UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard/Archives/ConfirmAccount

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Suggestion

With the recent nonsense going on in the account creation, I was wondering if installing ConfirmAccount would be too much? I think that with CA and Oversight, the wiki should be pretty safe. We could also remove CA after awhile until some things chill off. Also, perhaps placing Administrator's, Patroller's, and established user's usernames in the blacklist could help. Thoughts? –Elliot ^talk 02:56, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Or as a less extensive solution, this could be used. –Elliot ^talk 03:00, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

How involved would this bureaucracy be? I'm all for preventing offensive user names, but this is a public site that focuses strongly on the community. If something like this is implemented, what sort of delays would there be for new users who truly want to help? I realise that something like this will be disscused at length, but I just thought I'd bring these concerns/thoughts up now. Also, a possible alternative, would there be some way to block certain keywords from being used? I don't know much about programming, and I do know that there are always workarounds, but something like that plus the second option Elliot mentions (preventing the same IP from creating multiple accounts) would, I think, at least cut down on inappropriate account creations. Oh, one other question. Would the second option affect the creation of sandboxes since they are part of the User namespace? Again, I know next to nothing about programming so I appologise if these questions are pointless in the context of this issue. -Dlarsh^{(Talk,Contribs)} 03:16, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

The ConfirmAccount can be used by whoever is set up to use it (bureaucrats, admins, patrollers, etc.), so you shouldn't have to worry about waiting (we could even have some special members use it); I just think this recent activity is a problem especially considering the content of the usernames. There is something called a blacklist that we use to prevent certain words in a username (such as Arch Mage, Gray Fox, etc.). No, the sandboxes wont be affected, since they are for account creation only. –Elliot ^talk 03:22, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure about ConfirmAccount. I share the above concerns about it being an obstacle for legitimate users. Also to the extent that this vandal simply wants to flood the logs with obscenities (and not actually use the accounts), I'm not sure it would be effective, in that the offensive names would still be logged. Blacklisting might be worth investigating, although probably still not effective in this situation (he'd just change one or two letters).

I have gone ahead and set $wgAccountCreationThrottle to 1 -- meaning only one account can be created from a given IP in 24 hours. I'll change the setting if that's the outcome of this discussion, but in the meantime putting some type of limit in place seems prudent as an emergency measure. --Nephele^Talk 05:31, 19 August 2009 (UTC)