Semi-protection level for pages

Know The Staff and Fallen Creator are already locked.

Yes. I mean switching over to the new locking system. And for the record, so are the Mass Effect 3 subpages.

There are a lot of articles on Locked Pages that could be switched over to protected mode. Anything where the lock reason was edit warring or troll magnet, for example.

Oh this will be awesome, thanks. I'm tired of that Mass Effect vandal (heh he even got my own article locked). By the way he seems to frequent Internet Counterattack and the Videogame part of Internet Backdraft now. Oh and our forums

Final Fantasy VII comes to mind. Locked because of a freaking Ship-to-Ship Combat edit war, geez...

To be honest, I never thought to use this semi-protection for edit warring unless it was all newcomers doing the warring.

To take semi-protection a bit further, I wonder if it would be possible to set it globally throughout TV Tropes in case of extreme vandals attacking pages at random instead of pages related to a similar subject. An example is this vandal, who may be the notorious ''Mass Effect 3'' vandal or someone pretending to be him. He hit about 130 random pages in the span of 13 minutes on May 26th.

No, that's not the Mass Effect vandal. We know who he is.

That wouldn't be any help. It would only be applied once a mod was online, and when a mod's online, they can just ban the vandal. Having it permanantly would be a very bad idea since we'd get effectively no new productive editors.

Wait, that guy came back again? Wow. I thought he was done.

Anyway, I'm in agreement with what Telcontar said above. Only a mod could activate it, and if a mod is online to turn it on, they're also online to ban the vandal. No point, really.

Any luck on testing/implementation this weekend, boss?

Eddie did put in something to protect against vandalism from new accounts that is not the thing we're discussing in this thread. Clearly I can't give all the details, but it should deter major assaults.

Yay! Thank-you, Fast Eddie — it'll be a great help!

EDIT: Nevermind, I'll assume that there's no actual semi protection (yet), but just a deterrent.

edited 3rd Jun '12 5:51:13 PM by JudgeSpear

We were discussing a time lockout, right? Could a three day period where new accounts cannot edit, post or take part in discussions at all be implemented? Even with semi protection trolls could still attack the site this way.

That sounds incredibly extreme, and would probably discourage lots of new accounts, especially if they didn't know how long it was for. New accounts can be very productive, and we dont' want to lose them. Trolling isn't a big enough problem to justify that, and the Overlord has already put in another measure.

Agreed. That would probably be far too much of a damper on new account.

Fair enough. Not sure how far into the coding this is but with new accounts being deterred because they cannot edit in mind, if you can go into it would there be a way to select which pages would be protected from editing by new accounts? Something similar to the lock except it wouldn't stop established members from editing.

That's what this thread was about in the first place: a way to lock pages from editing by accounts tagged as new.

Yeah... kinda the whole point of this thread. I think Eddie has something implemented to that effect; brand new accounts cannot edit certain pages that have... controversy.

Sure, but if the staff can discuss it how would we go about choosing which pages are locked to new accounts? Would it simply be a case of those where we've had trouble?

For that matter, what would that mean for locked pages? Would this sort of replace locking pages?

To the first point, yes, that's the most likely course of action. Newbie-locking those pages that see the most vandals would save a lot of headaches, like Mass Effect 3, various Administrivia pages, My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, those sorta pages.

As to the second... that's actually a good question.

edited 4th Jun '12 4:24:40 AM by battosaijoe

I wouldn't say so. Some of the most problematic pages that required locking (Five-Man Band, Complete Monster, The Übermensch) aren't locked because of new account ban evaders, they're locked because people keep messing them up and cause edit wars. Locking doesn't exist just to prevent vandalism.

To the best of my knowledge, we have not implemented newbie-locks on pages. We've just put in a separate mechanism to make vandalism sprees more difficult. "Newbie locking" is on the to-do list but is not yet implemented.

edited 4th Jun '12 8:31:16 AM by Fighteer

Will this new mechanism also make it more difficult to go on ptitle killing and namespacing sprees?

I mean, when I really get down to brass tacks on namespacing, I'm making close to two hundred edits an hour, and I'd like to not get treated as a vandal because of it...

If you have an established account, you should not need to worry about it.