Talk:Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts/2024/July

Abuse filters

If an LTA from Chicago posts his rants on a small European wiki as an IP (easily switching to IPs from South America, Africa, South Asia), a good counter measure is to filter out IP edits on all his favorite topics, given that they're NOT coming from the wiki's +95% known IPs: our regular IP users can freely edit articles on stalin and rocky and...

If IPs will be discoverable only by clicking on each edit, there will be no way for me to analyze our usual IP ranges. He's smart enough to use private browsing, he can do all kinds of damage, so in this new scenario he wins. I have absolutely no idea how our abuse filters will work, given that most of them cover only IP (ab)users, who (luckily) represent the majority of our vandals. Is this being discussed? With emphasis on small(er)/nonglobal wikis? pon_or (talk) 17:21, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Hi. Apologies for the slower reply.

If you have the rights to see IP addresses for temporary accounts and also the rights to block users, you will be able to use Special:Block to see all the IP addresses used in the last 90 days by a specific temporary account.

Furthermore, we will be adding a special page that allows you to see the contributions made by all temporary accounts on an IP address in the last 90 days.

We are also updating AbuseFilter to add a variable for the IP address used by a temporary account. This variable will be restricted to filters that can only be viewed and edited by those with the ability to see temporary account IP addresses. This means that you will be able to continue to use filters that match edits made from ranges you identify as being nearly always problematic in specific topic areas.

Hopefully this helps, and if you still have unresolved questions please do ask. WBrown (WMF) (talk) 08:45, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

@WBrown (WMF): apologies, I wasn't notified of your response. No, this won't help. I'm saying that at the moment I have the ability to say from which ~cidr/12 ranges >95% of all my (small language) wiki anon edits come from, just by analyzing IP contributions in the last 30 days (which comes to about 1500 IP edits). The LTA uses some IP hopping technology that never puts him in those 95%, but some South American or African IP ranges. So the filter does not have to be too specific when it comes to the types of words, as the LTA knows how to avoid being caught, but can be very specific about where the edits should NOT come from.

I'm not going to be able to make the list of 1500 valid IPs any more (and figure out the very broad ranges), and we'll be exposed to this extremely annoying LTA again. Some people at WMF Legal will know who I'm talking about, I believe they had some court orders against him, which did not help. pon_or (talk) 02:01, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

@Ponor, thanks for the reply. I have raised this with the team. WBrown (WMF) (talk) 07:57, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

2 FR's opened

Not sure if these are enough to be considered 'bugs' or just feature requests so went with the later:

• phab:T370679 - dealing with the output when looking at ip ranges
• phab:T370676 - dealing with the "registered users" filter (bug?)
  • Merged in to bug phab:T370695. Xaosflux (talk) 14:46, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Xaosflux (talk) 17:22, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Newsletter

Could someone turn the updates into an Special:Newsletter? Aaron Liu (talk) 04:17, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I actually was considering this lately, especially since we'll post a new update today. Great idea @Aaron! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 16:57, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Lucky! I was actually considering it because someone added me to the graphs newsletter. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:09, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

I did, of course. :D I work with T&SP and the Charts group. The newsletter seems to be working pretty well with the Web projects, so I decided to use it for Charts, too. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 12:51, 27 July 2024 (UTC)