What i mean by that is, what this feature does is to determine whether or not a given title shall be blacklisted, based on patterns that are placed in MediaWiki:Titleblacklist, and this way there's no need to list every possible title that you don't want to have. In order to create these patterns, a few characters are used to represent what your pattern is, while the other characters are used as regular text. For instance, the + sign is used to mention that whatever character comes before it, should appear at least once. So, for instance, the pattern:
ab+c
Means tha you're looking for a sequence of abc, and the letter b can appear more than once. So it will match these titles, for example:
- abc
- aabbc
- abbbbbbcccc
But will not match:
- aboc
- abbac
- abk
But, if you want to look for a title that contains one of these character, you need to treat it as an ordinary character in your pattern and not as a special character. Adding the slash before the character is what makes it happen. I'll try to show the difference between an escaped to a non-escaped in the following way:
Sort | Pattern | Titlte match(es)
|
---|
Non-escaped | 1+2 equals 3 | 1+2 equals 3 11+2 equals 3 1111111111+2 equals 3 (and so on)
|
Escaped | 1\+2 equals 3 | 1+2 equals 3
|
I tested this in my wiki with my test account, by uploading a file named potato2.png, and the result was:
The title "
File:Potato2.png" has been banned from creation.
It matches the following blacklist entry:
file\:potato.+