Bulbapedia:Dealing with vandalism
Regular users
Regular users should immediately report vandalism to an administrator via instant messaging or IRC. Do not use User Talk pages - these will not alert the user until they visit Bulbapedia.
In the meantime, regular users should manually revert any vandalism.
Administrators
Administrators should ban large-scale vandals on sight. To revert changes, go to the user's list of contributions and click the rollback links. When reverting changes, please remember to add &bot=1
to the URL of the list of contributions, for example: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Vandal&bot=1
This will hide both the vandalism and the reverts from the recent changes list.
System administrators
Extremely large-scale vandalism involving the use of multiple sockpuppets should be resolved by immediately enacting the following measures:
- Blocking all instances of the vandal. Be sure to check the user list for unactivated ones.
- Locking the database, preventing all edits and new user registrations.
- Altering the MediaWiki configuration to prevent new user registrations.
- Unlocking the database, then reverting the changes as outlined above.
At a later stage, once all vandalism has been reverted, the user and their revisions may be completely removed from the database. Please be sure to lock the database before starting.