Musings

re:RC Patrol

Great! RC Patrollers are always useful. First I will link you to Recent Changes Patrol which is the guideline on how to patrol the recent changes. Now, you can do it manually, though I don't recommend it, it takes far longer and you need to check lots of edits. The best way of doing it is using one of the tools designed to help combat vandals. There is a list of the tools available here. They all work well but I use Lupin's anti-vandal tool because I got used to it and you don't need to download it. The others also work well (though some may only work on certain operating systems or web browsers). When you have found some vandalism, the best way of removing it is to revert it. You go to a previous edit (through the history) and then edit a previous version. You can tell it's a prior version because there will be a red/pink notice that tells you at the top of the page. This way you can be sure that you haven't missed any of the vandalism. Many of the tools will have a button that allows this with 1 click, or a rollback which undoes all the edits by that person, incase they made more than 1 edit in a row (but if they have edited that article in the past and someone has changed it since, it won't undo those edits). Once you have removed the vandalism you should warn the user. Leave a warning on their talk page by putting a template on. Theres a list of the templates on the RC Patrol page. Generally you just go through the warnings (test1 through test4). You can leave a warning on someone's talk page by using the code

{{subst:test1-n|the page they vandalised}} ~~~~

If they have a warning before (usually in the past week) then you can skip test1 and go straight to the relevant warning. Once someone has received test4 (their last warning) and vandalised since, you can report them to Administrator Intervention against vandalism where an admin will then check them out and (probably) block them. That's pretty much it. If you have any more questions feel free to ask. See you round. James086^{Talk | Contribs} 12:31, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]