MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist

TitleBlacklist Glitch?

In my quick tests, Mediawiki:Nocreate-loggedin doesn't seem to be getting used when TitleBlacklist blocks page creation for a logged-in user -- unlike Mediawiki:Nocreatetext, which is being shown by TitleBlacklist, but only for anonymous editors. It's possible that this is just a short-term caching issue, given that sometimes MediaWiki page changes don't take effect immediately. But it looks more like a bug... which I'll look into fixing so that we can give editors some more meaningful feedback when their page-creation requests are blocked. --Nephele^Talk 16:58, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

FWIW, I get the same: logged out I get the help message but logged in I get the standard TitleBlacklist message. I suppose MediaWiki:Titleblacklist-forbidden-edit could always get the extra code, but that would be a bit inelegant. rpeh •T•C•E• 17:07, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

After digging around in the code, I've made a bit more sense of this. The page that appears when a user is blocked from creating a page contains a list of all the reasons why the page was blocked. So anonymous editors creating a Skyrim page get two messages: one message generated by TitleBlacklist, and a second message because anon editors can't create any pages. Logged in editors are only being blocked by TitleBlacklist, so they only get that one message. Nocreate-loggedin would only show up if the site's permissions were changed to prevent logged-in editors from creating pages across the entire site.

Then I (re-)discovered that TitleBlacklist does have built-in mechanisms to allow a custom error message to be displayed for any rule -- using the errmsg parameter. We've used errmsg in the past, but I think we've been misusing it slightly. errmsg really wants to be given the name of a mediawiki message page (i.e. errmsg=titleblacklist-skyrim). It's not a disaster if errmsg is directly given the text instead -- it just results in the text being surrounded by <...>. But having figured out the slightly better way of doing things, I figured I'd take advantage of it.

The one remaining question at this point is the message shown to anonymous editors creating Skyrim pages -- they are now going to be told twice that they should go to UESPWiki:New Page Requests. There are two different reasons being provided, so I'm inclined to leave things like that instead of continuing to obsess over this minor problem. --Nephele^Talk 03:03, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

As proof that I can't stop obsessing... I added errmsg=titleblacklist-spam for all the various spam-blocking rules. Just on the remote chance that a spambot-operator reads the message, I'd rather not have them be told exactly what they need to change in order to allow their spam to get past our filter. Of course, anyone can view this Titleblacklist page, so the rules aren't exactly secret -- but finding this page takes a bit more legwork on their part. I also opted to not include a link to the New Page Requests in the titleblacklist-spam message, on the assumption that most of those pages aren't ones that there would ever be a legitimate need for. Now hopefully there won't be a Skyrim quest named "Find the 3 buyers" or some other string that just happens to trigger the blacklist. --Nephele^Talk 03:27, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Phone Numbers

It's a little telling that it's only come up now, but I was blocked from giving a warning to a recent racist vandal's ip by the phone number entry. The last time I created an IP user page was June 2018, and the modification to the entry was August 2018. It's blocking all user and user talk pages with an IP for the name. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 00:11, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

I removed the check for periods altogether since I couldn't think of a better solution. It should still be mostly effective. More important that a nearly infinite number of valid page titles are able to be created by users without the override. Let me know if it worked. —Dillonn241 (talk) 15:45, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

You could probably do some more complicated regex to catch those, though I don't think I've ever seen anyone attempt that particular form of spam. (If nothing else, you could always just separate phone numbers with spaces...) — TheRealLurlock (talk) 15:54, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

That's fixed it. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 16:04, 7 July 2019 (UTC)