User blog:TheGoldenPatrik1/Vandalism and Spam, Part 2

''This is the second part of a two blog series on Vandalism and Spam. You can read the first blog here.'' Welcome to my second blog on Vandalism and Spam! In the previous blog, I discussed the basics: what Vandalism and Spam are, who combats them, and how you can help. In this blog, I'll elaborate on how you can help. This is a three step process—finding, reverting, and reporting Vandalism and Spam. So without further ado..

Finding
The first step to deal with Vandalism and Spam is to find it! There are several ways to do this, so I'll examine each one in turn.
 * 1) Home Wikis. Often the best way to find Vandalism and Spam is on your home wiki(s). Vandalism is ever-present, especially on large wikis, and reverting it is a great way to help out. And Spam should always be reported to the VSTF, even if you're an admin.
 * IRC. It is a live monitor of suspicious edits, from which you can also report directly to VSTF by posting  into the chat.
 * Community Central. Keeping a close eye on events here—particularly RecentChanges and the Account Creation Log—is a good way to find Vandals and Spammers.

Reverting
Once you've found some Vandalism or Spam, it's time to revert it. Vandalous edits can easily be undone, and Spam added to an existing page is easy to remove. But the rest of time it's impossible to do much, such as if a user has a masthead full of spam or creates Spam pages.

There are however, a few tools that make reverting vandalism and finding spam a lot easier. For more information about importing scripts from Dev see this blog.
 * AjaxUndo — Allows you to undo an edit with one click.
 * QuickDiff — Quickly view edit diffs to determine if they are vandalism.
 * Rollback — Allows you to undo multiple edits by one user, similar to the actual Rollback tool.
 * UnhideUserMasthead — Great for detecting User profile spam by unhiding the user masthead.

Reporting
Now that you've found some Vandalism or Spam and reverted what you can, it's time to report it! But wait a second — before you rush off to report it, make sure that it's worthwhile to report. The VSTF do not always take action because some things are outside their control — they are Vandal and Spam-hunters not global administrators or FANDOM Staff. So to report something to them that they can't deal with is counterintuitive to both parties — you don't get the problem resolved and they have their time wasted. So here are a few questions you should ask yourself to make sure it's worthwhile. Once you've decided for sure that it's Vandalism or Spam, you're ready to report it. To help with this process, I have another tool to share with you — VSTFReport. This adds three buttons to a user's contributions page that allow you to quickly report Vandalism, Spam, and User profile headers by autofilling the forms of those respective pages. You can also manually fill out the easy-to-use forms.
 * Vandalism
 * Are there any local Admins active? Check this using Special:Listadmins.
 * Is the user trying to edit in good faith or are they actually destroying content? Remember that inserting controversial information isn't Vandalism.
 * Spam
 * Does the user have legitimate contributions? Typically spammers only have a few edits and only promote their spam.
 * Is the user trying to get me to buy something? If yes, it's probably spam. If no, it's probably not spam.

Conclusion
So now you know how to Find, Revert, and Report both Vandalism and Spam! If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask — here, via Special:Contact, or on the Message Wall of a VSTF member.