Esolang talk:Administrators

How does one become an admin? Smjg 01:10, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Contacting User:Graue. If it's to help with spam clean-up, I'd personally advise against; I've already asked ais523 to contact Graue to install better spam protection for the wiki, which is better than devoting human effort to it and clogging up Special:Recentchanges. —ehird 01:25, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
 * (I'd also suggest not blanking spam user pages, since they still need to be deleted by an admin afterwards. —ehird 01:26, 2 December 2011 (UTC))
 * That's why I don't blank them, but replace the content with "Spam removed." :) Is there any disadvantage of doing this?  Anyway, Graue hasn't been active here for just over a year, but I guess I could try using the email facility.
 * FWIW I've just had a look at the account creation page. "To help protect against automated account creation, please solve the simple sum below and enter the answer in the box" - ??? Smjg 13:04, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, admins still delete the pages afterwards, so it clogs up Recentchanges (and many people receive it e.g. via RSS). I can't think of any other downsides, though, I just don't see much point :)
 * Graue is indeed inactive but he responds to email on urgent matters like spam infestations. And our CAPTCHA isn't good enough to keep these bots out, we need something stronger. —ehird 15:07, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Therein lies my point - it isn't really a captcha at all. Looking at the MediaWiki documentation I'm now made to wonder whether this is the default test not intended for production use that it talks about.  Wikipedia manages a proper captcha - so can we. Smjg 15:27, 3 December 2011 (UTC)


 * The main thing that clogs up RC is the spam. The edits to remove the spam only clog it up more until deleted, from which point the deletions are what clogs up RC.  I suppose I had two main motives: getting rid of the spam as a preliminary measure, and providing a text string that admins can search for if they want to find and delete the spam pages more easily. Smjg 15:22, 4 December 2011 (UTC)