User blog comment:H-Man Havoc/Semi-Protected Pages/@comment-743796-20110328144324/@comment-737801-20110328172521

This is however because of many different reasons. First remember that Spart and myself both live in the United States, me near Chicago so CST, and Spart on the west coast in Santa Clara, which is PST. So we are asleep and I don't know of Spart even logged in last night. We can't be on 24/7 despite what you may think, we aren't machines.

As to your support, I would have to say that it hasn't even in the slightest. Vandalism on this scale is extremely rare, if ever seen and usually by one person who in all honestly can't seem to grow up and gets his kicks by undoing the hard work of others. Immaturity at its finest I suppose.

Frankly I also have to agree with Commdor, we can't block page creation, we can't predict what articles will be vandalized, and Spart and myself can't be on 24/7, which is why again I'm thankful we are on Wikia who does have a staff that can handle these things. Last time this happened, it was caught before it got to this scale, but apparently he caught everyone with their pants down.

Jake was pretty quick about undoing them, and even then I still can't see everything that was done. The guy probably had open multiple tabs of multiple pages and just committed vandalism as quickly as possible, which is how it's usually done in cases like this. Some people will go to lengths to get a rise out of others and get a rise themselves. While I had thought I'd seen everything, apparently the immaturity of some people just is so out there, that you can't expect that. Your theory itself seems sound about how he went about it, but frankly it still isn't enough to justify protecting a huge number of pages.

The only way this person could have been stopped is semi-protecting the entire wiki, and Spart and myself have already given opinions on that which can only be described as this, "Hell no". Apologies for the language but that is the most accurate descriptor. Semi-protecting the wiki was probably the only way to stop this and again Spart and myself have already given opinions on that. Most Unregestered users are actually nice, decent, and generally fix small things that people overlook. Sometimes the "how did that get overlooked" or "how did I miss that" sort of deal.

Also with your "temporary full-locks" you would have argued for 24-hours, which would have expired a long time before this guy started up. If we protect every article that is vandalized, then good edits may not happen as again sometimes URs add things to articles that are not only good, but do add necessary and usually overlooked information. Even with this, I still don't see a reason for semi-protecting, or even worse, fully protecting every article, which is exactly what would have had to happen to prevent this spree.

The only reason it went on as long as it did was the staff wasn't contacted, or didn't pick up on it, Spart and myself were offline, and to be honest, he got lucky. Nothing more or less than that.