8. Further Privileges: Blacklister

When you’ve been working within Charcoal for a while, there are further levels of privileges that you may be interested in getting. One of these is blacklister (formerly known as “code admin”), which deals with our blacklisting systems.

What does blacklister give you?

Blacklister gives you the ability to !!/blacklist and !!/watch independently - that is, without review from another blacklister. If you don’t know what that means, you’re not ready for it yet.

How do you get it?

The grant for blacklister is fully manual. If you’ve contributed a significant number of blacklist items and you seem to know what you’re doing, you’re likely to be given the blacklister role. That’s deliberately not a hard criterion; it’s subjective, because subjective humans are the people granting it.

How do you use it?

Exactly the same as you’ve been using the !!/blacklist and !!/watch commands up to this point, except now your actions will take effect immediately without waiting for the pull request to be reviewed by another blacklister.

To reiterate our current blacklisting guidelines:

• Watching is for keywords or websites that have been seen in spam. Past that, anything is game. Items may be removed as they fall out of use.
• Blacklisting websites should be done when a site has been used repeatedly in spam recently (5+ times in the last 6 months), without any false positives. Make sure at least one of the posts was under the default autoflagging threshold (280).
• Blacklisting keywords is for phrases that get used in spam particularly frequently, and have no false positives.

With all blacklists, remember to search on Stack Exchange as well as on metasmoke to check for false positives. Searching for spam amongst a dataset of spam (i.e. on metasmoke) is more than likely going to get some hits, but a Stack Exchange search indicates probable false positives.

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