Help:Notes for admins

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Home icon grey.png   ▶ Help:Main page ▶ Notes for admins

This page outlines basic instructions and tools for wiki admins. All Team Kodi members are admins (If you don't have access, poke Ned about this) and should have access to these tools, but please use them responsibly and with due caution. The way Mediawiki works, changes are applied live and right away.


Note: In the same way that you can undo a page edit, you can also undo nearly all admin actions, so even if you make a mistake, don't panic ;)

A little background

Interface

These pages allow you to change the interface of the wiki. Like normal pages, they contain a history of all changes made to those interface settings, and you can even revert a change you make if it is a mistake, or view how something looked in the past. All users can see these pages, but only admins can make changes.

  • MediaWiki:MenuSidebar - contains the links/formatting for the global side menu.
  • File:Logo.png - To change the sidebar logo, upload a new version (135x135px) on this page.
  • Special:AllMessages - These pages allow nearly every text string on the wiki to be configured. Most are set to the default, but you can filter the list by "Modified" to see anything customized for our specific wiki.
    • This includes both global and skin specific CSS files and javascript files for all users. For example:
    • MediaWiki:Common.css - Most of the CSS classes are defined here
    • MediaWiki:Common.js - Global javascript.
    • MediaWiki:Sitenotice - Display a global message on the top of every page, like when a new version is released.

Custom wiki skin

At least two different "skins" have been made for the wiki to make it look consistent with the main site at http://kodi.tv . Both skins are actually installed and you can try them out by changing your skin in your user-specific settings (Special:Preferences). Neither are enabled by default because the version 1.19 of MediaWiki is too old for either skin to function properly.

User accounts

Approving and creating accounts

Currently we use a system where users request an account and an admin approves that request. This is mainly just an anti-spam measure and not meant to regulate who can edit or not.

See Help:Confirming accounts for details.


Both admins and non-admin users can also make additional accounts, either for themselves (like when running a wiki bot) or on the behalf of other users. A user simply goes to Special:UserLogin and clicks on "Create an account" while logged in. This allows existing users to vouch for other users without having to wait on an admin. Anyone who does this for another person should be sure to ask that the new user change their password ASAP.

Making more admins

Admins can make other users into admins by using Special:UserRights. For the time being, please only make other Team Kodi members into admins. Chances are that if we can trust them with full admin access then we probably want to invite them to the team, anyways.

The options are granular, but normally you just want to select administrator, (most of the common admin functions), bureaucrat (allows a user to grant or remove user rights) and check user (allow admins to see IP addresses for spam checks).


Other options

Widget editor - allows people to make widgets without being an admin. All users flagged as admins already have widget access, so you don't need to worry about that. Because this allows people to inject raw HTML into wiki pages, this is only something admins should have access to.

Patroller - this is an old way to help prevent spam. It's not really needed anymore, thanks to the ConfirmAccount feature, but the idea is you can manually mark someone as having their edits as "patrolled". Admins can look at Special:RecentChanges, select "hide patrolled edits", and see edits by brand new users. They can then mark individual edits as patrolled. Marking someone as a patroller means you've seen them edit and you pretty much are 100% sure that they're not a spammer, and their edits will automatically be considered "patrolled".

bot - this marks an account as a wiki bot. An automated program that does lots of boring edits that are automatically filtered out of Special:RecentChanges. The program interfaces with the wiki as if they were a user, hence this flag to mark them as a bot and not a normal user.

Blocking and banning

In the unfortunate event that a user must be blocked, please consider a temp block before a permeant block, just as you would for the user forums or other account areas. Specific pages can also be protected as an alternative to blocking an entire account, in the event that there is a dispute over a specific page's content.

Spam

Since spambots have been pretty much stopped dead by the account request system, this really isn't used much anymore, but manual URL banning can be done using these pages. URLs can also be whitelisted.

The master blacklist is taken from Wikimedia's global list (meta:Spam blacklist), then additional entries are applied from the English Wikipedia (wikipedia:MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist), and finally our local black/white lists are applied to that:

Further reading - Deleting pages, protecting pages, etc

Since this page only scratches the surface of the wiki admin tools, be sure to check out the MediaWiki manual for additional details. This includes instructions on how to delete pages (or restore, as even deletions are not permeant unless specifically purged), projecting pages from being edited by non-admins, and more.