Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-74.213.78.53-20151227061510/@comment-3474542-20151227115658

Lady Lostris wrote: Ripto covered it perfectly: the VSTF doesn't handle all forms of spam, only the ones that fall under Help:Spam, namely the advertisement spam. It's not up to the VSTF to decide whether or not a page is relevant or useful to a wiki, that's the task of local administrators. I think we're talking across each other here. The OP asked how to deal with what they classified as spam. Ripto agreed that it was spam (he classified it as 'non-serious'), and suggested waiting for a specific admin. My comment was that if it's obviously spam/vandalism, there is no need to wait before requesting its removal. Ripto later changed his opinion, to it not being 'spam' because it didn't have links. I disagreed that edits links are the only form of spam, and suggested the OP politely contact the poster of the blog.

I agree that VSTF does not typically decide whether or not a page is relevant or useful to a wiki. However, they can and will clean up vandalism (especially if it is large scale or when someone requests assistance).

They leave decisions about content up to the local administrators, unless it's blatantly obvious the page is vandalism. Note that I said blatant vandalism. That means things like obviously nonsensical pages (on a non-nonsense wiki) or other repetitive edits where the only content is a some variation of something like: "TEH WIKIA/(insert noun) SUCKEZ (insert pejorative term)", "(insert noun) LUVS (insert perjorative term)", "21940ujw0gagag", "LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL", or "(insert pejorative anatomical/scatological/racist term)", "dial ###-###-#### for (sex/drugs/hacks/whatever)", etc.

The VSTF does try to Assume Good Faith and stay out of local matters. So, if an edit is not obvious and widespread spam or vandalism, they either let the local admins deal with it or limit their actions to things specifically requested by the local admin(s)/community consensus (e.g. - requests for: site protection, mass reversion, mass deletion, editing of blacklist/whitelist filters, etc).