Belisarius

Background

This bot has been developed in an attempt to help capture possible vandalism by identifying edits that:

remove all code
replace content with nonsense or repeated words
include solutions to questions
remove large amounts of text from the post
use certain keywords or offensive language within the edit summary

Why do we need the bot?

The point of the bot is to help identify bad edits and/or potential vandalism made to posts in real time so that the changes can be quickly rolled back.

Implementation

The bot queries the Stack Exchange API every minute to fetch a list of the most recently edited posts. There is logic to check that the post has been edited and that it has been edited by the author.

The post_id from each post is then extracted and the Stack Exchange API is again queried for a list of revisions. To reduce API calls multiple ids are sent at once, and then logic is in place to ensure we are using the latest revision.

Edits can be made up of a title change, body change of a question, tag changes or changes made to the body of an answer. Currently tags are not checked. Instead the title, question body and answer body depending on what has been edited are run through filters, as is the edit summary.

Accounts

The project is running under the user Belisarius in the SOBotics room. A sample image of a report is:

The source code is available on GitHub and suggestions are welcome.

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