Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam/2018 Archive Dec 1

COIBot and the spam blacklist log
COIBot is currently, in the 'free time' of the report saving module, backparsing the spam blacklist log, one wiki at a time. It turns out that one wiki is a humongous chunk of data, and that the bot spends quite some time before starting to parse reports again. Please be patient while this operation runs. The data is stored with the regular link additions, and the bots will then accessit in the same way as usual.

That likely results in certain parts of COIBot's reporting functions (on wiki and on IRC) to show strange results as some code may not understand how things are stored. I will resolve that later. --Dirk Beetstra T C 17:52, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

proctortrack.com
Multiple insertions and re-insertions at Proctor, no use for this link on Wikipedia. See also Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard regarding this user's promotional editing. Bri.public (talk) 19:21, 3 December 2018 (UTC)


 * to MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. --Dirk Beetstra T C 03:55, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Malformed LinkReport
WikiProject Spam/LinkReports/blackpinkblink.com I have no idea what happened here, but COIBot seems to have bugged and produced a malformed report. &#91;Username Needed&#93; 10:24, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Here as well []


 * the bug is deeper, and I actually don't understand why it still does that. What happens is that COIBot is picking up their own report (but not all, some of them!) as an addition, and the parsing of that results in some malformed pickups (it picks up '*. . ', which then get stored, and on refresh the bot reports itself (cascading then results to '*.*. . ').  Technically, the bot is told to ignore itself, but it seems to bug on that every now and then.  I'll try to dig into that.  --Dirk Beetstra T  C 10:47, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
 * (in the meantime I am doing some cleaning up). --Dirk Beetstra T  C 10:56, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Citation spammer
user making multiple spam additions multiple times:

ParticipantObserver (talk) 20:06, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
 * domain
 * Articles:
 * Gleb_Bokii
 * Robert_Fludd
 * Fencing
 * Venice
 * Carl_Jung
 * Carl_Jung

Multiple attempts to spam to the same two websites by two users with similar names
Domains

Users

Articles MrUnoDosTres (talk) 06:09, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Rocky Fielding
 * Canelo Álvarez

weberber
They only hit two articles. I've blocked the user for the name, but they may be back. - Donald Albury 18:02, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

CBS News on how to game us
This article may be a little a lot dated, and I don't want to bring it any more attention than I have to, but I'd like to bring a CBS News story about us to attention. Here's a link. In essence, it's a tutorial for corporate interests to change information on our site as they see fit while deceiving editors. It is instructed in the article to first create a WP:SOCK, and then to make a few innocuous edits to gain our trust, then proceed to make faintly negative changes to the target article to throw off spam patrol, and finally to go through with censoring negative information about the brand and post positive information. A tutorial to spamming Wikipedia. Thoughts? PrussianOwl (talk) 01:02, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
 * While someone following that tutorial would create a lot more work for us than your average spammer, it critically fails at step 5: You've now established your sock puppet as a credible and objective source for "true" information about your company. We've gotten a lot more strict about sourcing since 2007. Some established editor asserting something and possibly backing it up with a company press release would not fly. Anyway, I'm not how this discussion is actionable. -- Scott (talk) 05:50, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Maybe not the place but pointing out things like this benefits the less experienced of us. I came across this link on the Starbucks talk page and looking at the article although I can't see any obvious bad copy hidden it is readily apparent that the article has been loaded with lots of unimportant detail as suggested in point 3 Lyndaship (talk) 10:53, 28 December 2018 (UTC)