Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-13301-20140129213327/@comment--20140129222822

Hello,

Wikia blocked this string a few weeks ago after noticing an increasing number of cases where this particular CSS snippet was directly leading to obscuring of key skin elements and ads. To answer a point Ciencia made, yes, these cases are indeed mostly on user pages. However, in a number of cases we have seen - also both now on the page Ciencia linked and through our email support system - these elements were being used in a suboptimal way on main NS pages.

As such, we have blocked, for now, this CSS snippet. There is no easy way in our system to block strings in specific namespaces globally. Globally blocking this snippet allows us to gather data on its use and make a better determination of the volume of use of this snippet. If we see enough legitimate and essential use cases that make us revert the block and look at more technically-complex solutions, we will do that.

Just to be clear, the advantage of having a spam filter is that we are able to remove filters if needed just as easily as add filters. There is no such thing as a permanent filter. We are always open to discuss filters people are hitting, adjust them, and sometimes remove them. As I stated a second ago though, we are not yet at the point where we have seen enough use cases that make us feel as though the wiki work that could be done with the snippet is outweighing the TOU-based disadvantages we have seen.

In the interim, we are fine with this particular filter being public knowledge, but we do not see the need to highlight it due to our normal policy regarding spam filters - drawing attention to possible URLs/strings/usernames that are abused often leads to subterfuge.