Last modified: 2007-08-24 05:28:38 UTC
System administrators should be able to choose whether spam links should be "grandfathered." The spam blacklist extension works such that pre-existing links are not removed, but if a user edits an article, then the article will not save unless the links are removed. This can sometimes be a pain. Suppose that a user adds a spam link to an article, and an administrator blacklists the domain but forgets to remove the link from the article. If a new user who wishes to make a good-faith edit to the same article, the new user may have a difficult time. For example, I once saw some vandalism on a non-Wikimedia wiki and I tried to revert it, but the wiki was set that anonymous users could not add any links, and I ended up reverting to an old revision without the links, and it took a long time until another user showed up and fixed the page properly. To make matters worse, not all wikis may show the user which links matched the blacklist. If "grandfathering" was enabled, then users coould save a page if the link is already there (or if the edit matches a previous revision), but once a link is removed, it cannot be added back.
I'd say once spam forever spam, so I don't think "gandfathering" is the right approach. However, showing the list of blocked links to submitting user is definitely necessary. Besides I'd say it would be better have it already on preview rather than on submit.
It's not a wholly unreasonable request, and it's certainly not infeasible - the ConfirmEdit extension is quite capable of doing this. This has, however, been proposed before - see bug 1505. We already show the blacklist match to the user when they attempt to submit an edit containing an unacceptable URL. Running an advisory check on preview is something we may be able to do, but is certainly a separate issue. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1505 ***
