User:Philip Trueman/PILT

PILT is Philip's Improved Lupin's Tool, my own modified version of the highly acclaimed Lupin's Anti-Vandal Tool. I originally started writing these modifications for my own benefit but I would now welcome comments and suggestions from others.

The aim of these modifications is to make the user of the tool more productive by increasing the number of edits checked, reducing the number of false positives displayed, reducing the number of mouse and keyboard clicks required to perform certain common actions, and aborting reverts in certain cases where they may do more harm than good.

PILT is a work-in-progress, and may be modified or withdrawn at any time.

Would-be users are strongly advised to become familar with Lupin's original before experimenting with PILT.

N.B. Late in 2008 Cacycle incorporated some of these ideas, along with others, into the canonical AVT. He's welcome - I returned the compliment by incorporating one of his bug fixes. Development of PILT continues, albeit fitfully.

Recent developments

The number of edits pulled down each time now varies, depending on the recent update rate. The idea is to cut down on network traffic at times of low update rates.

Edits that have already been reverted, e.g. by a bot, in the same bundle, are ignored

There is now an 'ignore' link to cause all further edits, by a registered editor, to be ignored

Current modifications

1. Proper implementation of duplicate checking - the same edit should now never appear twice in successive bundles, as sometimes happens when using the original tool
2. Whitelisting of trusted editors. Edits by certain trusted (by me!) editors are ignored when filtering recent changes. Be warned - the list of trusted editors is currently hard-coded and constantly changing
3. Edits, by registered users only, that have certain standard keywords (e.g. 'Reverted, 'Disambiguate') in the edit summary, are ignored
4. Edits, by any user, that have certain standard phrases (e.g. 'Blanked the page') in the edit summary are ignored if certain anti-vandal bots are running. N.B. This feature is currently being considered for deletion, as having been superseded by the feature immediately below
5. Edits that are followed, in the same bundle, by a revert of the same article, are ignored
6. Changes are pulled down more frequently, a variable number every 10 seconds rather than 50 edits every 30 seconds
7. There is a 'User talk page history' link, to allow easier viewing (via popups) of a vandal's warnings history
8. There is a 'new-v1' link, for initial warnings, which creates a new section
9. There are now links to the AIV page, using a modification of code originally written by Gzkn. This is probably redundant for users of Twinkle, but I don't use that tool. The text of the report is only partially filled in and must be completed by the user
10. There is a link to WP:UAA for faster reporting of bad usernames
11. There is an 'ignore' link, to suppress all further edits by this editor. This only works for registered users, not IPs, and it's transient - such editors won't be remembered across separate invocations of PILT. If this link is selected then if the edit details are showing they will be immediately hidden
12. 'Admin' (i.e. MediaWiki) rollback is implemented via Ajax, so no new window is created
13. When reverting an edit, if the details of the edit are currently showing they will be hidden immediately, to reduce screen clutter
14. When reverting an edit using 'non-admin' rollback the new window is immediately sent to the bottom of the Z-order
15. When reverting an edit using 'non-admin' rollback only the last 10 rollback windows are kept open. Older windows are automatically closed to reduce virtual memory demand
16. If a revert would mean reverting to a version last edited by a previously-reverted vandal the revert is aborted with an error message
17. If a revert of an edit (or series of edits) by an IP would mean reverting to a version last edited by a similar IP the revert is aborted with an error message, to prevent 'locking-in' of vandalism by an editor using a dynamic IP
18. Templates {{X1}} to {{X9}} are now included in the list of safe pages, since they are essentially sandboxes
19. When filtering recent changes, certain edits suspicious purely on the basis of their edit summaries are also displayed. The criteria used are currently under development.

Notes

1. This version of AVT, unlike the canonical version, requires the user to have popups installed when using non-admin (strictly, non-MediaWiki) rollback.
2. Two additional groups of numbers are displayed for each bundle. The first five numbers are, in order: the number of edits retrieved, the number of duplicates suppressed, the number of edits actually being watched (e.g. excluding Talk pages if the user is only looking at Main space edits), the number suppressed because a later edit to the same article was a revert, and the number suppressed because they are by trusted editors or have trusted edit summaries. The last two numbers are: the number of edits in the bundle that were reverts by the user, and the number of reverts in total, among the changes to the pages being watched. Finally, if the bundle contains any successful reverts by the user then the names of the articles reverted are also displayed, as indicators of which edits to go back to to warn the vandals.

Planned improvements

1. A link to WP:RFPP for requesting page protection
2. Different link menus for admin and non-admin users
3. Display edits that are reverts by the user, with a special set of links to facilitate warning and reporting vandals whose edits have been reverted by the user

Blue sky thinking

1. A way of allowing registered users of PILT to share out the work at times of high update rates

Installation

As for Lupin's tool, but replace 'User:Lupin/recent2.js' with 'User:Philip Trueman/recent2.js'