Multiple blocks
This is my wiki
I have MediaWiki 1.16.0
PHP 5.3.6 (cgi-fcgi)
MySQL 5.5.17
Does anyone know of a quick way to do multiple blocks on spambot accounts? Everyday I block the new day's crop of spambots but this needs be to block every account individually, including setting block time etc. Is there a way to block a number of accounts in one go. Martin Hogbin 15:51, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi Martin,
I know there are several extensions which allow you to block single users, but I don't know an extension, which could block multiple users at a time.
I would try to solve the problem by preventing those spammers to register: Use ConfirmEdit to display a captcha on registration (and maybe also on editing pages, if they still should get through). --88.130.67.28 18:33, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for that. perhaps I should make clear that I am happy to block the accounts individually, I normally do this from the recent changes page, but I do not want to have to set up the expiry time etc every time. Is there any way that I can just click the 'block' link and it would perform a default block. Martin Hogbin 00:03, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi ho,
no, I do not know of a possibility to preset these values. (Well you could hack the MediaWiki soure code, so that the page always shows up with these values preselected, but 1. you don't want to do this and 2. this will only cure the symptoms and not the cause of your problem.)
According to your recent changes you currently spend 5 minutes a day in blocking spammers. This makes around 24 hours a year.
If I were you I would set up ConfirmEdit, which does not only solve the root of the problem, but also only needs a fraction of this time. --88.130.93.156 02:47, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
I am reluctant to use a capcha because some of our users find it hard enough to register as it is. Is there much harm in letting spambots register, I seem to have stopped them from actually spamming the wiki, it is just the noise that they add to recent changes that is the slight problem. Martin Hogbin 22:11, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
You could have certain options pre-selected via url parameters - http://mywiki.com/wiki/Special:Block?wpExpiry=indefinite will automatically make the expiry field be indefinite as an example.
If you want a one-click block button from the RC, the best approach would probably be to use JS combined with ajax (That of course requires some programming knowledge though - however its quite likely someone on some wikipedia already came up with such a thing, but i don't know of any off the top of my head).
