Subject: You know, I wonder why these things happen.
Author:
Posted on: 2023-12-02 04:10:28 UTC
Was it intentional trolling, or an attempt to interact with the community without knowing how it works? Shame we'll prolly never know, but it's interesting food for thought.
The page for Luxury is vandalized and every single revision of it is overwritten, so I can't revert the change. The question is how did this happen? How can someone just retcon the entire history of a page?
These are low edit, but high vandalism articles (relative to our overall pretty infrequent vandalism). For example, the "How to Make a Character Page" article has been vandalized several times now. I don't think it will hurt anything to restrict editing those types of pages to admin-only. Updating them in any major way is probably a matter for community discussion first, anyway.
(Before anyone asks, we probably are moving at some point and we will have more options to choose from then, but I don't intend to discuss that further until after the holidays. {= P )
~Neshomeh
The following pages are now admin-only:
Additionally, based on past history, "Protectors of the Plot Continuum" may now only be edited by auto-confirmed users. We'll see if we need to bump that up to admin-only later.
Now we wait and see what the spammers do next. I admit I'm legitimately curious—I mean, maybe there will be some kind of pattern to detect; could be good info!—but I hope I have to wait a long time to find out.
~Neshomeh
I'll just add that I am on board with this.
--Ls
Which I discovered by going to Agent Kaguya's page. I don't know if I should be scared or be happy that something I wrote is vandalized for the first time XDDD
I've just rolled it back, problem solved.
hS
Was it intentional trolling, or an attempt to interact with the community without knowing how it works? Shame we'll prolly never know, but it's interesting food for thought.
For starters, you kinda have to know where to look to find a template page. It's not something a casual search will show you. I also don't think it's random that they overwrote the most-used infobox on the wiki.
Second, they added several lines, one of which was "Favorite food: burger." I've seen that before, whether just "burger" or "cheeseburger." It seems to be some kind of troll meme? I don't know why, but it's a definite pattern.
And finally, in this particular case, I actually blocked this account last month for the same behavior. They came right back and did it again as soon as the block expired, having made zero attempt to communicate with anyone.
Overall, this is not the behavior of a person acting in good faith, so the block is now indefinite.
Why this form of trolling and why us, though—those are questions I'd love to have answered!
~Neshomeh
I do wonder why. Is it because random netizens see "oh, look, they have OC pages" and decide to make their own? Or are they trying to make a point about how "see, look, their wiki sucks, too. Their OCs are bad too!111". The former seems more likely to be genuine, whereas the latter is definitely trolling.
I wonder if it's the same person who keeps doing this under multiple accounts, or at least if it's something done by the same person multiple times.
--Ls
while pages for other HP characters aren't.
Trolls are not known for their stellar views on gender.
With multiple accounts, solely hating Hermione, for weirdly personal reasons. Not saying that couldn't be it, but I don’t think that's the only reason someone would repeatedly vanadalize a wiki page.
--Ls
Also, why is the top search term on the wiki "Loli"? Whyyy
I also think it's someone with a very weird, sad, personal grudge, and I hope someday they get help resolving their issues.
Re. "Loli," beats me. We had someone(s) determined to correct our explanation of the term for a couple years, too. I had to edit a topic I don't care about at all to explain that sometimes, two words that share a stem end up shortened the same way. As if English doesn't do that all the time. Sheesh.
~Neshomeh
and I apologize for making this discussion longer than it should be.