Botnet

Wikipedia:Bot owners%27 noticeboard

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This is a message board for coordinating and discussing bot-related issues on Wikipedia (also including other programs interacting with the mediawiki software). Although its target audience is bot owners, any user is welcome to leave a message or join the discussion here.

This is not the place for requests for bot approvals or requesting that tasks be done by a bot. It is also not the place for general questions about the mediawiki software (such as the use of templates, etc.), which have generally a best chance of being answered at WP:VPT.

Archives
Archive 1 (2006) • Archive 2 (2007) • Archive 3 (2008) • Archive 4 (2008-9) • Archive 5 (2010)

ArticleAlertBot

The User:ArticleAlertbot has been down for a few months now, due to some sort of login problem. The coder, User:B. Wolterding, has not logged in since March, and thus is not available to fix this. I believe in April, a couple of users discussed the issue with the bot's operator, User:Legoktm, and User:Tedder agreed to try to fix this. However, he appears not to have a toolserver account (or something like that), so he has been unable to do this. Is anyone here willing to give it a try? I'm sure many WikiProjects would appreciate it. (I posted a similar request in the village pump in late March, but nobody replied). Brambleclawx 00:47, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

I had passed the code onto FinalRapture who was going to work with Tedder...so I assume he is still working on it. Anyone with any java experience should be able to fix the bot, I believe error its in the framework itself, but I have absolutely no java experience. LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 05:46, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

I can do database reports, they wont be as pretty as AAB, but if you give me a list of categories, I can generate the cross lists of them, IE all articles that are in Category:Articles for deletion and what ever category your wikiproject uses for its tracking purposes. β^_command 05:49, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Legoktm, do you have the actual java source code? Can you provide it to me in a tarball or zip? It'd have to be the .java, not the .class files. tedder (talk) 06:18, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

It's in the jar file, I know where the code is that needs changing, I just don't know how to change it and compile it or whatever. FinalRapture - † ☪ 15:27, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

The jar contains the .java? Well, send it to me, I'll see if that's the case. tedder (talk) 15:39, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Email sent. FinalRapture - † ☪ 15:58, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Any update on fixing it? If the only issue is a login problem due to an API update, I'm willing to take a stab at it if someone sends me the code. VernoWhitney (talk) 18:39, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Hi there! Just checking in to see whether there is any progess with getting the Article AlertBot up and running again. Betacommand, thanks for the offer but the categories in some projects are all over the place. For many, more complete results are achieved by cross-referencing with the Project banner on the Talk page--Plad2 (talk) 22:02, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

RaptureBot

In my opinion RaptureBot is not checking sufficiently before replacing Wikipedia images with Commons images. I have reverted several that popped up in my watchlist which have incorrect attribution on Commons.[1][2][3][4]. Incorrect attribution is cause for deletion on Commons which could leave the articles without images. The bot should check that the attribution on Commons matches the attribution here before replacing. At the very least it should be tagging the files with the information that they do not match to warn administrators not to delete the en.wiki version without checking, but probably the right thing is not to replace the image until the problem is resolved.

There are also several complaints on the bots talk page that the bot has replaced an image with one at Commons threatened with deletion. This really should not be happening. This replacement of a fair use image immediately caused the Wikipedia image to be deleted. This was despite a challenge to the copyright tag on Commons. Potentially, this could have resulted in both images being deleted.

Since the bot owner is showing no inclination to pro-actively clean up these errors him/herself, leaving it to others to sort out, I think that the bot should be forbidden from doing any further runs until tighter checking is implemented and approved. SpinningSpark 18:04, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

AFAICT, the bot hasn't run that task since the operator said he would fix this. Mr.Z-man 21:52, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Possibly, but they haven't agreed to fix this or this. SpinningSpark 23:35, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

It is not enough to say that changes will be made on the next run. Bot owners are obliged to fix problems that are brought to their attention themselves, not leave it to others. Anyone not willing to do this should not be allowed to run bots. In my view they should also search the bot's edits for further examples of the same error, even if the original error was already fixed by the reporter. Neither of these things seem to be happening as far as I can tell. SpinningSpark 09:01, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

It should probably be noted that I also ran into issues with the bot after it was approved Talk page discussion, although was busy with course work at the time and didn't get to follow up after the owner said he would look into it, so I probably should later today. Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page · Contribs)} 02:23, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Peachy framework almost done...

So after a few weeks of work, the new PHP framework that was called for above is reaching a public beta point. It's got most of the common functions that bots use, and those are fairly stable. The only things left to do are to fill in the remaining obscure functions and plugins, do bugfixing, etc before the stable 1.0 is released. In the beta stage, we need multiple people to test out the framework using their own bots, as this is the only way many of the bugs will be found. It can be downloaded here, and the manual is here. When bugs are found, they can be listed here, and feel free to submit a patch. I hope it works well for all of you. :) (X! · talk)  · @082  ·  00:57, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

See also WP:Peachy. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 22:04, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Looking for a BOT

Does anyone happen to know of a BOT that removes Red Links from articles. --intraining ^{Jack In} 23:14, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

In general redlinks should not be removed without a reason. You need to specify exactly what it is you want to remove. SpinningSpark 23:44, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Another possibility is mw:Extension:RemoveRedlinks. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 00:06, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Redlinks should only be removed if they have been checked and it is certain that the subject is not notable, and will therefore never have an article. A bot could not do this, so this task is not suitable for a bot. - EdoDodo ^talk 14:40, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Lightbot is being considered for re-approval

ArbCom is considering lifting the restriction imposed in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Date delinking#Lightmouse automation, subject to BAG approval of Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Lightbot 4. As part of BAG's mandate is to gauge community consensus for proposed bot tasks and Lightbot's former activities were highly controversial, I invite all interested editors to join that discussion to ensure that community consensus is in fact in favor of this task. Thanks. Anomie⚔ 17:32, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Preference to mark all edits minor by default going away as a result of bugzilla:24313

During the code review for the removal of this preference setting, it was noted that it may effect bots that were using this setting. In this case, the bots would need to be modified to explicitly mark their edits as minor. I'm sure this would be a fairly simple code addition, but it could also be accomplished through javascript as explained in this VPT thread. –xeno^talk 12:50, 15 July 2010 (UTC) [with thanks to User:Department of Redundancy Department for pointing this out to me]

XMPP's implications for bots

Looking at bug 17450, it would appear there is some possibility that we could get an XMPP-based XML-format recent changes feed that would include revision text. I wouldn't suppose this bug would be too hard to fix, considering that MediaWiki already has IRC recent changes feed capability. Anyway, the revision text would be quite useful, since it would eliminate the need for bots to hit Wikipedia's API for said text. Therefore, I'll probably end up creating an extension, or finishing this one. Does anyone have a particular XMPP PHP library they think is particularly good, and would recommend using for this project? I found this one, but their SVN repository doesn't seem to be working at the moment. Hopefully, with the right library, we can make that Jabber shit happen soon! Thanks, Tisane ^talk/_stalk 15:47, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

I added a Bugzilla comment inquiring about this, so maybe we'll hear back soon. I'll let you know if/when I come up with a working extension. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 15:56, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm not too keen on XMPP, but is it basically similar to an IRC feed, except that it sends an XML message? If that's the case, why not have an alternate IRC feed channel that sends JSON-encoded messages in the meantime while this is being implemented? (X! · talk)  · @083  ·  00:59, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Maybe we should do that, but I think this extension is also supposed to implement such UDP feeds in addition to XMPP. It would seem that XMPP messages have a higher length limit than IRC messages. Specifically, from what I hear, the XMPP Core does not specify a hardcoded limit on the size of XMPP stanzas. However, many XMPP servers enable the server administrator to configure a stanza size limit in order to prevent abuse of the service. IRC length limits were an issue raised earlier when I suggested including revision text in an IRC feed. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 01:21, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Barelink converter like DumZiBoT

Do you think there would be support for a bot to replace barelinks with bot-generated titles, much as DumZiBoT used to? Tisane ^talk/_stalk 19:10, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Major API breakage in the latest MediaWiki update

An hour or so ago, we were apparently updated to r70061. This seems to have broken the use of "max" as a value for the various limit parameters in the API; attempting to use them will now give a fatal error. This has already been reported as bug 24564http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24564, hopefully they fix it soon. If necessary, a workaround is to use explicit limit values in your API queries (typically 5000 for flagged bots, 500 for some expensive queries). Anomie⚔ 03:49, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Tim has already rolled out the fix for this issue onto the WMF cluster. Peachey88 ^{(T · C)} 06:26, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Not completely fixed, the backlinks, deletedrevs, and revisions modules are still b0rken. Anomie⚔ 14:43, 28 July 2010 (UTC)