non-breakable spaces,  instead of , sometimes outright replacing existing tags with templates (example 1, example 2, example 3)
 * In citations, they write the parameters in a very specific order like how you see it in reading view, i.e. lastname, firstname, date, title, url, name of source, access date (example 1, example 2)
 * In existing citation templates, they will reorder the parameters of the cite template, add spaces before, as well as "align" the format of the dates to the rest of the article (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4)
 * Adds "Use ___ English" and/or "Use ___ dates" templates to the topic of the article if they aren't present already (example 1, example 2, example 3)
 * Bypasses links to redirects, i.e. turns them into piped links that link directly to the target article (example 1, example 2, example 3)
 * Hardly ever uses the edit summary (or often blanks it if there is a pre-filled one as in the case of the "undo" feature)
 * They "silently" make major changes to articles as a result
 * When an edit they make is disputed, they usually revert it back to their version, often without an explanation (or even with a blank edit summary)
 * They may attack or harass editors that they disagree with
 * Their English is of a very high, native-like quality

Accounts

 * (Aug 2022)
 * (Sep 2022)
 * (Nov – Dec 2022)
 * (Dec 2022)
 * (Dec 2022 – Jan 2023)
 * (April 2023)
 * (April – May 2023)
 * (Nov – Dec 2023)
 * (Feb – Jun 2024)

Involved IP addresses and ranges

 * (June – Oct 2022)
 * (Nov 2022 – Dec 2023; blocked 1-yr until Dec 2024)
 * (Dec 2022)
 * (Feb 2023; Colocation webhost (Hetzner), 176.9.0.0/16 globally blocked 5-yrs until Feb 2028)
 * (Nov 2023)
 * (Feb – Jun 2024; blocked 1-yr until Jun 2025)

Likely unrelated user with similar behaviour
For a brief few months of time between late 2023 and early 2024, some Algerian IP addresses were heavily editing various computer hardware articles, displaying some behavioural similarities to Xselant, such as:
 * Preference of templates over HTML tags for line breaks:  instead of   (example)
 * Bypassing links to redirects, using piped links (example 1, example 2)
 * Obsession of spacing in source code (example)
 * Obsession of things "taking up too much space" in tables (example)

However, there are also some stark habitual differences that strongly suggest that it is not Xselant:
 * Use of VisualEditor ('Visual edit' tags)
 * Exclusive focus on computer topics
 * No adding/reordering of cite template parameters in a very specific order, no aligning citation dates, no addition of language parameters
 * Very untidy addition of infobox parameters (example)


 * List of IP addresses/ranges:
 * (Oct 2023 – Apr 2024)
 * (Oct 2023)
 * (Dec 2023)
 * (Feb 2024)
 * (Feb 2024)
 * (March 2024)
 * (March 2024)
 * (March 2024)
 * (March 2024)
 * (March 2024)
 * (March 2024)
 * (March 2024)
 * (Sep 2023 – Apr 2024)
 * (Dec 2023)
 * (Dec 2023)
 * (Feb 2024)
 * (Feb 2024)
 * (March 2024)
 * (Dec 2023 – Apr 2024)
 * (Dec 2023)
 * (Dec 2023)
 * (March 2024)
 * (Oct 2023 – Apr 2024)
 * (Oct 2023)
 * (Jan 2024)
 * (March 2024)
 * (Jan 2024)
 * (March 2024)