Help:Vandalism

From Homestar Runner Wiki

Revision as of 17:10, 18 November 2005

Here's how to help stop a troll.

1. To begin, you first must understand what a troll is. Take this quote from Wikipedia:

Trolling is deliberate and intentional attempts to disrupt the usability of a wiki for its editors, administrators, developers, and other people who work to create content for and help run that wiki. Trolling is deliberate violation of the implicit rules of Internet social spaces. It is necessarily a value judgment made by one user about the value of another's contribution.

2. So a troll is a person who puts bad things on pages, basically. How do you help prevent this sort of thing?

One way you can help is by going to the recent changes page, and looking doing the following:

• First of all, every edit on the page with a ! next to it has not been inspected yet.
• Click on the diff link next to an edit that has a ! next to it to see the difference between the two most recent edits.
• If the page is not trolling, then click the [Mark as patrolled] link next to the edit.

3. If there are so many ! signs that you can't possibly check them all, then look for these things:

• A new page, symbolized by a N, is important to check out.
• An edit made by an IP address, a red username, or a user name spoofing another user's name, needs to be inspected.
• An edit without a description is often made by a troll in a hurry. Check these out.

4. If the page you find is trolling, like if the page is blank, or if profanity has been added, you can revert the edit:

• While in the differences page, click previous diff and/or next diff until you find the most current non-trolled version.
• Click on the Revision as of 00:00 link above that version and click "edit" at the top of the page. Alternatively, you can find the last good version and click on it in the page history.
• Type "reverted trolling" or "reverted vandalism" in the edit summary. The shorthand for this is "rv/v".
• Save the page (without making any changes).
• Now the page is the version that you selected, in effect removing the troll edit.

5. Now it's time to add the troll's name to the wiki troll page, a list of all trolls.

• If the troll's name has already been added, then simply add the page you reverted under the pages defaced column.
• If the troll is not in the table, follow the instructions on the page to add the troll's information.
• Eventually, a sysop will delete any new pages made from the troll, and ban the IP address from editing.