Firefox add on and a look at spam on Fanlore

[facetofcathy]

Two things that might be of interest to Fanlore editors today:



Textarea Cache is a Firefox extension that:

...will save automatically the content in textarea or WYSIWYG editor when user is typing. User can recover the saved texts in the cache window, even the tab or the window is closed unexpectedly.

The user will see an icon in status bar when the text is saved in the cache. Click the icon will open the cache window.

It would be useful to add the Textarea Cache button in toolbar. This button can help the user for advanced settings or to open the cache window.

When editing Fanlore, the contents of the edit window will be cached by the program as soon as you start typing. Just opening an edit window to see the code, or even clicking in it will not cache the contents. I don't know how I've lived without this! I can't tell you the number of times I've lost all or part of my Fanlore edits because of my wayward clicking making me accidentally click a bookmarklet or the close tab button when I was aiming for something else.

H/T to this post.



I've noticed what looks like an uptick in the amount of Spam on Fanlore, and I wanted to see if my perception was correct. First I compiled (by the age old method of counting by hand, so there might be some small errors) the number of Users banned since June 2009 by month. I added the new users created for the same months and compared them.



Some things to consider:

The above chart represents 89 banned users out of 2,744 new accounts or 3.24%. Prior to June 2009, there were 1,079 accounts created with only one banned user. And yes, there has been a rise in banned accounts, a small one in absolute numbers, and there was a corresponding, but smaller jump in spam about this time last year as well. That big jump in August is as of this morning, so not even 18 days.


However, if you look at the percentage of new users that are spammers, the increase is much more clear.



Going through the User Creation Log, I noticed that for all months after June 2009, most of the users were red links, that is, they have no user page. Most of the volunteer editors at Fanlore do have a user page. Prior to June 2009, a much higher percentage of new users are editors who at least made a user page and may have edited a few pages or thousands of pages. But, it has always been true that the large bulk of new user accounts never edit a single page. It's impossible to tell how many of those accounts were potential spammers that never followed through with spam edits.

Spam is never successful at Fanlore. It is always caught by volunteer editors, and quickly disposed of. The accounts are rapidly banned by the administrators. This is for me one of the signs of how much Fanlore matters to the volunteers that create and maintain it. It takes our time, cleaning this up, but we will keep doing it.

Comments

[onceamy]

I actually, a while back, added a huge list of banned known spam IP addresses via script, which are not listed in the banned user page. It didn't seem to make a difference, however, because spammers are quick to reset routers, use IPv6 IPs and so on. One has to be conservative about banning people and mass-banning IPs, to avoid affecting legitimate users.

I also recommend Lazarus for form recovery. Works on Firefox and Chrome :)

[facetofcathy]

I don't think anything works to keep off spammers between the two extremes of make account creation by request only or leave it open and rely on regular users to clean up the spam.

So, I think we'll have to rely on volunteers loving it enough to keep on top of spam right now.

The creator of textareacache also suggested Lazarus for people who need password protection on their cache.