User:AmiDaniel/VP/Upcoming release

Suggestions Being Considered

Finished in the Next Release (v1.3)

Tabs

VandalProof now uses a tabbed browser interface (pictured right), similar to that of Opera, IE7 or Firefox, which should make navigation a bit easier. To open a link in a new window, simply hold down the Ctrl key and click the link. To close a tab, double-click on it.

Filters and precached rollbacks

VP can now retrieve recent changes from the RSS feed, which offers a lot of new features. For one, it now uses Lupin's badword list to identify catchwords, such as obscenities, and report them in the recent changes list under "Filter" to make spotting vandalism easier. It will also now report the number of characters added or removed in the list, and it will display any particularly large removals in boldface. You can then scroll through the edits, using up and down arrows or clicking, and they will load instantly in the main browser window as you can see to the right. While it isn't as attractive to look at as diffs, they load with almost no delay so you can review 50 edits in less than a minute. If you would rather view the diff in the old, more attractive format, you can either click on the item in the list with the Shift key pressed or you can click "Last diff" in the main browser window.

Also in the interest of making things faster, I've now implemented precached rollbacks, whereby it retrieves the oldid of the last version by the previous user to which you can revert and then prepares to revert long before you click the Rollback button. This way, when you click Rollback, the reversion is almost instantaneous. It will also disable the rollback if someone else, such as User:Tawkerbot2, has edited the page following the change you are reviewing, which helps to prevent edit and warning conflicts. It's all still a bit shakey, but coming along quite nicely.

VP now also has the functionality to filter recent changes for edits coming from an IP range.

New Log-in Method

After griping about VP's bad log-in for so long, I finally did something about it! In v1.3, when you load up VP you will see this screen. It will now automatically identify under which account you are logged in on Wikipedia and what rights you have there, and if you are not logged in correctly (due to odd IE cookies, etc.) you can then click "Chg," enter your password, and click "Log-in to WP" to log you in on VP's internal browser and bypass any cookie problems. Note that you do not have to provide your password if you choose not to, and most users will not have any problems if they are correctly logged in on IE; this feature was provided merely to make things easier--the passwords are not stored or sent anywhere, not even on your own computer. Once you have verified that you are correctly logged in, you can click "Verify Authorization" which then checks if the username is on the approved user list and will then load up the typical VP form. Thanks to Yurik's fabulous Wiki API I've been able to make this process lightning fast!

Block and warn

I've now also implemented some of my first sysop tools. Under "User tools" there is now a "Block User" menu, from which you can select an expiry time, and it will automatically block the user for that time and post an appropriate block message on the user's talk page.

Contribs from IP Range

Following the recent AOL DoS attacks and the ceiling cat vandal, I and others agreed that the ability to pull up all on-top contributions from an IP range would be a very useful tool, so I decided to give it a shot. My first idea was to load up the contribs of every single IP address in a given range and add them to a list--then I decided I didn't feel like waiting an hour for the results, and I also didn't want to be the one responsible for bringing down Wikimedia's servers. So I came up with a much better approach that involves eliminating those IPs with no edits on top and then retrieving contribs from the remaining IPS, the results of which method proved quite successful.

As you can see at the right, this tool is now a quasi merge of the former "Rollback All" tool and another tool to retrieve the contribs from an IP range. When you load the dialog, you can input a username, an IP address, or a series of usernames and IP addresses (each divided by "&&") and click "Retrieve Contribs." This will then populate the list with all on-top contributions from the given IPs and usernames sorted by date from most recent to oldest. Double-clicking on an item will load the diff in a new browser window, and clicking "Rollback" at the bottom will then use bot rollback (admins only) to revert all checkmarked contribs from the given users or IP addresses, which goes quite quickly--much quicker than the former Rollback All tool could.

To load the contribs from an IP range, click on "Load IP Range." This will open an input box requesting the range to use, which you should enter in the following format: "STARTADDRESS::LAST". For example, "172.0.0.0::255" would equate to all IP addresses between 172.0.0.0 and 172.0.0.255. Note that all ranges must be smaller than 256 IP addresses. Once you enter the range and hit OK, the edit box at the top of the form will be filled in with a series of IP addresses ("172.0.0.0&&172.0.0.1 ... &&172.0.0.255"). Now you must be thinking that retrieving the contribs from 256 IP addresses must take a long time; however, as I hinted above, my method of elimination has resulted in a very quick query. If you look at the image to the right, you'll see that retrieving all of the on-top contribs from the AOL IP range 207.200.116.0/24 (or 207.200.116.0::255 in VP notation), quite likely the most active of all IP ranges Wikipedia, took only 52.10726 seconds; however, since I've uploaded that screenshot, I found a couple of foul-ups I made and have been able to reduce this query time even further. When I just ran this exact same query at 06:46, 28 June 2006 (UTC), it took only 37.38973 seconds.

VandalProof ON WHEELS!!!

Yes, that's right, ON WHEELS!!! VandalProof now has the ability to clean up page-move vandalism in just a couple of clicks. It's really quite simple to use — not too much to explain. You type in the username (or there will also be a menu item to load this when looking at a user's talk page, etc.) and click "Retrieve Log." This will return all the page-moves by a user and generate a list of actions to complete to undo the page-moves (as you can see to the right). Should you feel that any of the provided actions need not be performed for whatever reason, you can uncheck the item. When you click start it will go through the list, moving pages back to their original location and deleting the resulting redirect.

I actually just got to use this tool for real the other day, as you may be able to find in my log, reverting the page-move vandalism by Villy van der Veelen. There are still a couple of things I'd like to tweak on this, but for the most part, it worked flawlessly.

Under Development in the Next Release

Double Warning Safeguards

In the rare instances when two users attempt to revert and warn for the same edit, we often see cases of warning stacking. In v1.3, VP will be able to detect any other VandalProof warnings for the same edit and prompt you if the user has already been warned for the edit. I'm also working with Joshbuddy and Tawker to prevent stacking on top of Tawkerbot2's warnings.

Interwiki

I'm working on making VandalProof available on as many wikis as I can; however, to do that I need your help! Please see User:AmiDaniel/VP/Interwiki or contact me for more details.

Later Versions

Set RC limit (Default edit count customizeable)
Linux (and Macintosh?) version
Remove "deadspace" in interface
Hotkeys
Precaching the next edit to speed up loading
A loading status bar
Adjustable frames
IRC feeds / "worktogether"
Show only newpages / Hide newpages

Rejected

None at this time