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Thechange filter is a tool used to allowadministrators to set controls on certain types ofbad changes. This page calls it the "change filter" instead of the "abuse filter" because not everything that it stops isabuse.
TheAbuse Filter extension was developed byWerdna with support from theWikimedia Foundation and went live on the Simple English Wikipedia in October 2010.
This extension allows rules to be written to apply to all actions that are taken. These rules can include things like "users with less than 350 changes are stopped frommoving pages to titles which contain thisregular expression: /poop/". Of course, the rules can get quite a bit more complicated.
Log entries (a record of what changes have been caught by filters) can be seen by all users, but some filters cannot. Every user will be able to see a short description of what each filter is designed to stop.
Change filters can cause a lot of damage if they stop changes that are helpful. Because of this, new filters can be tested for a few days (in "log only" mode, which only records the changes that the filter detects) before being used (in "throttle", "warn", or "disallow" modes). If the change filter makes a mistake, it can be reportedhere.