User talk:A. B./October 2008

This page is a chronological archive of past discussions from User talk:A. B. for the month of October 2008. Exchanges spilling over from late September or into early November may have been retained elsewhere to avoid breaking their continuity. In order to preserve the record of past discussions, the contents of this page should be preserved in their current form. Please do NOT make new edits to this page. If you wish to make new comments or re-open an old discussion thread, please do so on the User talk:A. B. page. If necessary, copy the relevant discussion thread to the user talk:A. B. page and then add your comments there.

Full protection of Williow Palin

This may sound odd but looking over the Sarah Palin redirects I spotted this one and was about to nominate it for RfD as it's a redirect based of the misspelling of one of her childrens names which seems like quite a misnomer. However before I did this I noticed you had fully protected the page to prevent edit warring a while back and have hit a quandry - I don't particularly want to "abuse" my admin position by going over the top and simply nominating a fully protected redirect for RfD, nor do I want to remove protection myself then nominate it for RfD which would also be going over the top. Do you mind removing your protection, or otherwise me requesting unprotection at RFPP? –– Lid^(Talk) 23:42, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry to be slow to respond -- I've been away. I protected probably a couple of dozen Palin-related redirects when she was first put forth for the nomination. We were getting all kinds of odd articles and odd abuses of redirects in the first few days.

By all means, delete this redirect. I don't think it needs to go to RfD -- I think Wikipedia:CSD#R3 is justified here. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:10, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Wasel Safwan

Hi. Seeing the new comment and links at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wasel Safwan, it seems to me that there is now sufficient basis for an article to be created about the artist (but not about his supposed movement, UAEism, which was the subject of a related article). I don't have any particular interest in creating such an article, though... --Orlady (talk) 20:26, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm with you -- notable but not something I want to take on.

Thanks for taking a look. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:25, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Search engine optimization

I posted to ANI for help by other editors. In trying to do the right thing, I ended up getting attacked by one editor in particular who tendentiously opposes anything I do, irrespective of the merits. This is a very bad situation. If you would watch search engine optimization and make sure it does not have valid content removed, that would be very nice. I have no particular need to edit the article. My current interests are mainly astronomy and ships. I did recently go through the article to restore blanked content from prior versions. Sometimes in the constant storm of spamming and vandalism, damage is not completely repaired. Otherwise, I have not made any substantial content edits to that article for quite some time. Thank you for your concern and offer of help. Jehochman ^Talk 13:06, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for this. Please keep an eye on the edit history in addition to the changes. Sometimes a few different spammers or vandals hit the article one after another, and the damage is only partially reverted by a rollback. As I said, I am leaving this article alone and hope that a new editor interested in updating the content appears soon. Jehochman ^Talk 12:50, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I already watch the SEO article for spam and I'll start watching it for content problems now, too. That article, plus Asbestos and Mesothelioma, are my three best honeypots for catching linkspammers. Sooner or later, they just can't resist sticking a link in one of those articles. (Asbestos-related Adsense ads generate very high revenues per ad click due to the big money in asbestos litigation; every other linkspammer seems to have his own asbestos scraper site). --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:44, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Heh, heh, heh. Mesothelioma is a $100 per click keyword. The lawyers make good money on that search. Jehochman ^Talk 21:53, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Blacklist

Sorry bout duping your entry. I rarely check to see if a domains already listed - I rely far too much on the linksearch function to tell me what's current! Anyway, thanks for blacklist. -- SiobhanHansa 21:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

StandardsDirect.org

Thank you for the informational edit summary--I'll be on the lookout for those in the future. Jclemens (talk) 00:27, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I am from Standards Direct, and I have been watching this unfold since I was alerted to it last week. I wish to make something clear: we do not engage in such smutty activity as spamming Wikipedia. Further, someone, seems to be seeking to inflict reputational damage here. Look at the last mass addition of links to our property by 72.255.83.2. Do you imagine that is us? I invite you to trace that IP usin gany steps necessary, and the previous. No reputable business would act like that.

More than this: we have no need to desire to be listed in Wikipedia at all. All it is doing at this point is providing a route for some sort of squalid attack on our reputation. As such, could I suggest that you block our domain somehow? We don't see Wikipedia as any sort of commercial channel, but it shouldn't be a route for presumably a competitor to attempt to darken our reputation either.

Feel free to contact us through our website for validation of this genuine request. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.88.199.1 (talk) 20:43, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

See the response I left to your similar question at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#StandardsDirect.org. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:54, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Reversion of edits by Astor14

Could you please explain reasoning for reverting User:Astor14's inclusion of info boxes on various company articles? -Hunting dog (talk) 06:52, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

In a nutshell, I screwed up.

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#ZenoBank.com.

I looked at a sample of Astor14's edits and it looked like he was primarily just adding these links so I started rapidly rolling back his edits. Then I saw that some of what I was rolling back consisted of entire infoboxes, so my small sample was clearly not representative. I stopped. Later I went back and reverted my edits.

Boneheaded, huh? --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 08:22, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

thanks for the candid explanation, the diff I saw and changed back seemed fine, so I thought I'd ask for clarification to see if I was missing something.... (which is normally the case for me) ....

If the changes are all relying on the same website link too much maybe it is something that should be discussed - I'll try and put something on the user page to explain what concerns were, and to let the user know about the WP Spam discussion. -Hunting dog (talk) 23:26, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Template Substitution

Hi there. When you add the zombie proxy template to a users talk page please remember to substitute it. If you wish to reply to this message please reply on my talk page. Thanks ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 14:27, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

OK. I've gone back through previous blocks and fixed templates I left. Thanks for the note. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 16:32, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

davidbenariel.org blacklisting

Hi A.B. Did you notice my response here? Just wanted to know whether to go ahead and file at meta or not. Thanks. -- SiobhanHansa 12:08, 30 October 2008 (UTC) PS Saw your comment (and hard work) on JPeizer - an lo, he turns out to be a multi-faceted spammer. The harder they protest their good intentions the worse their actions seem to turn out to be....

Regarding davidbenariel.org, if they've cross-wiki spammed before, they probably will eventually do it again. That's just an opinion, not some sort of decree. If I remember correctly, this guy systematically spammed across even the smallest Wikipedias with ezine-articles spam.

As for your PS, I've found that if spammers ask us to look again, we will out of fairness. However they should be prepared for what we find when dig deeper. I think there are still more kinky-casting and foot-fetish adult sites out there but I did not take the time to dig deeper. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 12:19, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks AB - the point I was trying to make in the davidbenariel.org response is that he has not, to my knowledge, crosswiki spammed. It was just blocked on meta because there was no local blacklist at the time. -- SiobhanHansa 13:57, 30 October 2008 (UTC)