Staff will discuss how to proceed. In the meantime, chatops who receive questions about applications should just explain that due to a spammer, apps are currently not being accepted.

Edit: Annnnnd they self-deleted. Keep an eye out for further fuckery.

Zyn has taken on a Herculean amount of responsibility to ensure that the wheels do not come off of forum crit. But a system that requires one person to take on dozens and dozens of cases just to get by is not sustainable. There are simply too many people needing draft critique, not enough reviewers, making the job a thankless task.

Most writers on the site probably would enjoy giving crit to drafts with some merit, which could be guided to completion. But frankly, most of the drafts that get posted are drivel that even the writer didn't put any level of serious thought or energy into. This is an enormous burden and wastes the talents of our incredibly dedicated Forum Crit team.

Staff needs to take immediate action in order to prevent our entire content creation system outside of the existing clique of writers in IRC from falling to pieces. The most immediate way to provide relief that a few people in admin chat came up with was to restructure the application process, changing the site permissions so that anyone with a wikidot account can comment but only those who are site members can create threads and edit/post pages. Obviously this would be a major change, but it would provide immediate relief to Forum Critique without preventing existing users and those with an interest in the site the ability to engage in the forums.

The recent threads for autocritique and shutting down the forums would probably provide temporary relief, but this is a systematic problem and if we have to shut down the forums for two weeks to cool off there needs to be immediate, major restructuring to ensure the same problems aren't present when the forums open back up again.

If anyone has any thoughts on how we can save our critique forums, we would love to hear them, because the problem is only getting worse by the day.

This discussion is open to anyone with access to 05command, will proceed for 3 days, followed by an Admin level vote on what immediate action to take.

e: extended the timer by another three days since tomorrow is Christmas and it seems like there could be other things occupying people's attention.

Made a thread requesting help here: http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-5080120/inbox-is-broken

All pages on the Sandbox Wiki can only be edited by their creator or a member of the staff. Anyone wanting universal editing ability on the sandbox wiki (via a mod promotion), talk to your team captains, and they'll provide it at their discretion. Team captains are expected to use this power with restraint, and not simply grant it to people because they wish to have it. Any team captains who have not yet joined the Sandbox Wiki formally, please join and message me so I can promote you.

The user believes that the person harassing them is connected to EldritchCyanide in some way. EldritchCyanide and the user involved had a prior interpersonal relationship, which since ended.

The user was unable to identify the caller when the user picked up. The user believes for personal reasons that someone connected to EldritchCyanide is responsible.

EldritchCyanide tells us that ze has no idea who would do that, and can think of no one who could do this, and condemns the action.

If the user is right, and someone connected to EldritchCyanide is responsible for this, unbeknownst to EldritchCyanide, staff would urge them to personally come forward, because this may result in EldritchCyanide being expelled from Wikidot and our community.

This is because Wikidot was approached with the issue separately from us. Wikidot apparently wishes to eliminate the possibility of EldritchCyanide being connected to this in any way by deleting EldritchCyanide's wikidot account.

We urge anyone who has any information to please contact a member of the Harassment Team immediately. The user tells us that the situation is hurting them and driving them crazy.

More information may be forthcoming, but this is all the information we are approved to release at this precise time. However, anyone may still ask questions.

Full Disclosure: This is related to a Harassment case which I have opted not to directly handle for personal reasons, until now, due to being understaffed and having my participation requested.

EDIT: A small clarification due to my own error.

As seen in the image here, attempting to access http://scp-wiki.net kicks back an untrusted certificate error. After some speculation, Randomini hypothesized that it might be Wikidot fucking with their security certificates, or something fucky going on with the domain.

Either way, probably worth looking into. Don't want anybody thinking we're creeping on their info.

Edit: Linking this as well, which is just the details page as provided by Randomini.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/waukesha-police-2-12-year-old-girls-plotted-for-months-to-kill-friend-b99282655z1-261534171.html

Now, this obviously doesn't have anything to do with us, but what's the feeling about having the wiki take some kind of action in sympathy for the poor victim's family— say, a black banner on the front page for a little while, or even having the wiki go dark for a day? Or just some kind of temporary explicit statement that this is fiction, these are stories, and that people with mental health issues need to get help?

Edit: Attempted murder. (Fortunately, it looks like the victim will live.)

I need to know as soon as possible if anyone has done applications since the new interface went active.

Here is the log. A significant amount of Pokemon-related inanity was cut to make it readable.

The writer of The Shakies is one milleniumty who, as far as I can tell, only ever contributed that particular Tale to the Site.

The sample provided above indicates that the basic ideas of the stories are similar. A babysitter being asked by their child ward to bring them to bed and tell them a scary story. However, the writing styles are very different.

I'll come back tomorrow to edit this post to give my own verdict on how different they are from one another. I'm posting this here and now because Troy asked me to, and I think it deserves a post.

On a slight tangent, I have gone ahead and tagged The Shakies as a creepypasta, because its a creepypasta.

Somehow, someone who doesn't even have a wikidot account, much less is a member of the site, managed to edit the page. Admittedly, it was only to add a couple of used-nowhere-else tags, but it's still Not A Good Thing. Let's keep an eye out for any other signs of non-member editting, as well as bringing this to the attention of Wikidot. Y'know, since that's not supposed to be possible with our settings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp5xGLj1RME

Edit: I changed the thread description. This post refers to the Lovecraftian Locket.

The short of it is, people more knowledgeable than I have expressed concern that these are symptoms of Wikidot entering death throes, or at the very least, we are seriously testing their capacity. In either case, we need to GTFO, and the current timetable, or more specifically total lack thereof, is exceedingly risky.

I know, there are currently a total of two people working on a show site, one of which is hiking the Appalachians. However, why and how we find ourselves fucked won't change our level of fuckedness. So we need to decide if this is actually a significant risk (I think it is) and if so, figure out how to get off Wikidot before we find ourselves up Shit Creek.

I told Murphy to apply to this site so he could explain things. He has a much better understanding of tech stuff than I do.

Which brings me to the problem.

At first, I pretty much just Lol'd. After all… Seriously? You join and delete on the same day? How sad are you? And then Reject pointed something out.

Yes, but he upvoted my article in the ten seconds he was here, so it's okay.

Pffffffffff- What?!

Yeah, he did. Actually, he wrote a glowing review of it, too, it seems:

I like this idea a lot, but it does seem a bit rough as is. The issue that breaks it for me is the way most of the kids are basically parodies of disruptive children. I feel like this would be much more effective if the children were mostly normal kids, who just happened to have a few odd quirks. I think that would make the few that are completely unhinged much more intriguing. The issue with the triggers being so specific does bother me as well, but not quite as much. Still, this is a good enough idea that I'll upvote even before changes are made.

So, just for posterity, I took a look at the current votes on the article:

Page rated by:
Adam Smascher -
catwhowalksbyhimself -
Chocolate Chip +
Doktori +
DrBright -
Drewbear -
DrGuin -
ed_montague -
Grigori Rasputin -
Lumancer -
Metaphorphosis -
Salculd -
Scantron +
Shebleha -
spikebrennan +
Tabbyclaw -
TuomeyTombstone +
Tyber -
Voct +
(account deleted) +
(account deleted) +

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. That is correct. In the last two days (Reject's article is two days old currently), it had two, count 'em, two upvotes from accounts that were subsequently deleted.

I'll be honest. I have not yet done the work. I don't know how far these two accounts went or what else they voted on. What I do know is this: without an application, it is exceedingly easy for someone to create an account, vote, and delete the account. Within five or ten minutes, I could upvote/downvote every article written by someone (assuming they had an author page, to make it easy).

So, just as a quick stopgap, I'm proposing the following measure be added to the deletions guide:

Votes from accounts which have been deleted will not be factored into the rating of a article for the purposes of deletion. For example, an article which is at -4 that has two upvotes from deleted accounts would be eligible for deletion. Likewise, an article at -6 that has two downvotes from deleted accounts would not be eligible for deletion.

This should serve to stop the issue of dealing with people upvoting to keep their articles alive…

But there are still other problems, such as:

• Inflating the rating of an article.
• Deflating the rating of an article.

Inflating articles… I'm honestly not worried about. Well rated articles are usually fine. The worst that could happen is pushing something higher on the "Top Rated Articles" list. Deflating is a problem, one that I believe Bright has dealt with in the past. While previously, it was just an answer to dealing with one person…

Now, there is the possibility for a mass attack on a single article. And I honestly can't think of a way to deal with it, other than making it a pain for people to join via the application process. And I don't want to do that.

So, all. Thoughts?

Obviously our first step should be to have an admin message wikidot help about the problem, but in the meantime how will we deal with the removal of bad articles whose ratings are artificially raised by the error, and what should we do about user complaints re incorrect page rankings?

The rating system is pretty important to the site, so we need to get this dealt with.

Just gone, it says 'forum: Thread does not exist'.

Anybody know what happened or how this can get fixed?

EDIT: Now they're back. Huh.