Guild Wars 2 Wiki talk:Autoconfirmed users

Crap, forgot to log back in after checking the signup URL - the IP that created this page was me. Anywho, the reason I created this page was mostly so that the requirements would be explicitly documented and I wouldn't have to worry that I was remembering them wrong. I asked Justin Lloyd to check the wiki configurations, and he told me:

$wgAutoConfirmCount is 10 for both English wikis and 15 for the three non-English wikis.
$wgAutoConfirmAge is 3 days (3  * 24 * 3600 seconds) for the DE wiki and 1 day (24 * 3600) for the rest.

—Dr Ishmael 16:16, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Don't worry. :) I thought that the full method was a bit complex, and the wiki formatting a bit too perfect, not to mention too well informed for a first edit by a new user :P -Chieftain Alex 16:27, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

I has a confus

Why have a limitation (number of edits) and tell everyone a way to circumvent it (mass edit own user page) ?

Would it not make more sense to require three edits outside the userspace or something? Khenmu 04:16, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

My guess is it's primarily to stump bots. Bots rarely (if ever) manage 10 edits without tripping our filters, even on their own userpage. It's a simple requirement to meet for any "legitimate" users and another hoop for bots to jump through. Also depending on a person's level of wiki knowledge, a brand new editor might not know enough to make productive main space edits, preferring instead to fiddle around on their own page - and if we force them to make 3 unproductive main space edits, that's just more mess for other people to clean up. -Auron 05:05, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense. I hadn't thought of the filters. Thanks. :) Khenmu 05:07, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

The only two requirements that MediaWiki can place on autoconfirmation are on account age and edit count. So if a spammer really wanted to get around it, they wouldn't have to know the exact details - they'd write bots to wait progressively longer periods of time and/or make progressively more "innocuous" edits until they were able to become autoconfirmed. —Dr Ishmael 05:49, 1 March 2015 (UTC)