Vandalism Combat Policies

**Vandalism** is the act of messing up articles on a Wiki. It is a major issue that every interactive Wiki on the Internet suffers from. There will always be users who seek only to wreck pages for no reason. In addition to our Guidelines, we also have a set of policies which all users must follow, as well as different measures for our Administration team to effectively combat vandalism.

## Principle

Our principle is: **ZERO tolerance** on vandalism. All kinds of vandalism are **strictly forbidden**, and edits which involve any kind of vandalism **must be instantly reverted**.

What we may consider as malicious actions include, but are not limited to: inserting nonsense, gibberish, foul language or inappropriate content, distorting and spamming on articles, creation of spam pages, large-scale removal of contents without legitimate reasons, and renaming articles into gibberish titles.

## Measures

### Undo & Rollback

All users can use the "**Undo**" function on the edit history of articles to revert any obvious vandalism edits. If the case is serious, you should contact Administrators to allow them to assess and correct the concerns.

"**Rollback**" is a tool enabled to all Bureaucrats, Administrators and Content Moderators. This allows quicker reverting of vandalism by instantly reverting all consecutive edits from a user on a page.

### Article Protection

As many anonymous users have previosuly caused serious damage to the Wikia, all contributors must now log in or register before contributing. However, there might also be some registered users who might violate the rules. **Article protection** is the action of locking down articles to prevent certain user groups from editing, renaming or creating them, depending on the protection status. All members on or above Content Moderator rank have the power to deploy protection. There are 2 kinds of protection levels:

* **Semi-protection**: Prevents newly-registered accounts from modifying the protected pages. Auto-confirmed users are not affected. This is widely used when a page is repeatedly vandalized by newcomers.
* **Full Protection**: Prevents anyone other than Content Moderators and higher ranks to modify the locked pages. Commonly used to prevent articles of future locations being created, as well as when vandalism or edit wars involving Auto-confirmed users break out. Certain important pages such as homepage and guidelines are also locked.

### Suspension

If a user repeatedly vandalizes articles, causing widespread damage to the PBB Wikia, Bureaucrats or Administrators may **suspend** the user's rights of editing.

* **Yellow Card**:    Before actually issuing a suspension of editing powers, a **warning message** is usually sent first to the message wall of the user who committed malicious edits from an Administrator or a Content Moderator. Discussion Moderators may also send warnings if they find a user constantly violating the discussion rules on article comments or forum threads.

* **Red Card**:    Users who continue to vandalize after the warning is posted will be **banned** for a couple of weeks. Users who severely damaged the Wikia, such as inserting foul languages into a large portion of the page, or tearing many articles apart in quick succession, will be blocked as well without prior warning. After the first timed suspension expires, if the user vandalizes again, he or she will receive an extended suspension for a month or even longer.

* **2nd Yellow Card**:    Users who have already received a yellow card in one section of the Wiki and then proceed to commit another act which would usually merit a Yellow Card will gain a second yellow card - which is the equivalent of a RED card - and will likewise be **banned** for a couple of weeks. Users who severely damaged the Wikia, such as inserting foul languages into a large portion of the page, or tearing many articles apart in quick succession, will be blocked as well without prior warning. After the first timed suspension expires, if the user vandalizes again, he or she will receive an extended suspension for a month or even longer.

* **Black Card**:     In very extreme cases, such that we are very sure the user will never stop his or her acts of destroying the Wikia, we might consider **permanently exiling** the user. This means not only a block without any expiry date, but also a report to the Community Central of Fandom, and the exiled user may receive further punishments from there, especially if his or her actions harmed the other Wikis as well.