Small wiki toolkits/Starter kit/AbuseFilter

AbuseFilter tutorial video for beginners (2020, 100 minutes, including examples)

This page explains how you can use filters on your wiki in order to block bad edits and actions.

General information

Sometimes users make bad page edits (for example: vandalism). Some of those edits have some patterns in common, and you want to automatically block these patterns. This is possible with the AbuseFilter extension. It is installed on all Wikimedia wikis.

AbuseFilter allows you to define filters. The filters automatically check every edit that is made on your wiki. The filters also check other actions like account creation or page moves.

A filter has two parts: Rules and actions. When an edit matches conditions in a rule, then actions are performed.

The filter will also log the edit. The filter can also disallow the edit, tag the edit summary, warn the editor, block the editor, remove the editor's autoconfirmed status, remove all user groups from the editor, and/or block a group of IP addresses.

Global filters

Some bad edit patterns are common across all wikis. That's why there are global filters. Global filters are enabled on all small wikis by default. You can see the list of global filters on meta. Global filters can also be enabled on non-small wikis if a wiki community requests it.

Per-wiki filters

In addition to global filters, there can also be individual filters for each wiki. You can see the current filters of your wiki on the page Special:AbuseFilter.

By default, only sysops (also called administrators) can create or edit local filters on your wiki. You can find the list of sysops on your wiki by going to the page Special:ListUsers/sysop on your wiki. If your wiki has no local sysops, then you can contact the global Abuse filter maintainer group for help, or global sysops. After a while you could also request to become a local sysop on your wiki.

In order to learn how you can define rules and actions for filters, see the links under Extension:AbuseFilter#Creating and managing filters. To write more complex filter rules, it is helpful to know regular expressions.

To test filter rules without referring to a specific edit, use the page Special:AbuseFilter/tools on your wiki. To test filter rules on some specific edits, use the page Special:AbuseFilter/test on your wiki. When your filter rules do what they should, you can create the filter on the page Special:AbuseFilter/new on your wiki.

To import a filter from another wiki, use the page Special:AbuseFilter/import on your wiki.

If you need access to the data in the edit filter logs, contact the Abuse filter helpers global group.

The exact AbuseFilter permissions (groups and block duration) for each wiki are also public. Your wiki community can request to change these permissions if needed.

Help

If you need help with writing a filter, you could ask on mw:Extension talk:AbuseFilter or maybe w:en:Wikipedia:Edit filter/Requested. Please always explain which problem you want to solve on which wiki.