The World Ends With You
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The World Ends With You

Introduction[]

Vandalism is intentional damage to a wiki article, such as inserting jibberish or deleting useful information. The usual scenario is that the vandal uses an anonymous account, damages a few articles, makes no useful contributions and leaves. In that case, the user receives a one-year IP ban, without warning. Other situations are reviewed individually.

Sometimes, an article is damaged by mistake if a new user tries out editing without realizing they're messing up the wiki, or someone has incorrect information and relies on it to change an article or in another similar, accidental situation. These are not cases of vandalism, but honest mistakes. In these cases, please repair the damage if you can, and if you have the time, please leave a friendly and helpful explanation on the user's talk page to help avoid similar problems in the future. Please report such cases, just so that we can think of ways to provide better help to new users, etc.

It would be nice to announce this page in the news section on the main page, but doing so would invite vandals, since they like the challenge. So this page will remain half-hidden in this weird location.

How To Find[]

Often, you will see vandalism just during normal browsing. But if you have a few extra minutes, there are more things you can do:

  • Various Recent Changes tricks
  • Sign up for RC RSS feed using this URL (use any RSS reader, like Google Reader or FreeDemon)
  • Perhaps check the "hide logged-in users" button, to see only anonymous user contributions (vandals rarely register)
  • Click on the "diff" link to see what the contribution was
  • Join anti-vandalism IRC channels (Java IRC access here and general access instructions here)
  • #countervandalism -- to ask questions, etc.
  • #cvn-wikia-twewy -- to watch for real-time list of suspicious edits (note: 99% of them are false alerts)
  • If you know the IP or username of a suspected vandal, go to Special:Contributions and search for all edits by that user
  • If things get worse, ask Wikia staff what other anti-vandal tools are available for us

What To Do[]

When you find vandalism, please do the following:

  • Fix the vandalism you noticed
  • Check the page's history to see the account name or IP address of the vandal
  • Click on "contribs" link next to the vandal's user name / IP address to see what else he did
  • Most likely the other edits were also vandalism, so please correct what you can
  • Please always report the vandal, so that IP ban can be issued
  • If any of the vandal's edits could not be fixed, please mention it
  • Do not leave any messages on the vandal's talk page; this might encourage them to reply, which probably means more vandalism
  • The admin will leave a message for the vandal using the {{Vandalism}} template after the user is banned

If the admins are absent for a long time, you can check any vandalism reports (at the page where they should reported), and ask Wikia staff to ban the vandals. To contact Wikia staff, use IRC channel or the contact form.

History[]

As of May 11, we have had only two known cases of vandalism. Both times the culprits were anonymous users, and each of them made three or four changes (inserting swear words, replacing words with jibberish, etc.). Neither of them made any positive contributions. In each case, editors noticed and fixed the problem within a matter of minutes. Each of those users is now banned from the wiki for a year. Of course, it is always possible that some vandalism remains unnoticed.

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