User:Veinor/Spam

If you're reading this, you're probably curious about how to fight spam on the English wikipedia. Some of the tools outlined here will also work on other wikis, but I edit the English Wikipedia to the exclusion of all others, so there. Anyway, I hope this helps!

Tool list

 * Access to IRC. If you don't know how to get on IRC, go to the IRC page on meta. If you're trapped behind a firewall, ircatwork.com is a open CGI:IRC program that will let you connect to any network. If you do so, I recomment you get an IRC cloak. If you can't get on IRC at all, then you're going to have some problems. Also, I recommend adding some script to your client that automatically changes bracketed links (such as this ) into something clickable, as you'll be seeing a LOT of those. They can be found at WP:SCRIPT.
 * Some way of doing text completion. For this, I personally use the textcomplete extension for Firefox. If you're using some other browser, I don't know what to do for you. Trust me, this is necessary for doing warnings.
 * Some way of automatic reversion. Edit Special:Mypage/monobook.js and include User:Veinor/monobook.js. Replace any occurrences of my name in there (other than the author!) with yours. If you don't know how to do so, see the script tutorial.

Now, we move on to the actual how-to.

How to remove spam
Get on IRC and go to irc.freenode.net. Join #wikipedia-en-spam and #wikipedia-spam-t. The former is where you'll be seeing the links being added, and the latter is the talk. The outputs from the link reporting bot contain (in order): the page that had the links added, a link to the diff, the user who did it, and the links added.

Check out the links, and if you think that it's spam, look at the diff and see whodunit (if you didn't know already). Load the user's talkpage and add a spam warning template. For example, if they added a link on Microsoft, you'd add ~ Don't forget to sign, and always make sure your comment is on a new line. If you're ever in doubt, just preview. If they've been previously warned, escalate the warning. However, if the previous warning is old, then I'd recommend starting over at level 2 (e.g., ). I generally go with 2 days old for registered users and 1 day for IPs.

After you've left the comment, go back to the diff page. Click 'spam' if it's spam, or 'vandalism' if it's vandalism that added a link. It'll revert all the edits (and give you an error message if someone else has edited since), and leave an appropriate edit summary. If that doesn't work, or if they've made legit edits as well, you have to do it by hand. See WP:REVERT for how to do hand-reversions.

What to do if they should be blocked
If the previous warning was level 3 or 4, and you think they should be blocked, go to WP:AIV and follow the instructions there to report them. Hopefully, an admin will look at that page, check the contributions to make sure that they're indeed a spammer and they've gone past their final warning, and block them.