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Build a proper system to allow local wikis to control 'Thanks' spam
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Description

Background

T169268: Limiting thanks for new users at pl.wikipedia chronicles a long-term problem of a known troll who abuses the Thanks feature to harass users by bombarding them with notifications. A daily maximum of 3 thanks was put into place for non-autoconfirmed accounts for several months, but was rolled back because the solution was intended to only be temporary.

This ticket is to build a proper long-term solution to address this problem.


Ideas

  • Re-implement the daily maximum, make it administrator customizable via MediaWiki message
  • Bundle Thanks notifications & emails (from new users
  • Ability to mute (certain?) notifications from non-autoconfirmed users
  • Allow the thanks, but build a notification/logging system when someone spams it so the abuser is more quickly identified and addressed
  • Allow thanks to trigger AbuseFilter filters

Event Timeline

I think the existent RateLimit Mechanism is enough to deal with this situation. Nevertheless, an extension to allow sysops to set RateLimits dynamically would be really interesting for Non-WMF-Wiki, perhaps something for MediaWiki-Stakeholders-Group .

Is someone working on this? It's a bit urgent, LTA and vandals are currently abusing this feature to harass users.

This should be global, not local, if the vandal is blocked on one wiki, they will go to another wiki with more permissive settings and if the user being harassed has interwiki notifications activated, this won't resolve the problem...

@Thibaut120094, can you report any new case with links, so we can know the frequency of those attacks? Thanks.

The WMF's Anti-Harassment Tools team is not working on this now, we are working on other projects. If needed, T169268 could be carried over to more wikis.

If needed, T169268 could be carried over to more wikis.