Administrators have the option of enabling a site-wide semi- or sysop only protection for up to 12 hours at a time. It can be accessed by going to Special:Protectsite.
This tool may only be used in the event of:
- Extreme vandalism by one or more users that occurs at a fast enough pace that administrator(s) cannot keep up with
- A wiki-wide update (for example, if major changes were being made to templates that would affect 500 articles)
The wiki should only be fully protected if the vandalism is caused by multiple autoconfirmed users. In other cases a site-wide semi-protection should be used instead. The length of the protection is generally decided at the discretion of the administrator enabling the protection. Abuse of this feature can lead to the revoking of sysop privileges. All site-wide protections, semi- or full, must be posted on the Yew Grove and reviewed by the community to determine whether or not they were necessary as well as to decide if any recourse against the administrator(s) in question are necessary. The enabler of protectsite should start the thread, give a brief overview of the situation, and list some of the attackers leading up to it.
The protecting administrator must also notify the wiki of the protection via {{Wiki Messages}}. The information required includes the length of the protection (how long it will take to expire) and whether it is a semi- or full protection. It is also recommended that administrators specify the reason for protecting the wiki in the site notice.