Urgent: Don't starve wikia is currently being vandalized

[me real life]

"Don't feed the trolls" is an attitude that should be applied when, for example, someone is in a chat room pretending to misunderstand the conversation to get people upset at them. Or when someone on reddit is trying to bait you into getting angry over their opinions on video games. Or when someone in a Discord server is being unruly and rude to get a reaction out of someone over something that ultimately doesn't matter. Or any other silly scenario like that, where someone's just being a jerk and you can forget about them within a couple minutes.

Where shouldn't "don't feed the trolls" be applied? Well, maybe a situation like this where someone is pulling out incredibly skewed, inaccurate, and grossly transphobic suicide statistics on a website that's meant for information about a video game. Just silently ignoring someone and reverting their edits is fine when it's just some silly troll doing something dumb but harmless in the long run, but you've got to do more than just that when it's someone spreading actual hate. You've got to call attention to it and make sure that everyone knows it's not acceptable, and that you're not going to have a good time in this community if you genuinely believe the kinds of things that are being spread by whoever this is.

You can't approach everything in life like a gamer.

[ADM]

44 minutes ago, Viktor234 said:

I see you are trying to encourage the forumers here to fight against the griefers in the Don't Starve game Wiki who vandalize the whole wiki with wrong data or with racism and homophobia.

No, because the only ones who have actions to take on internet are the one with permits in their own domains, in this situation, admins from the wiki.

Knowing this I don't have to explain to forumites how to behave about an individual (mostly cause we can't do nothing more than supporting the wiki staff for their reaction or disclaim this guy), but that's what you're doing by encouraging us to be silent on the topic... here again we just post personal opinions while you're trying to explain why we're wrong... I'll just refer to Skye's post on what I think of it.

44 minutes ago, Viktor234 said:

And while doing that, you're also lovely supporting the griefers in their work!

You have Lakurius support on the question, it says long enough on who's supporting who. No offence, Lak.

 

Spoiler

44 minutes ago, Viktor234 said:

In other words: "Where's the fun in bullying other peoples? There's no fun in there because other peoples might become sad. The bullies should stop doing that because it's not fun at all!"

Plus, I don't like being reinterpreted like if I was cringe. I'm not going to say you're griefing my post but...

[Zillvr]

To everyone concerned about this situation, as far as I can tell based on the Recent Changes page of the wiki things are being managed by the admins.

Those who can help and wish to help the WIKI admins, do help. I'm sure they would appreciate any assistance with dealing with it.

Unfortunately, trolls thrive on attention and having an effect (ANY effect) on others. I'm only one person but I'd like to think that no one in this community actually support those kinds of hateful views. If anyone has any helpful advice for the WIKI admins, send them their way. Let's not give the troll any traction from this point forward in our forums. 

Our community guidelines says it all. If you find any infractions within our forums, don't hesitate to simply report.

[SpikeGuy]

Judging by timings from the previous days, I'm guessing this is currently the troll's sleeping hours. If I'm doing my math properly, he'll be up and screwing around with things again in around 5 hours or so.

In the meantime, I'll go around and slap more protections on things I think might be hit.

[Viktor234]

On 5/4/2020 at 4:16 PM, Viktor234 said:

What's the griefers main goal here? [...] It is also to make as much attention as possible and to see the whole drama happening everywhere!

On 5/4/2020 at 5:39 PM, Zillvr said:

Unfortunately, trolls thrive on attention and having an effect (ANY effect) on others.

(Also included in this list: @Queron81, @CameoAppearance)

On 5/4/2020 at 5:23 PM, ADM said:

You have Lakurius support on the question, it says long enough on who's supporting who. No offence, Lak.

You have Lakurius support on the replies you're liking, so you must be on his side!

(Nothing bad about you Lakurius, I just never understood the strange reactions of regular humans.)

[freddiums]

you know, normally i'd laugh at something like this if it were just memes or whatever but this guy is genuinely condoning murder, spamming racial slurs, encouraging suicide, etc etc and its just tiring. i grew out of this phase years ago and it's so strange seeing people still just... thinking this kind of thing is funny.

[PunkShark]

4 minutes ago, taako bell said:

you know, normally i'd laugh at something like this if it were just memes or whatever but this guy is genuinely condoning murder, spamming racial slurs, encouraging suicide, etc etc and its just tiring. i grew out of this phase years ago and it's so strange seeing people still just... thinking this kind of thing is funny.

Some people just have a very twisted sick sense of humor 

[minespatch]

I just made this thread so I could get help cleaning up the wiki, not to cause a ethical debate. I'm glad people pitched in to help clean up the wiki. I really needed that help.

[Sinister_Fang]

3 hours ago, Zillvr said:

To everyone concerned about this situation, as far as I can tell based on the Recent Changes page of the wiki things are being managed by the admins.

Those who can help and wish to help the WIKI admins, do help. I'm sure they would appreciate any assistance with dealing with it.

Unfortunately, trolls thrive on attention and having an effect (ANY effect) on others. I'm only one person but I'd like to think that no one in this community actually support those kinds of hateful views. If anyone has any helpful advice for the WIKI admins, send them their way. Let's not give the troll any traction from this point forward in our forums. 

Our community guidelines says it all. If you find any infractions within our forums, don't hesitate to simply report.

Would it be possible for admins to lock the entire wiki so edits can only be made by admins? If they're unable to make edits for a while, they'll get bored and just move on.

[OMGkawaiiAngel]

They better not touch Charlie's page!!!

[Viktor234]

9 minutes ago, Charlie Dark said:

They better not touch Charlie's page!!!11!!1!1!

Hold on, I might try to send them a message to improve Charlie's page for you. No need to thank me for that.

[SpikeGuy]

19 minutes ago, Sinister_Fang said:

Would it be possible for admins to lock the entire wiki so edits can only be made by admins? If they're unable to make edits for a while, they'll get bored and just move on.

That's been proposed, but this vandal is absurdly dedicated and will probably move back in as soon as the block comes back down. Plus, it would cause massive disruption for everyone else, and we aren't giving that kind of satisfaction to the troll if we can help it. So it's currently being held in reserve as an emergency button.

8 minutes ago, Viktor234 said:

Hold on, I might try to send them a message to improve Charlie's page for you. No need to thank me for that.

Don't worry, that page is already protected.

[minespatch]

Spoiler

He's back

Okay, it looks like his attacks are towards people who undo his "work". What the hell?

[Hornete]

10 minutes ago, minespatch said:

  Reveal hidden contents

He's back

Okay, it looks like his attacks are towards people who undo his "work". What the hell?

Im doing my part to try and help! 

[Charesque]

9 hours ago, Lakurius said:

kinda funny imo

For some reason I suspect that this situation is your doing. I applaud your dedication, if that's the case.
As far as I can tell - your comments as well as actions in-game have been pretty controversial.
You know what I'm talking about.

[1bubbainpa]

6 hours ago, Sunset Skye said:

"Don't feed the trolls" is an attitude that should be applied when, for example, someone is in a chat room pretending to misunderstand the conversation to get people upset at them. Or when someone on reddit is trying to bait you into getting angry over their opinions on video games. Or when someone in a Discord server is being unruly and rude to get a reaction out of someone over something that ultimately doesn't matter. Or any other silly scenario like that, where someone's just being a jerk and you can forget about them within a couple minutes.

Where shouldn't "don't feed the trolls" be applied? Well, maybe a situation like this where someone is pulling out incredibly skewed, inaccurate, and grossly transphobic suicide statistics on a website that's meant for information about a video game. Just silently ignoring someone and reverting their edits is fine when it's just some silly troll doing something dumb but harmless in the long run, but you've got to do more than just that when it's someone spreading actual hate. You've got to call attention to it and make sure that everyone knows it's not acceptable, and that you're not going to have a good time in this community if you genuinely believe the kinds of things that are being spread by whoever this is.

You can't approach everything in life like a gamer.

But in this scenario, it would just be better to DM an admin of the wiki. An entire forum thread isn’t necessary, and is giving said troll the attention he wants anyways.

[minespatch]

Just now, 1bubbainpa said:

But in this scenario, it would just be better to DM an admin of the wiki. An entire forum thread isn’t necessary, and is giving said troll the attention he wants anyways.

I still needed the help. There's some pages I might have overlooked.

[PasssionFish]

I guess ill be avoiding the wiki for a while. Good luck to all the people fixing up this mess.

[freddiums]

51 minutes ago, 1bubbainpa said:

But in this scenario, it would just be better to DM an admin of the wiki. An entire forum thread isn’t necessary, and is giving said troll the attention he wants anyways.

if you read what the admins have been saying, theyve been doing everything in their power to fix the situation already and it's been persisting. at this point the best solution really is to just get as many people to fix things asap as soon as the problem arises so the admins can focus on getting help.

[Rinkusan]

I just want to give my 2 cents as someone who has engaged with stereotypically "edgy" griefers like these. Yes, trolls in general love feeding off the attention from all the chaos like a typical sadist, but in the case of "politically incorrect" griefers like these, many of them are actually motivated by an "owning the snowflakes" mindset. Whether the griefer actually believes what they're saying doesn't matter; all that matters is that they've "triggered" the "disingenuous virtue signalers". It goes without saying that this is hasty generalization fallacy and counter-culture tribalism at its finest, but in my view, that is the perspective you have to keep in mind when dealing with these kinds of people.

With that being said, I somewhat disagree with the two perspectives that've been shared in this thread.

I personally see no need to specifically call out what is clearly just over-the-top obscenity. Informing people of a griefer is fine; intellectually engaging with what is deliberately unintellectual garbage from a bad-faith actor who is aware that the stuff they are posting is unintellectual garbage is basically just shooting yourself in the foot because you're giving the troll ammunition to confirm their warped world view that anyone who holds these tolerant views is just a Holier-than-thou attention-seeker.

On the other hand, I also see no reason to sweep this entire situation under the rug in order to "not feed the troll". The fact that there was so little oversight to allow this problem to come up in the first place is something that 100% should be brought to the public's attention, even if it feeds the troll's warped sense of self-worth and hypocritical attention-seeking. In fact, just a few hours ago, I was able to edit the sea shells page, and the correction went through INSTANTLY. I didn't do anything nefarious; I just did a minor grammar fix, but the fact that I was able to instantly edit a Wiki page with absolutely nobody checking what I actually edited before the edit went through tells me that the problem HAS NOT been properly addressed yet. 

[minespatch]

5 minutes ago, Rinkusan said:

In fact, just a few hours ago, I was able to edit the sea shells page, and the correction went through INSTANTLY. I didn't do anything nefarious; I just did a minor grammar fix, but the fact that I was able to instantly edit a Wiki page with absolutely nobody checking what I actually edited before the edit went through tells me that the problem HAS NOT been properly addressed yet. 

Which is why I made this thread. Need as many hands to clean the wiki with me. I even contacted the Fandom heads since even the janitors are having trouble with this. So this is not a tiny issue.

[Kelloggs Dogfry]

Pardon me if this is not applicable or is a dumb input, but would an ip ban against said aggressor be of any use?

(Woops didn’t notice someone asked this.)

[Rinkusan]

1 minute ago, minespatch said:

Which is why I made this thread. Need as many hands to clean the wiki with me. I even contacted the Fandom heads since even the janitors are having trouble with this. So this is not a tiny issue.

Absolutely; thanks for bringing this conundrum to light. Contrary to the notification from the Wiki I pointed out earlier, I don't think "the issue with vandalism has been resolved" yet at all.

With that being said, do you happen to know of a way to access the ENTIRE "recent Wiki activity" log? I can see on the right-hand side of the screen that there is a section on the Wiki right under Discord that shows the most recent edits, which implies that the Wiki itself keeps a record of all the edits made on the site and by whom. Having access to that information would make it extremely easy to track down all the pages the griefer has vandalized.

[minespatch]

Just now, Rinkusan said:

With that being said, do you happen to know of a way to access the ENTIRE "recent Wiki activity" log?

https://dontstarve.fandom.com/wiki/Special:RecentChanges?limit=500 This is what I've been tracking. Sorry if this isn't too much to work with.

[SpikeGuy]

13 minutes ago, Kelloggs Dogfry said:

Pardon me if this is not applicable or is a dumb input, but would an ip ban against said aggressor be of any use?

We do ban them, and do both preventing logged-in users from that IP from editing (when it's anonymous) and prevent others from that IP address from editing (when it's a user). Thing is, the guy seems to have a network with an entire series of devices/addresses or something.

While my counting isn't entirely accurate because I'm using the ban log as a reference (and the cross-log-in banning didn't start until a little later), my estimate is that there are at least 70 addresses. Banning specific addresses is like stabbing a goo monster with a spear when what you really need is a large warhammer.