Belegarth

Now that the Geddon has had a bit of a facelift, we're going to start addressing content issues. This will consist of a few key things:

• Spam eradication
• Category reorganization
• Navigation organization
• Removal of blank entries
• Removal of non-Belegarth related content**

**Content that is related to Belegarth related things (e.g., history of monster races, pages about pantheons, pages on history, pages on warfare, character/persona pages, etc.) will remain. Content that has no particular relation (e.g., the article on Flogging Molly) will be removed. If you want to link to these types of pages, please link to their actual Wikipedia page.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please post. If you have any ideas concerning any of the above topics, please share. The wiki is and will remain an open source project, and it doesn't move forward without the input of the community. We're just trimming the hedges.

I'll try to keep an ongoing log of changes and work that I'm doing on the Geddon and elsewhere.

Recently, on the Geddon, I:

• Deleted a bunch more spam pages
• Added a category for flagging pages for deletion. Pages that need to be deleted may now be flagged as such by adding [[Category:delete]] <blockquote>'''COMMENTS'''</blockquote> to the page, with the "comments" section being replaced with a brief explanation of why the page requires deletion.
• Restored Maddog's page that elaborates on the differences between the two military texts "The Art of War". The page was previously hijacked by a spam bot, and then blanked by a moderator. I rolled the page back to Sir Maddog's most recent edit, saving a resourceful and well written article.
• Deleted a few blank, redundant pages (e.g., people pages created with a misspelling, construction pages mirroring the more commonly linked ones, pages that had been consolidated, etc.)

On the realm map, I:

• Added Valley of Ashes to the realm map and accompanying data set

That's all for now. I'm pretty busy with school and work, but when I have time I'm tinkering here and there.

Geddon work:

• Began work on template pages for easy creation of new event, people, and realm pages.
• deleted unnecessary redirects.
• Began organizing event pages by creating singular subcategories for each event in the Events category, and further organizing individual event pages into those proper subcategories. E.g.: Category:Events-->Category:Oktoberfest-->Oktoberfest 1998. This will aid in decluttering high traffic pages, such as the "Events" category.

I've been going through and adding uncategorized pages to their appropriate category. Nothing big, but it's something.

Eradicated 500 spam pages today. They're mostly harmless, and hidden in User: pages, but it's another step towards a clean Wiki.

Thanks! Are these mostly older spam pages or have they been recently created?

Old. 2012 seems to have been the year of spam. Probably Rasheab's fault; * Hawaiians and their spam...

How obscure and random. I'm highly amused that I get randomly referenced though.

(But hey, I've killed thousands of spam pages over the years... a quick nuke button would be awesome, instead of the 3ish buttons it takes now.)

I was being punny, comparing SPAM postings to the canned meat, Spam. You're the only Hawaiian I'm familiar with, so I just threw out your name Also, of course, good work on the spam eradication.

I finished up a couple of templates for making Geddon pages, last night. These are simple copy+paste+edit pages that can help streamline making nice, easy to navigate pages. At this time, I have a template for events and a template for people pages. These can be found here.

Also, added Kamigawa to the realm map, and removed Wildlands.

I continue to be the bane of all things spam, and I'm considering a way to make a page to catalog specific materials that are known to be ill suited for equipment in our sport (e.g., the green stadium seat/kneeling pads from Menards). Not sure if that's necessary, or feasible.

The Geddon should now, at this time, be virtually free of spam. I finished off going through the hoard of spam User: Talk pages this morning, and did an external link search for the most popular domain tags (.com, .org, .net, .uk, .info). After taking a quick look through the "All Pages" section, I failed to find any of the telltale "enlarge your genitals today!" page headers. So, by and large, I think we're clear of spam pages.

Still spending time here and there organizing event pages, but I don't currently have any large projects on my plate for the Geddon, as my present focus is on updating realm information for the realms map.

Cheers.

I think the question might have been asked before but is there anything we can put in place to reduce the number of spam accounts?

This year, we've only had to deal with about a dozen spam accounts. All of the spam that I've been deleting was mostly from 2012, when we were getting hit with hundreds of new accounts every day. As far as deleting old spam accounts, I don't know how to do that, or if it is necessary at this point. Any new spam that comes in is immediately deleted, and the IP and account that it originated from banned. Between the lot of us, we're patrolling every edit that is done on the Geddon, and catching spam before it can take off.

If need be, if we get hit with a wave like we have in the past, we also have the ability to temporarily disable account creation and editing. Otherwise, I think the spam blacklist that was implemented and the improvements in Captcha locks have helped us out tons.

Did I catch what you were meaning, Kyrian?

I put in a number of spam blocking stuff some time back, and this seems to have stopped the influx we were seeing. As Thurat mentioned, most of it was simply removing stuff that had built up over the years.

Thurat wrote:
Did I catch what you were meaning, Kyrian?

Yuppers. Thanks for the information.