Thread:Ollie231213/@comment-961279-20180109151810/@comment-961279-20180114194115

In terms of credentials, consider that I requested the bare minimum user rights that would be necessary for the task and was willing to keep the initial cleanup limited to you could verify what I was doing before I continued. But more importantly, I've been a member of Wikia for nine years, starting in September 2008. About 75% of the wikis listed on my profile page are wikis that I was promoted to admin as a result of helping clean up vandalism or are a wiki that I adopted after cleaning it up and to be there in case further vandalism occurred.

One of those, Simpsons Wiki, had been subjected to a "scorched earth" campaign where the former admins wanted to make sure nothing was left after they were gone, so they started vandalizing the wiki, blocking people to force them to go to their new wiki or falsely telling people they'd be blocked in order to make them leave, and quite a few other things, such as being hypocritical by blocking people on their new wiki for vandalism while they were committing vandalism themselves. I organized the adoption of Simpsons Wiki, and three of us became co-Bureaucrats/Admins together as part of the adoption.

As for changing a default setting to prevent editing until an account is vetted, I would have to ask Fandom staff if that's even possible. You've already got anonymous editing disabled and you could set protection on every page so that someone would have to have an account for a certain amount of time before they would be considered "autoconfirmed", which would then let them edit a page. But making it so accounts have to be manually approved? I just don't know if the MediaWiki software supports that.

Finally, in order to set blocks to prevent further sockpuppet accounts, I'd have to turn to Fandom staff for that as well. I was contacted a few years ago to see if I wanted to be part of the VSTF, but I think a webcam and Skype was required at the time and I didn't have either one. If I had been accepted, I'd have the ability to run a report to see what IP addresses are being used and figure out what rangeblocks are needed.

The rangeblocks Fandom staff would set are dependent upon those IP addresses. If they're coming from an ISP that uses dynamic addressing or from just a couple of computers, that's simple. If a proxy server is being used, it gets more complex. The key is not to set rangeblocks so wide that there's collateral damage and no one can edit here.

If you like, I'll go through the block log and user list to compile the accounts he's used since he's really obvious about the names he chooses, then send it to Fandom staff to see if us with the two points I can't do by myself.