Requests for comment/New global filter for "bot"

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Hi,

I propose the creation of a new global warning filter when creating a "bot" account.

Preamble

Some projects, like enWP or frWP, have a filter when creating a bot account. Other projects, large or small, have no bot filters or no filters at all. Nicknames or real names containing "bot" are not uncommon.

Context

Some people, future contributors or real bot accounts, create an account and contravene certain local filters, but do not know it, since they created locally on a wiki not applying these same filters.

Conclusion

An informative message must be provided to them, on all projects and before the creation of the account (when writing the nickname), warning them that their future account will be blocked on other important wikis upon seeing their nickname containing bot (reserved for robot accounts) and that it would be preferable to modify this part of the nickname with something else.

Thank you for reading me, I'll let you debate the usefulness of my request.

Cordially. ―Eihel (talk) 11:58, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]

  • Neutral Neutral I get that containing the word "bot" in many ways is misleadng, especially on smaller wikis that lack from moderation (or proper moderation), but this can also come out as an attempt of language policing (and I don't want to open those can of worms). --SHB2000 (talk | contribs) 12:24, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    This is "bot", not ロボット. If it were a question of refusing bot, that would be a regulation, but here, there is no question of it, so no Pandora's box is open. This is a prevention, not an attempt to object, let's not mix things up. If people continue with their account creation with "bot", they will have been warned. I have no objection to people being called Talbot or Ribot, but they will be stuck at some point and projects that want to be free to contribute must warn beforehand. Eihel (talk) 14:06, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    It's still forcing an Anglo/Franco-centric policy on all-language wikis, irregardless of their intention of contributing on en or fr projects. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs) 11:40, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Support} * Pppery * it has begun 03:00, 23 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Support for accounts ending with "bot". --Irønie (talk) 13:09, 23 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is it even possible to use global abuse filters to display custom warning messages? How does the localization work in that case? Orlodrim (talk) 13:36, 23 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Not really possible with global filters currently. Most wikis display the filter description when a warning is triggered however, but some wikis do not show this description. For example, on nlwiki, we show the filter description when a filter issues a warning, but not when it disallows. XXBlackburnXx (talk) 04:26, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Support if technically possible. Avoid to have some wikis that are allowing it and some that don't. Where accounts can't be created, for a bot doing cross-wiki API requests, the calls are anonymous, and we don't want that. Framawiki (talk) 15:36, 23 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I find this request a bit confusing. Why do we say that "their future account will be blocked on other important wikis upon seeing their nickname containing bot" specifically? Has this been a significant problem in the past that I can't recall? What's the ID of the en.wiki filter? I can't seem to find it myself. Leaderboard (talk) 18:01, 23 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Oppose, it would be a very confusing and anglocentric thing, in my opinion. Accounts can end with bot, or even more likely contain bot inside the name, for many different reasons. Even in English this might potentially trigger someone with a name like BotanyFun123 to be shown a warning that they are about to be banned, this is intimidating and should not be allowed to happen. For someone who does not speak English and for whom the logic behind the warning would be even less intuitive, for example if the word bot for robot does not exist in their language, it would be even more confusing. There is no global policy that forbids people from having bot in their usernames unless the account is in fact bot, not there is a policy that requires for bots to contain bot in their username. I know many bots that do not follow this convention and I see absolutely no problem with that. If some wikis randomly ban people because their username contains bot in it, I know this first hand, my own bot account used to be banned on enwiki for over 5 years for containing bot in it but not having a bot flag (despite having 0 edits), the problem is not in the lack of warning but in the local policy that enables such actions. --Base (talk) 03:47, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Oppose - not problematic, and this is imo not what the global abuse filter is meant for. XXBlackburnXx (talk) 04:20, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Oppose - this isn't problematic enough to warrant a global filter. Per Base, and also the need to not create unnecessary GAF conditions for performance reasons. – Ajraddatz (talk) 13:15, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    (w:WP:DWAP, and this would be quite a cheap rule to implement if it was necessary – though there are definitely quite a few (more) unnecessary GAF conditions in the filters we currently have that could be simplified or removed/deactivated.) ~~~~
    User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)     20:03, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Abusefilter is one of the few areas where this does matter, because (at least as I understood it years ago) all of these conditions need to run as an edit is saved. It's not a huge deal on a micro level, but at a macro level we should be restrictive in what we enable as a filter. This was even an early reason why GAF wasn't more widely rolled out at first. That said, this is based on my memory from a decade ago, I could be mistaken or things may have been optimized/changed. – Ajraddatz (talk) 22:01, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Oppose per Base – I don't really understand the premise of this RfC; it seems like an issue with some local abuse filters. Blanket prohibition of usernames containing "bot" should not be acceptable on any wiki. ~~~~
    User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)     19:57, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Weak support since it's just a warning, I think it's a good idea to let them know that their username may be problematic on several wikis (including the biggest ones). PS: obviously it should be limited to account names ending with "bot". Cheers, VIGNERON * discut. 14:59, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Custom warnings are not supported for global filters, they can only show each wikis local version of MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning / MediaWiki:Abusefilter-disallowed. Without the ability to show custom warnings the proposed global filter doesn't make any sense, because users won't understand why they can't register. By the way it's really no effort to request a new username if people discover the username they initially chose is not allowed at some projects. Johannnes89 (talk) 15:55, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Johannnes89: well if that's technically impossible, indeed that settles it. Can someone else confirm so we could close this request? Cheers, VIGNERON * discut. 07:50, 27 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Oppose Oppose: Sorry, but from all 6000+ languages on Earth this community would like to make a filter for "bot" appearances in usernames. This is practically impossible or at least very unfeasable, what you will get is a global (!) filter with heavy English bias. As Base already pointed out, there is too much space for false hits of such filter, however I would also point out to another problem that such filter would be useless if bot was written in non-Latin script (ie. Arabic or Korean), but making queries for all of these is not feasible as well as not economical server-wise. I think we sysops can still handle all of such requests locally through appropriate channels.--A09 (talk) 17:01, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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