Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

When an abuse filter is tested on past changes from RC, the edit summary (the “summary” AF variable) is filled with the contents of rc_comment (which is e.g. “/* Section name */ new section”). However, when the filter is really applied during an edit which adds a new section (using action=edit&section=new), the hook is called with $summary without any of the section syntax, e.g. just “Section name”.

1) The inconsistency is wrong by itself, because it makes filter development and testing quite difficult.
2) I would _really_ like to be able to recognize edits to sections (and creating new sections) because of spambot filtering. (E.g. not many humans create new userpages as action=edit&section=new, but many bots do exactly that.)

Not sure about the proper way to fix that, though. This seems more like a lower-level inconsistency in MediaWiki (the EditFilterMerged[Content] hook versus what gets stored in the RC table). Not sure if the hook behavior could change, even in such a small aspect...

On second thought, this might be really just a bug in EditPage: When you _edit_ an already existing section, the hook is called with the whole $summary = '/* Section name */ user comment', but when you create a _new_ section, the hook is called with just $summary = 'Section name'. This does not seem to be logical.