MediaWiki's spam blacklist filters on the URL, not on the account that adds it. Once a domain matches an entry on that list, no edit containing it can be saved anywhere on Wikipedia — not by the editor who triggered the listing, not by someone who has never heard of them, not by a reporter trying to cite the same domain months later for an unrelated article. The block doesn't check who is asking.
A domain rarely earns that listing for one bad edit. XLinkBot handles the smaller cases automatically: a link added by a new or unconfirmed account, in a pattern its filters read as promotional, gets reverted within minutes, with an explanation left on the editor's talk page. Most people take the hint and stop. The ones who don't — who add the same domain to a fifth article under one account and a tenth under another — build exactly the record a formal blacklist request needs: several pages, several accounts, no improvement to any article beyond the link itself.
We inherited an account mid-campaign once, after the freelancer who'd been running it moved to another job. Over five weeks he had added a furniture retailer's own catalogue pages as "further reading" to eleven articles on furniture design and manufacturing — none of them about the retailer, all of them a plausible place to leave a link to a product page. Four accounts carried the pattern between them. XLinkBot had already reverted six of the additions before a volunteer filed a request at the spam blacklist noticeboard, diffs attached, asking that the domain be added outright.
A blacklist entry doesn't expire when the account that earned it does.
By the time an administrator acted on the request, the domain was blacklisted across every project that shares the list, not just English Wikipedia. The eleven articles kept their prose; only the links came out, and a genuine secondary source replaced two of them once someone went looking. The domain also stayed unusable for us going forward. Months later, citing the retailer's own site as a primary source for its founding date, on the retailer's own article, produced the same error message everyone else was getting. We filed a whitelist request for that one page, attached the sentence it supported, and waited eleven days for an administrator to approve it.
Eleven links to a catalogue did nothing for the retailer's notability while they lasted, and cost the account that placed them the benefit of the doubt for months after the domain came down. A source is worth citing once, where it supports a claim a reader would otherwise have to take on faith — not scattered across every article a keyword search turns up.
