User:Jéské Couriano/On the Chans
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Over the past few months, users on Wikipedia have come under attack by forces not beyond our ken, not beyond law, and not beyond sanction. However, in response to these attacks, we have feigned ignorance in their face, adopted damnatio memoriae with respect to them, and ignored them in the name of ignoring them, in the mistaken belief that disregarding them will make them go away. Well, guess what. YHBT. YHL. HAND.
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Problems with damnatio memoriae
The current school of thought, given at WP:DENY, is that not mentioning vandals and reverting their edits will give them less impetus to continue their destructive acts. Unfortunately, this is not true, and for evidence I give last week (as of 05/02/08) as an example.
I invite those with administrator privileges to look at Ocean sunfish's history, and then to look at my deleted-edits log for my talk page. Once I'd mentioned that their edits were going to be deleted (per WP:DENY), they assaulted my talk page and accused me of censorship, little realizing they had fallen prey to their own hypocrisy, where to them "censorship" does not involve choking out discourse with constant rabbling, like a group of 9/11 conspiracy theorists on Real Time. In any case, the storm died out five hours later and 50 IP addresses later, each one now under a three-month block.
WP:DENY does not support damnatio memoriae. It supports methods to drive away vandals, and, misapplied, gives ways to attract them.
Reason it won't work
As explained above, the motivation for these users, with the sole exception of their unofficial leader (User:Grawp), is to cause mayhem while claiming to be anti-censorship. Thus, censoring discourse only attracts them, and thus a middle ground between open discussion of Grawp (which emboldens him) and damnatio memoriae (which incenses his followers) must be achieved. Just yesterday (05/01), Nakon was attacked by anons who accused her of censoring another user - whom was demonstrably Grawp.
However, these downs are not without their ups. Unwilling to face punishment for their crimes, they sign on anonymously, thinking it legion. It is not; past vandal cases have made this all too clear and those who do not familiarize themselves with the laws of IP addresses are doomed to suffer. Another upside is that they are easy to spot; the IPs they use almost always have only one edit and thus can be assumed to be theirs alone, so long as you check "Block anonymous users only".
Solutions
The first solution in regards to the Chans regards their followers: Revert their edits, Block on sight for three months (unless the contributions history proves such a block unfeasible), Wait for the vandalism to die down, and Delete the revisions being used in the attack* (4channers prefer target-revision vandalism, where they use an oldid and revert back to that). Above all, do not protect unless the vandalism would push the number of edits for that page over 5000; they will just move on to someone else and harass them instead.
For Grawp, whom is generally invisible before the attack, follow the current standard operating procedure: Undo all his page moves, Block on sight, Contact checkusers to root out any sleepers, and Delete and Protect page move targets. Do not use edit summaries for either; if you must, label them as pure vandalism.
Notes
*: You must contact an administrator in order to do this; oversighters will not remove the edits.
