STOWiki talk:Admin portal

MediaWiki's RC Patrol Feature
...isn't very useful to us with default settings. Having all non-admin edits marked as unpatrolled just leaves us not bothering to use the feature at all, as we already know what users aren't admins.

I think we should ask Curse to tweak around the user right settings to make it actually helpful in identifying edits more likely to be trouble. Specifically:


 * We can set how long a user has to be registered to become autoconfirmed, as well as the minimum number of edits required.
 * By default, users become autoconfirmed immediately, so we'd have to decide on how much time and how many edits a new registered user must make before they stop getting the red ! next to their edits on recent changes.
 * Give the "autopatrol" right to the autoconfirmed group. This is what will stop the red ! from appearing next to their edits for us admins and actually make it useful to them.

Additionally, we could take this one or two steps further:


 * Create a user group called "patrollers" with the "patrol" right and promote trusted users to this intermediate level.
 * They would then also see the red ! next to edits by any un-autoconfirmed user and would be able to mark them as patrolled.
 * Alternatively, we could trust the entire autoconfirmed group with the patrol right. None of their edits will show up as unpatrolled anyway, not that the software allows one to patrol their own edits anyway.

At any rate, we gain one or two benefits from these changes, depending on how far we take it:


 * 1) At a minimum, edits more likely to be problems get flagged, making it more likely that somebody checks them.
 * 2) If we actually then flag good edits as patrolled, then only one person has to check the edit.

Note that these changes are helpful regardless of whether or not we enable anonymous editing. &mdash; Eyes   11:30, 31 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Good idea. I always wondered what the usefulness of the patrol thingy was. I'd go for trusting the autoconfirmed group with patrol rights. I dont think there is a need to cherry pick, and most contributors have demonstrated willingness to deal with spam or vandalism.
 * Also, thank you very much for looking into all this stuff Eyes. You're a real credit to the community. :) --Zutty 11:42, 6 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Your post made me realize that I consciously ignored the patrol feature up to now. I'd like to see it becoming more useful. I'd be careful about assigning explicit patrol rights to individual users for the same reasons as Zutty. Ideally, autopatrol would be assigned to userd which have 10 or more admin-approved edits under their belt (it there is a mechanism in MediaWiki to count that).
 * Zutty is right, I'll increase your salary by 10 Quatloos ASAP :-). --RachelGarrett 19:03, 6 November 2011 (UTC)


 * The only control we have over the automatic promotion into the autoconfirmed group is simple: we set a number of edits (no way to filter to specific edits, just how many they make) and an amount of time since registration. They become autoconfirmed when both happen; if there was a way to change it to "or", I didn't see it (and I prefer it as "and" anyway). My intention in the post above was mostly to describe what we could do; like Zutty, I really don't see any meaningful problem in letting autoconfirmed users patrol if they so wish as long as our thresholds are set reasonably well.


 * But just to play devil's advocate against myself, though, having a separate patrol group we have to assign manually would have the advantage of consciously showing trust and appreciation to longtime editors who have shown an willingness to step in and help new users and revert vandalism and spam. (Though then we have take care to not use it too arbitrarily, so that's a downside to that argument.)


 * Just to get the discussion moving toward deciding on the thresholds though, I'm going to throw out 30 days and 50 edits as the starting values. That might be on the high side, but I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that as long as we have settings as long as our trusted contributors are getting autopatrolled. I'm pretty sure just about everybody we trust already has hit both those thresholds. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 19:25, 6 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me. I like the idea of the group showing trust to our devoted editors, too. --Zutty 19:56, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Other opinions? Should we go ahead with this? Should we ask the community at large about this too, or do you think that isn't really necessary for this change? &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 12:19, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Pages "not found in the database"
Not sure how many of the admins will see this here, but I want to make sure this is out here.

Occasionally, on some of the larger and busier wikis, we've been getting the odd page that will suddenly not appear, giving an error message about "not found in the database" or something similar and asks the user to report it to an admin. This apparently happened recently with List of craftable items. We haven't been able to track down the cause, unfortunately, but there is a simple fix for specific instances. Simply delete and restore the page. &mdash; Eyes   05:18, 22 December 2012 (UTC)