Thread:Tokina8937/@comment-27345308-20180831235456/@comment-9136029-20180901002331

Hello and thanks :)

For the "how I decided to fight spam", it's really... By randomness. That may seem silly, but it really happened like this. As for the "where to report it", actually the first reports I made on VSTF was because of a cross-Wiki vandal whose the first account has been banned by the staff itself. One of the admins of the Wiki I was coming from (the English Vocaloid Wiki here) also used VSTF. Some users on this Wiki told about VSTF.

And on VSTF Wiki, then I saw the reports of others, most of them being centered on Community Central. By curiosity I just looked at them, I learnt what kind of accounts they were reporting and when I just looked at the recent activity of the Wiki I found some similar posts seeming to be spam.

Now, how I retrieve the usernames... Several checks.

First one is the activity feed of Community Central. If I see that a blog post/a discussion post is promoting a commercial service -> spam

Also user pages (some of them appear in the activity feed). The ones adding pictures to make promotion of their products -> spam

On user pages themselves, look at the links and the profiles. Many are found out that way.

Finally, the big documentation to how to find them: Special:RecentChanges. Can list some blog posts and discussion posts having spam content that weren't in activity feed, but also lists all the users making different changes. After, it's report of users fitting with the spam profiles (check websites on profile etc). Here most of checks are done randomly in the names, and for the moment the checks aren't done for profiles appearing in red. The least thing that can be suspect, I check, and if I find out there are spam things, report.

When back to VSTF report page, I search for the name of the profile in the current reports, and if not added yet, I add it to the report.

Now it's been few days I sometimes look at the report page and I just decided to help. No particular reason.

And that's it :)