Forum:Gigapause protect

So as been noted already when the gigapause ends there will likely be a flurry of activity, much of it likely being vandalism (whether it be just common vandalism or people trying to make highly visible spoilers). Of course there will be legit edits but the amount happening will likely cause edit conflicts, badly done-good faith edits, and the major volume of it all will likely cause trouble in trying to vet everything. I mean most of us already all realise this, but might as well state it for those who don't realise this.

So clearly we are going to need some sort of protection while everything is being sorted (if Hussie spreads the ending out over a period of time as opposed to the one huge update then depending on how spread out it is the major problem should only be vandals as the smaller parts of the story should be integrated much easier and without issue). So this discussion is to figure out all potential solutions and also figure out which ones are viable and which one(s) we should use.

Now the easiest, broadest, most consistent option is protect site. While we don't have access to it ourselves and Wikia seems reluctant too grant that power to Wiki admins, however Wikia staff and VSTF can protect the wiki for us, but the question is whether they will feel it is appropriate to do so, if we explain our reasons and the fact this will be a one off thing they might be willing but it will have to be discussed with them, which of course can easily be done beforehand. One thing of note is that protect site's maximum time limit (at least on Wikia) is 12 hours, if Hussie does a single big update and we only have a single use of the protect site that only gives us 12 hours to sort whatever we can out. If he does break it up I doubt we will be able to have it done for each update, so I think we would have to reserve it for Act 7.

Another option is the add something to the filter that basically blocks all edits for any restricted group(s), however people will still be able to make edits, they simply be told their edit was blocked when they try to save, this will simply frustrate and piss off a bunch of people, and clog up our abuse log. Plus it wouldn't surprise me if such a thing was against the terms of use.

Another option is simply protecting everything one-by-one, highly undesirable.

There is another option however; cascading protection. Cascading protection results in the protection of all other pages included in a page; for example if we activated cascading protection on John's page, his infobox, the character navbox, the HS link template, all the images, on his page, would be protected. Problems? It only works on transcluded things so we would need to create a pre-existing page that transcludes a number of other pages and hope the page isn't so large that it breaks and then we simply cascade protect the special page. More problems? This only works if you do a full protect, not a semi-protect. If we have to resort to cascading protection I think temporarily promoting any mods to admins so they can still edit would have to be done.

Well that is everything I can think of at this time. - The Light6 (talk) 02:29, October 22, 2013 (UTC)