If we are going to use this at meta, then I believe this breaks downward compatibility. That's too bad, because I really like this solution.

How should this break downward compatibility? (Maybe my explaination was bad.)

[[mw:Extension:SpamBlacklist]] and the source code says that the URL for fetching the spam blacklist is:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spam_blacklist&action=raw&sb_ver=1

This is just the wiki source of the page and does not expand transclusions (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=raw in your favorite text editor). The character { followed by } is likely to make older spam blacklists spew errors.

Perhaps we can have a syntax like:

#SB_INCLUDE<page>

where the # conveniently comments out the line for those who can't understand it.

Then again, maybe spewing errors to get people to upgrade might be a good idea.

Oh, I didn't know that other (non-wikimedia) wikis use our sbl. Afaics this would be the only compatibility problem.

We could use a combination of our proposals:

#{{some transcluded page}}

So the first line of that transcluded page is ignored and could be used for a comment instead, e.g.

----%<----
please insert a space before each line
foo
bar
---->%----

Would that fix the problem, you mentioned?

Yes.

matthew.britton wrote:

Or you could start actually maintaining those blacklists, rather than merely adding a link every time it gets used for spam.

(In reply to comment #7)

Or you could start actually maintaining those blacklists, rather than merely
adding a link every time it gets used for spam.

The blacklists are maintained already. Maybe you want to discuss that in detail at the meta talk page.

This seems like a duplicate of bug 14322.

i'm not sure.
as we deleted a lot of superfluous entries in the last years, the sizes of the SBLs are now the same (meta: 290kB) or even smaller (w:en: 140kB) than 2010.
as computers got faster during that time, it might be a not-so-big issue right now. however, i don't know what the situation will look like in the next years.
at least i'd say that this issue is of low priority.