User talk:Krellis/Archive/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

Automated message to bot owners

As a result of discussion on the village pump and mailing list, bots are now allowed to edit up to 15 times per minute. The following is the new text regarding bot edit rates from Wikipedia:Bot Policy:

Until new bots are accepted they should wait 30-60 seconds between edits, so as to not clog the recent changes list and user watchlists. After being accepted and a bureaucrat has marked them as a bot, they can edit at a much faster pace. Bots doing non-urgent tasks should edit approximately once every ten seconds, while bots who would benefit from faster editing may edit approximately once every every four seconds.

Also, to eliminate the need to spam the bot talk pages, please add Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard to your watchlist. Future messages which affect bot owners will be posted there. Thank you. --Mets501 02:59, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

A short message...

So, are you all helping everyone all day, every day? LegoAxiom1007 05:03, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Yup! That's the beautiful part of being a bot - he never has to take a break, and never gets tired! —Krellis (Talk) 12:08, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Bot problem?

Hi Krellis. When looking over my archive index, I noticed the bot did not fill in the link for the alternating row, regardless of the fact that I made the template flawless — or did I? Any idea what's up? —« ANIMUM » 16:58, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

The tiniest of errors - I had to look a couple of times to find it myself. You had "%%link %%" instead of "%%link%%" in the definition of the first row. The bot didn't recognize it with the extra space in there, hence the broken behavior. I've removed the space and re-run the bot and all looks well now. Let me know if you run into anything else unusual! —Krellis (Talk) 18:27, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Ah. Thanks. —« ANIMUM » 02:34, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for fixing the archive indexer mask. I appreciate it, and also the index. --Rbraunwa 22:09, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

No problem. To be honest, I only notice because it was causing trouble with the bot. There's a bug of some sort with the particular way it was messed up in your case that I'll have to track down in the code. So I should be thanking you for finding the problem, however inadvertently! :) —Krellis (Talk) 00:43, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

count is off

Somehow the count of the number of IPvandals is incorrect, as can be seen from this diff. Errabee 15:46, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

One of the IPs on the page at that time wasn't using {{IPvandal}}, so the bot couldn't count it. It relies on the templates used, so the count isn't always perfect, but it's usually pretty close. —Krellis (Talk) 18:26, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

User:HBC NameWatcherBot

Hey, the above bot is mispelling actually in its WP:UAA reports, and also, when it reports names, sometimes its comments say "this name was reported for containing the word .35 instead of the word itself, not sure why this is but it might be what it is supposed to do? SGGH ^speak! 22:19, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Fixed the misspelling of "actually". I think the .{35} thing you're thinking of is actually BetacommandBot - the reason I think (and not operating the bot, I can't say for sure) that happens is because he's using regular expression matches. .{35} is a regular expression that matches any string of 35 characters. So I think the bot is just reporting the exact regular expression it matched, even though the text says it's the "literal expression". You might want to ping Betacommand about that particular one. Thanks for the feedback! —Krellis (Talk) 23:30, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Award for the BOT

I awarded the AIV bot a barnstar but didn't know exactly where to put it for that particular bot. You see, with some bots, you don't really put them on the talkpages but straight into the userspace, which is what I've done there. Hope that's OK. Lradrama 18:15, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

That's a great place to put it, thanks for the note, and thanks for the barnstar on behalf of helperbot3! :) —Krellis (Talk) 18:27, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

AIV helpbot left out duration

For some reason, in this edit, it left out the duration of the block. --(Review Me) R ^ParlateContribs_@ (Let's Go Yankees!) 02:36, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know, it looks like the format of Special:Ipblocklist was changed slightly, I've updated the regex used and posted the updated code. —Krellis (Talk) 12:19, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

New code

Thanks for letting me know. Will update now. Thanks! — E ^talk_bots 21:32, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

User:HBC NameWatcherBot is down?

I think User:HBC NameWatcherBot is down. Secretlondon 18:03, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, it seems to have lost its connection to IRC, which killed the whole bot. Re-started now, thanks for the heads-up. —Krellis (Talk) 18:04, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

The bot didn't clear reported users after blocking - 11:00 25/08/07

Um... I manually cleared the log. I will keep an eye out, if it continues I will contact the bot operator. LessHeard vanU 23:04, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

The bot's activation string/parameters was changed, causing it to be unable to find it and thus not to service the page. I've fixed it, and the bots are working again. —Krellis (Talk) 23:23, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks... so it isn't magic, then? ;~) LessHeard vanU 23:30, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

216.124.153.98

If he was blocked 2 days ago, how is he making these edits now? --Amaraiel 14:57, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I think I see the confusion - the bot wasn't saying the IP was blocked 2 days ago, but that it was blocked for 2 days. I suppose the word "for" really should be in the edit summaries there, though, oddly, it's never come up before. So don't worry, that wasn't anything bad, it was actually good - an admin blocked the user based on your report, so that IP can't continue vandalising now. Thanks for your work combating vandalism! —Krellis (Talk) 15:11, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Internet

The tubes are being neglected. Nearly every IETF protocol is not under the purview of an WP, and they plainly require some coordination - Most are unsourced messes or simple summaries of RFCs. Would you have any interest in formally joining up to help us coordinate some initial fixes? I spotted that you were a repeat editor on SMTP, so I figured I oughta ask. MrZaius^talk 13:14, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, but I'm mostly inactive on Wikipedia these days. SMTP is certainly an area of my professional interest, but I mostly stick to more occasional vandalism reversion than any heavy-duty editing. —Krellis (Talk) 17:18, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Bots and spelling

The namewatcher bot should warn administrators to ensure that names are actually violations before blocking them, rather than insure. DS 21:08, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks. Couldn't find it for a minute, since it's in a different tense than the way you worded it :) —Krellis (Talk) 15:35, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Malfunction

The bot left a note here, but it did nto say what the note was, just Note. Mr.Z-man 23:01, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Odd. I can't see any obvious reason it would have done that, and it's too late for me to look it up in the logs now, sorry. If you see something like this happen again, let me know on my talk, where I'll be likely to see it sooner, and I'll take a look. —Krellis (Talk) 17:52, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Question

When the bot merges things, does it do so chonologically? If so, then in this edit it merged my entry with another, even though I reported it first. (Probably doesn't matter; just wondering if this is odd for it.) -WarthogDemon 21:43, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I think it works top to bottom. ((1 == 2) ? (('Stop') : ('Go')) 22:28, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Correct, it just uses the order on the page, with entries lower on the page being merged to entries higher on the page. Order generally doesn't matter on AIV and UAA, as long as the reports are there. —Krellis (Talk) 17:54, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Category:IP addresses used for vandalism

I notice that the AIV helper bot 3 uses the category for categorizing IP addresses. There is a CFD discussion ongoing about the category. [1] Please discuss the use of the category there. Royalbroil 16:19, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I didn't add that particular category to be used by the bots, so I'm not sure I have much to add to the discussion. If the category is deleted, it just needs to be removed from the special IPs list that the bots use to avoid confusion. —Krellis (Talk) 19:38, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

HBCNamewatcher bots

I think the name watcher bots are down - no edits since 17th October. Secretlondon 05:45, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Looks like it may have lost its connection to IRC - I've restarted it and it looks like it's working normally now (though no names worthy of reporting yet). Thanks for letting me know. —Krellis (Talk) 13:51, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

AIV helperbots dead?

The AIV helperbots seem to be down? Cheers --Pak21 16:33, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

It looks like someone removed or changed the "User-reported" header from the page, which is required to be present for the bots to function properly. Once the header was replaced, the bots returned to functionality. I haven't been able to find the exact edit where it got messed up, and don't have time to hunt for it right now, but that's what the logs show happening. —Krellis (Talk) 18:02, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah, there was actually a slight bug in the bot code (well, it's arguable whether it was a bug or just being too strict in what it was looking for), that was causing problems with the FixInstructions task. I've made the code more liberal so that this shouldn't happen again, and posted an update of the bot code for the other operators. Thanks for pointing the problem out! —Krellis (Talk) 12:44, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

helperbot feature request

Hey. I've made a feature request at User:HBC AIV helperbot/Feature requests. Can you check it out? Thanks. --- RockMFR 00:31, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Does the <noinclude> block that's around the backlog tag not take care of that? I don't know enough about how categories and transclusions interact to say for sure, but it would seem to me that the fact that it's inside a noinclude already should do the trick... —Krellis (Talk) 14:27, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Oops. Nevermind. The noinclude tag had been removed and I had been looking at an old revision. Ignore this :) --- RockMFR 18:55, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

No problem! :) —Krellis (Talk) 18:59, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Re: WP:UAA edit summary

Re: your message: I'm glad that I fixed it. =) I noticed other admins manually removing names and leaving unusual comments about it, so I took a look at what the page looked like before the bots stopped working and figured that might be the problem. Here's the edit that changed it. I left the editor a note about not doing that and letting the bot handle it. On a side note, if you're fixing the code, you might want to look at User talk:ST47/Archive8#HBC AIV helperbot4 bug where I stumbled on a bot bug. -- Gogo Dodo 23:13, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for the heads-up on that one, I believe I've fixed it (as simple as changing the .*? regex condition that matched into $2 into .+?, so the bot will just skip over that particular type of malformed entry), I'll update the code on wiki after I've run for a bit and made sure all is good. Thanks! —Krellis (Talk) 12:55, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Helperbot problem

Hi, you need to check this out: diff. If you hit the revision which the bot had posted, you'll see that the bot added a rougue = symbol, causing the template to display with the username User:Example User. It's not a particularly harmful problem so I haven't switched the bot off, but it is still a problem that requires fixing. While I'm here, though, very impresive work bot coding/maintaining! Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 20:06, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the bot error wasn't putting in the equals sign, as that was actually part of the username (see here), the error is that usernames containing "=" and other special characters need to be put into the template slightly differently. I've updated the code (a 2 character fix) and will verify that it's working the next time the bot makes a report. Thanks for pointing this out! —Krellis (Talk) 20:23, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh, by the way, that's the NameWatcherBot, not the helperbots, that had the problem :) —Krellis (Talk) 20:24, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm just up too late ((:30 pm here in UK... may not seem bad but after a tiring week...) Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 21:25, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Opera Project and Archive indexerbot

Hi. This is just a note to say that I have put the Archive indexer bot code on the Talk page of the Opera Project (42 archive files covering 2004-2007) - and I'm hoping, without a huge amount of confidence, I've done it properly! Please let me know if I've done anything catastrophic! Best regards. -- Kleinzach 03:17, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Nothing catastrophic, but not quite perfect either :) I've updated it so that it should be correct now, and I'll take a look at the next run to make sure it gets picked up. Enjoy, and feel free to let me know if you find any problems! —Krellis (Talk) 12:19, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Looks good now - the archive index was generated on this run of the indexerbot, and should get updated as appropriate going forward. Enjoy! —Krellis (Talk) 16:43, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Looks terrific! This is going to be very useful. Thanks very much. How often will the bot run in future? Obviously this is not something that's going to be needed every day - once a week or two weeks would be fine. Best. -- Kleinzach 00:03, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

The bot runs twice per day, at 11:23 and 23:23 US Eastern Time. So anything that gets archived should be in the index within 12 hours at the most. It's not needed nearly that often on most pages, you're right, but it runs that frequently so it picks up changes on any of the pages that it services. Enjoy! —Krellis (Talk) 01:00, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Fine. Thanks again. -- Kleinzach 13:57, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

You're most welcome! —Krellis (Talk) 15:28, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Cadderly Bonaduce

An article that you have been involved in editing, Cadderly Bonaduce, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cadderly Bonaduce. Thank you.   — Jeff G. (talk|contribs) 09:05, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

User Talk:Wogsland

Hi - what a snazy robot! I've a quick question: You deleted my report of User:Wogsland because (s)he was already the subject of a block. However, as I said in my report, I am aware of the current block - my report related to vandalism of his own talk page while the block was in force. Can you suggest where I can make this report while a block is in place?

My report was:

* {{vandal|Wogsland}} - On User talk:Wogsland; vandalism after final warning, vandalism directly after release of block. In this case the block hasn't yet been released, but his response to the block on his user talk page is "Wikipedia Admins are Assholes! ... ergo you will find I have stopped contributing." and his edit summary for this is "(C'mon and delete my account or something for this you fucktards!)" As his current block has yet to expire, it may be best to simply delete the abusive comments from his talk page and wait for the current block to run its course. But I didn't want to delete the comments myself and felt administrators should at least be aware of his latest post. . B1atv 05:59, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. B1atv 06:12, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I apologize for not getting back to you on this last month, this page tends to get lost among my watchlist. I've started a thread about this on WT:AIV, as I'm not 100% sure of the best solution. In that thread, I propose two possible places to post such messages, and hopefully some others will have feedback soon as well. —Krellis (Talk) 20:12, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

User talk:HubertNugz

As the user above also suggest, I have problems with a user that is already blocked using his talk page for personal attacks against me. [2] However, your bot is removing my request to have an admin look at the situation. [3] What am I supposed to do? Arthur 19:33, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

As I mentioned in my just-written reply above, I'm not 100% sure of the best solution. I've started a thread about this on WT:AIV, in the hopes of getting some feedback from the admins who service the page (and any others willing to chime in, of course). In that thread, I propose two possible places to post such messages, and hopefully some others will have feedback soon as well. You may wish to try one of the places I suggest there if you need to try to get a response more quickly. —Krellis (Talk) 20:13, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Archive bot question

Hi, Krellis; someone pointed me towards User:HBC Archive Indexerbot, but I'm not sure of its application. Wikipedia:Goings on has a very specific archiving process, which is described in a hidden HTML comment on the page. There's a discussion on the talk page about the possibility of a bot, and there was a bot request, but no one has ever stepped forward to do it. Raul has several times expressed frustration about listing the recently promoted featured articles there because of the archiving issues. Is there any possibility your bot could be adapted to this purpose, and would you be interested in doing that adapting (I'm a techno-dummie)? I'm going to be helping out with promoting/archiving at WP:FAC, and I tend to agree with Raul about the archiving issues at Wikipedia:Goings on; there are already so many steps involved in promoting articles that having to stop to archive that page manually wouldn't be fun. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:37, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

The Archive Indexerbot could help with creating an index of the existing archives, but doing the actual archiving would be something considerably different, and beyond the scope of its approval. I think such a task would be best taken on by an existing archiver bot, such as MiszaBot, which I know someone has already pointed you at, though it wouldn't solve the problem as it exists now, or by a new bot entirely. I don't really have the time to dedicate to any coding on Wikipedia-related projects at this point, though, so I don't think I'll be able to help at this point. Sorry! —Krellis (Talk) 16:13, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks anyway, Krellis; looks like manual it is, then. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:00, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

User talk:Rschen7754/Archive Index

I recently merged some of my archives; however, duplicate entries are showing up. I have even deleted both the old archive pages and the archive index; however, the problem still remains. --Rschen7754 (T C) 23:03, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

The bot doesn't really detect deleted pages currently, so they stay in its local cache, which was causing the duplication. I've cleared the local cache for your talk pages, and re-run the archive indexing, so hopefully it is no longer duplicating anything - I took a quick look and it looks good to me, but feel free to let me know if you're still seeing it. I'll look at properly detecting and deleting from cache deleted pages, too. Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience. —Krellis (Talk) 02:47, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Bot problem

I just saw this; is it normal for the bot to be making edits logged-out? -Jéské ^{(Blah v^_^v)} 05:34, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, no, it shouldn't be, I'll have to take a look and see what happened - I think it's supposed to be checking if it's logged in on a pretty regular basis, but obviously, that wasn't working, or I'm mis-remembering the code. Regardless, I've re-started the bot now so that it'll be logged in going forward, thanks for letting me know. —Krellis (Talk) 12:47, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your hard work!

Thanks for taking the time and effort to sort out my archiving with these two edits: [4] [5] ! It's really much appreciated and I'm very grateful. Alice^✉ 05:15, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

You're very welcome, I'm glad to help! —Krellis (Talk) 14:57, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

FYI, I just removed another duplicated opt-in from User talk:Alice/Archive 2/Header - you might want to look at modifying your Archive 2 page to use your main header, and then requesting deletion of the duplicated header (unless you intentionally want to preserve the old header, in which case that's fine, though you might want to check for other duplicated opt-in templates, like Misazabot). —Krellis (Talk) 15:01, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I do wish to retain the old header, but this whole episode has highlighted the need for me to do do some further study on this whole topic - there really is a lot to learn, but that's part of what makes Wikipedia Wonderful! Alice^✉ 22:19, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

UAA

I tried to implement a new template with more convenient links for blocking, but it didn't occur to me that your bot might be incompatible with it. See WT:UAA#Template. —Random832 20:09, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, it will require an update to the HBC AIV helperbot code to support. I'll try to look at that soon - it's a pretty simple regex change, but with the holidays here, my time on the computer is going to be limited. I'll post here (and probably there, assuming I remember to do so) once I've made the updates. —Krellis (Talk) 14:30, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I've made the change, and am running it on my instance as a test now (to make sure it doesn't break anything else). Once I'm happy with the changes, I'll post the source code and make a note on the discussion at WT:UAA. —Krellis (Talk) 20:37, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Bot flagged

This account has been flagged as a bot per [6] =Nichalp «Talk»= 15:13, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Speeling erorr

The string 'xxxx' is prone to false positives, please take extra care insuring this name is actaully a violation before blocking. --Steve _(Stephen) ^talk 05:17, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

and possibly "insure" to "ensure",[7][8] while you are at it! It looks like ensure/insure are fairly interchangeable in American English, but "ensure" would work better for British English speakers --Slp1 12:01, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

I was just going to report...the same thing. :) Yes. I'd agree that ensure is more universal. --Woohookitty^Woohoo! 16:02, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Lol, I will fix those. ^(H) 20:22, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Counting problem

Hi H. Minor bug report - [9] The bot seems to have made a mistake the counting numbers. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 16:41, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Oh dear, thanks for telling me. I have disabled the number counting feature and will look into this. ^(H) 17:11, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion for teh bot

I noticed a lot of username violations contain the word "pimp", so maybe we could add that to the bot's field? Cheers, JetLover ^(talk) 04:49, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

You can make suggestions for the blacklist here. I suspect that that particular phrase might be prone to false positives, unfortunately. —Krellis (Talk) 19:52, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Counting characters and unicode

I keep noticing this every so often. Non-latin usernames regularly get reported as longer than they are, presumably because of multibyte encoding of each character. Is this readily fixable? I have no idea what language the bot is written in or any libraries, so I can't tell whether the cause is what I guess or whether it's easy to fix. SamBC(talk) 21:08, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

HBC NameWatcherBot question

Is it possible to add strings to its blacklist that include parentheses without causing the bot to malfunction? -Jéské ^{(Blah v^_^v)} 06:23, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Specifically, to add " (LWA) " to the list. - Rjd0060 (talk) 15:34, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

As long as you do not include the REGEX flag, names with parentheses should work fine. When the regex flag is set, the string is treated as a regex, where parentheses are special characters, so they would not work as expected there. —Krellis (Talk) 20:52, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank'ee. -Jéské ^{(Blah v^_^v)} 21:03, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

CHANGEME

Thanks for fixing my drain bamage. [10] [11] (I swear, sometimes I think I'm loosing my mind.) —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 04:41, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Heh, no problem. I might not have noticed it except for the fact that there were two of them, and that generates a message at the very top of the bot's run log. I like fixing easy things! :) —Krellis (Talk) 15:52, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

HBC NameWatcherBot

Hi: I've been editing the blacklist and whitelist, and noticed the bot has stopped making edits: did I break it, or have you temporarily stopped running it? -- The Anome (talk) 01:44, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Looks like it got disconnected from IRC and died. I've restarted it, thanks for letting me know! —Krellis (Talk) 20:46, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

HBC AIV helperbot3 seems to have logged out

There's an IP address that just started doing the helperbot's job, so I think it might have accidentally gotten logged out. Could you please log in your bot so no one gets all worked up about unauthorized IP bots and stuff? Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 19:28, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Never mind, looks like you already noticed. :-) Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 19:29, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

The bot noticed, actually:

[2008-01-20 19:24:56 UTC] Login check failed, logging back in!

I coded that in last time it got logged out. It checks every 10 minutes to make sure it's logged in. I think there's actually a better way to check now, but I haven't had the time or strong urge to use it instead, since the current way works reasonably well. Thanks for letting me know though! —Krellis (Talk) 20:22, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

HBC Archive Indexerbot not functioning

It seems on January 19, HBC Archive Indexerbot stopped being able to write archives. Having never used this bot before, I can't venture a guess as to what went wrong, but maybe you can from the first error-filled log. —dgies^t_c 22:52, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know, it looks like there was a change to the MediaWiki software to make the method that the bot was using to check for authority to write pages no longer valid. I'll have to see if there's an alternate preferred way to do it and update that. —Krellis (Talk) 12:49, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

This is fixed now - looks like there was a change to the MediaWiki software that prevented "action=raw" from being used on "/wiki/ArticleName" style links, so I just had to change the bot to explicitly use index.php, where "action=raw" still works, instead. Thanks again for letting me know! —Krellis (Talk) 13:01, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Bot has stopped removing blocked users from AIV

Looks like the bot has fell asleep... Maybe he needs a cup of coffee or something. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 17:49, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

This edit caused the bots to be unable to function. I've re-added the {{noadminbacklog}} template, so everything should be working again now. Thanks for the heads-up. —Krellis (Talk) 18:27, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about that.  :-( Maybe that should be added to the page. I only removed it because of some guy on IRC freaking out because of a backlog. - Rjd0060 (talk) 18:29, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

I further clarified the comment text that immediately precedes the line, so hopefully that will help in the future. It's not the end of the world, you were obviously trying to help, and that's certainly appreciated! —Krellis (Talk) 18:30, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Anon Comment

Sorry, I feel really bad about editing that page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.244.4.62 (talk) 15:55, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

AIV Helper Bot

Hello, I sent you an email, can I please have the files (other than the source) to run an AIV helperbot. Thanks. Thedjatclubrock :) ^(T/C) 04:36, 3 February 2008 (UTC).

E-mail reply sent. —Krellis (Talk) 19:09, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Email

I've sent you one (: . No rush. Mønobi 23:29, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

And I've replied :) —Krellis (Talk) 19:09, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Problem with AIV helperbot

On one occasion an account with an inappropriate username had been blocked for a definite period of time (not indefinitely). I tried to report it to WP:UAA for username violation requesting that it be blocked indefinitely, but as soon as I added its entry to the page, an AIV helperbot removed it stating that it had already been blocked even though it was not blocked indefinitely. Is there any workaround to this problem?--Urban Rose 18:21, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

To be honest, it's never really come up as a problem before - the helperbot code was originally written for WP:AIV, where any block is reason to remove a username from the page, regardless of the length of the block. WP:UAA was just added on using the same logic, under the theory that offensive usernames are almost always either blocked indefinitely, or not at all. I suppose it's possible to add some functionality by way of a flag in the definition of which page is being serviced, or something, which says "remove indef blocked usernames only", but, to be perfectly honest, it comes up so infrequently that I'm not sure I can justify the time to spend on it - I really don't have a lot of time to devote to Wikipedia at all. I'd be happy if someone else wanted to write it - the bots' source is GFDL licensed. I'd probably even be happy to test/tweak a patch if someone wanted to write it but not try to set up the bot/get approval/etc themselves.

As far as a workaround, I can't really think of one, other than using some other forum to report the abuse (which, I understand, is difficult, given that WP:UAA is pretty much the only forum for reporting username abuse of a blatant nature - WP:RFCN might work, to some extent, but certainly isn't a perfect solution). I'm sorry I can't offer much more by way of a suggestion. —Krellis (Talk) 02:22, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

HBC AIV helperbot 8 bug

HBC AIV helperbot 8 was fooled by text in the comment area. As you see, the end comment was removed and the whole page went blank. I'll drop this on a couple other talk pages as well. Thanks. —Wknight94 (talk) 20:32, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Intriguing bug. I'll have a play with it in my testing area, though I think I see already what happened. Thanks for letting me know, and I'll update once I figure out for sure what happened and get a fix together. —Krellis (Talk) 22:09, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Your python/PHP/whatever code scares me (I'm a .NET developer by trade) but I imagine the remove_name needs to be more careful in determining whether it's in a comment block. That's my 100% uneducated guess... —Wknight94 (talk) 22:23, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, just one line of diff (and it's Perl :-P). This would only come up when FixInstructions was turned off (and I don't know why it is turned off) AND the same report was added in BOTH the comment section AND the main body of the page, AND that particular username was blocked. Quite a confluence of circumstances. Regardless, it's fixed and verified in my test area now, new code uploaded, joyous times for all! :) Thanks again for letting me know of the issue! —Krellis (Talk) 22:32, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

That's why they pay you the big bucks! —Wknight94 (talk) 02:10, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

e-Mail

You have mail. — E ^talk 23:50, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Replied (and gotten your reply that you didn't really need my reply :)). —Krellis (Talk) 13:01, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

UAA

Apologies! So that's what it was - I thought the bots were putting their feet up for the day. Guess I'll wait for it to be removed automatically next time. Thank again! :) Regards, Rudget. 14:53, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		For helping fix the problem over at UAA - go on, you deserve it! :) Rudget. 14:56, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, and no worries - I just wanted to let you know for future reference more than anything else. Have a good one! —Krellis (Talk) 15:04, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

AIV helperbot error

Didn't see the instructions and reset them, even though they were already there. ~ Mønobi 18:56, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, thanks! This was a little bug in one of the regular expressions handling this (well, not a bug so much as a flawed assumption). I've posted version 2.0.14 of the source, you can update your bot and it shouldn't make this error anymore. Thanks for letting me know! —Krellis (Talk) 04:57, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Bot source update notifications

Hey Krellis. Being a AIV helperbot operator, is it possible for me to get periodic updates from you if any such source is updated? Thanks, — E ^talk 08:25, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, just e-mail me the e-mail address you'd like them to go to and I'll subscribe you to the list. —Krellis (Talk) 19:14, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Odd deletion

I left a note to admins, and you deleted it. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrator_intervention_against_vandalism&diff=next&oldid=194307491 Why did you do that? They never had a chance to see my message. --Edibility (talk) 01:09, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

WP:AIV is only for the reporting of ongoing vandalism in the format described on the page. If you wish to discuss with admins how to handle a situation that may be appropriate for AIV, use its talk page, or try another forum such as the administrator's noticeboard. The AIV helperbots will automatically remove things that do not look like valid AIV reports from the page. —Krellis (Talk) 13:11, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you! I didn't know about that... --Edibility (talk) 13:13, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Just noticed this

Hey Krellis - hope you're well. I just noticed this edit by one of the helperbots which seems to have removed a report of someone who hadn't been blocked while it was tagging another report. I guess this was it failing to notice the edit conflict or something. Given it seems to be a fairly rare occurrence I doubt it's overly important because someone just reported that person again anyway. Thought you might want to have a look though. Best regards. Will (aka Wimt) 18:39, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it's an edit conflict. I haven't come across a way to really prevent it - as far as I can tell, the code isn't doing anything to intentionally circumvent the Mediawiki software's built-in edit conflict prevention (messing with edit tokens and the like), so it seems like the server SHOULD catch and prevent it, after which the bot would reload the page and try again, but for whatever reason, it seems to pop up from time to time. Because of the tight timing needed, it's very difficult to reproduce to attempt to diagnose any further, either, so I've pretty much just said "it happens, sorry, it just shouldn't happen very often, so try again". —Krellis (Talk) 20:50, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Ah ok, thanks - not a major issue anyway. Incidentally, I've just been notified of another two issues with the helperbots today, this time forgetting to remove entries and re-adding ones that had already been removed. Not sure what's up there? Regards. Will (aka Wimt) 20:52, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, the issue with 71.156.35.83 is that there was an unprintable character in there - it showed up in my debug log when I started looking into it as "71.156.35.83â" - it's really strange because Mediawiki and my browser weren't showing it at all, but it persisted when I copied and pasted from the original diff. Not much I can do about that - the character was in the report, so the bot tried to look it up, which is why it didn't show up as blocked. Really strange, though - must have been some funky Unicode ligature or something. I'll take a look at the other one now. —Krellis (Talk) 21:15, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

The second issue looks like another redux of the edit conflict thing, this time conflicting the prior two edits. That's really surprising to me - when this came up a while ago, I profiled the code paths between when the bot loads the page for editing, and when it actually submits it, when removing an entry, and they're wicked fast - tenths or even hundredths of a second, as I recall. It really shouldn't be edit conflicting like this. :| I hate to say it, but I wonder if it's the cross-Atlantic latency? It really shouldn't be enough to make that much of a difference, but in issues of very tight timing like this, I suppose it could be. Other than that, I don't really have any ideas. —Krellis (Talk) 21:18, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I guess that could be the case. The latency from my server to the nearest Wikimedia servers in Amsterdam is only 7ms, but of course the database server is in Florida so making edits would have a bit of a higher latency. Seems strange though, because even with 130ms of latency to Florida, I couldn't see it making a major difference. Will (aka Wimt) 21:34, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me either, but it was the only thing that came to mind. Oh well, not much we can do about it either way, I guess! —Krellis (Talk) 00:53, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Excess removal by helperbot3?

Please take a look at this edit; the edit summary is "1 IP & 1 user left. rm 78.100.2.3 (blocked 7 days by Edgar181 (AO ACB)). 1 comment(s) removed.)", but the bot also removed a posting of mine, reporting a different IP address. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:27, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Looks like an edit conflict - notice that the edit timestamps are the same (at least to the level of precision shown by MediaWiki). Unfortunately it happens sometimes - best bet is to just re-add the entry if it happens to you again. Sorry! —Krellis (Talk) 12:39, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

No problem. Thanks for the quick response. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 12:57, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Helperbot Code?

Hi Krellis,

I'm trying to get my bot back online after my period of inactivity. Could you possibly contact me with the modified mediawiki.pm file? Please email me at my wikipedia email address, or respond on my talk. Thanks, alphachimp 03:05, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Sending e-mail shortly. —Krellis (Talk) 13:13, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Wikipedia Bot Builder Award
		For creating several awesome bots to monitor questionable usernames and to help out on AIV, Krellis is hereby awarded The Bot Builder Award. Congratulations. J.delanoygabsadds 20:05, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! In fairness, though, the since-departed-from-Wikipedia H did the original building of all of the bots that I run, I just took over maintenance and operation of several of them. —Krellis (Talk) 20:33, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Redundant entry in white list?

In the username whitelist, the word "sparse" seems redundant to the word "parse", both present because they contain the word "arse". Given the presence of "parse", does the word "sparse" add anything? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:50, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I imagine they probably are redundant, "parse" should cover "sparse" as well. It's not really a big deal to have an extra word in there, though, so I wouldn't really worry about it much. —Krellis (Talk) 12:30, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Template:User-uaa

My next request (maybe give it a day or so in use for user reports to see what people think of the template) is for the Namewatcherbot to post using the new template. —Random832 14:35, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Sure, that's easy enough to do, just let me know when you think people have become comfortable/happy enough with it and I can make the change. —Krellis (Talk) 14:37, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Is HBC NameWatcherBot down?

It seems to me that HBC NameWatcherBot is down - hasn't edited since 06:58, 21 March 2008. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 10:18, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Yup, it dies sometimes :| I try to keep an eye on it, but must've missed it over the weekend. I've re-started it, thanks for letting me know! —Krellis (Talk) 22:50, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Add the word "bot" to the blacklist?

I think that we should add a regex for words ending with the string "bot". Such accounts, if they aren't actually bot accounts, should be blocked as misleading. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 05:51, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

To be honest, I don't really have much to do with the NamewatcherBot's black/whitelists, there are a number of admins who keep an eye on them and help out. If you want to suggest it, feel free to do so on the blacklist's talkpage, and include an {{editprotected}} if you want to get an admin's attention about it. I do think this has been discussed/tried in the past, though, and decided against, because there is too much risk of someone not paying enough attention and blocking an account that is a legitimate bot, or blocking an account before the creator has had a chance to set up a BRFA or information about the impending BRFA on the bot's user page. —Krellis (Talk) 11:59, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Is HBC NameWatcherBot down again?

It seems to me that HBC NameWatcherBot is down - it's seven hours since the last report, and it seems to have missed Hangdatbastard. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:59, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Back up, thanks. —Krellis (Talk) 15:17, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

HBCNameWatcherBot character counting

Is there any way to make the bot actually count characters UTF-8-ishly? A number of non-latin usernames get reported that aren't over the "limit", but because (I assume) each glyph is at least 2 bytes, they get matched as being over.

I understand that perl regexen will treat characters UTF-8-ishly, if Perl thinks is told to use UTF-8, and I also believe that all usernames are unicode and presumably presented as UTF-8 to the bot; I assume this both because UTF-8 is the usual way of doing such things, and because this doesn't happen with latin-alphabet names, so presumably it's not UTF-16 or higher. SamBC(talk) 14:03, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Unicode and I aren't on speaking terms. I tried to get on speaking terms, but then I realized that the O'Reilly Unicode book is larger than Programming Perl. If Unicode is that complicated, I'm happy to know as little of it as I need to to scrape by, and no more. Alas, that means I don't really have the round tuits to figure this particular one out - I'm happy to accept and apply patches, especially if it's something simple like using the right pragma at the top of the code, I just don't have time to work on it myself right now. Sorry! —Krellis (Talk) 21:08, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I'll look into it. Is the source available somewhere? SamBC(talk) 09:14, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah - take a look at User:H/HBC MCP and User:H/HBC MCP/NameWatcher, mainly. The other plugins are linked from there as well. —Krellis (Talk) 11:23, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, I'm not in a position to be able to test this, but it looks like it might be as simple as using the -cs switch on the perl command line (or, equivalently, setting the environment variable PERL_UNICODE=S), or editing the IRCFeed module to use the decode_utf8 function from the Encode module. Either of these might break things in odd ways, though, so the first option could be tried in some harmless way. Basically, it would seem that the IRC feed is serving up UTF-8 characters but Perl has no reason to treat it as unicode, so doesn't. My instinct is that the first option (-cs or the PERL_UNICODE environment variable) is the right way to go. SamBC(talk) 17:39, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, using the -CS flag (that's case sensitive!) it still seems to work with non-UTF8-ish usernames (the ThisIsAReallyLongTestUsername12345678901234567890 user that just got reported was me). Do you want to try with a UTF-8-ish username based on what you've seen, or just let it run and see if you see it counting strangely again? —Krellis (Talk) 19:43, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

The docs I found said -cs, lower case... but that's by the by. I tested a name with >20 but <40 characters (the first 20-something letters of the hebrew alphabet, I think), and the bot caught it. Unless you'd stopped running it with the switch, I guess that didn't work... the weak point in the chain might be somewhere else, of course, like the IRC feed, but I doubt it would be that. SamBC(talk) 20:33, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

HBC NameWatcherBot seems to be down again

My talk page was vandalized by a user called "ForbiddenSockpuppet 2". After a quick check, I discovered that the account had made its first edit 9 minutes earlier (the sockpuppet regex has a WAIT_TILL_EDIT flag), yet HBC NameWatcherBot didn't catch it, nor had the bot made any edits for nearly 5 hours. Is the bot down again? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:38, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, no, the bot was up, but for some reason it wasn't receiving data. I'm wondering if it got kicked out of #en.wikipedia or something. I've restarted it and it's getting data again now. —Krellis (Talk) 16:51, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Index bot

For some reason it only shows the index for my Archive # 12. I might have made a mistake - can you help out? The page is available here, and my archives are hard to miss on my talk. Thanks! - Milk's favorite Cookie 19:02, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Looks like two problems. First, you've included the archive index code on all of your archive pages - that's not what you wanted to do. It should just be included once, on the main talk page. I've added it to the talk page, but you've got a lot of archive pages - you need to remove it from all of those. The second problem is that you had the capitalization wrong in your mask, so it wasn't finding your actual archive pages. I corrected that in the version I put on your talk page, so, in theory, next time the bot runs it should be all set. I'll keep an eye out and make sure it works correctly for you. —Krellis (Talk) 21:20, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

AIV Helperbot

Either Gb has super fast reflexes or the bot is malfunctioning: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrator_intervention_against_vandalism&diff=207198961&oldid=207198882 (I've seen many edit summaries like these lately).¤~Persian Poet Gal ^(talk) 20:31, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

All these were removed manually.¤~Persian Poet Gal ^(talk) 20:32, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to keep flooding you, but I'm just confirming this - none of the watcher bots have been active in the last 40 minutes, and none appear to be blocked or shut down manually. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 20:49, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Never mind, they're back up. I just noticed you're on Wikibreak anyway. Oops. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 20:54, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

FYI, I think this edit fixed it (someone had manually changed it). -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 20:58, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, moving the backlog tag like that makes it impossible for the bots to figure out what they're supposed to be doing, unfortunately, not much that can be done about it other than fixing it when it breaks. —Krellis (Talk) 18:28, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

User:Milk's Favorite Cookie/archiveindex

For some reason it won't show archives 1-16. Milk’s Favorite Cookie ^(Talk) 16:07, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I think this should be fixed on the next run. Let me know if it doesn't update properly. —Krellis (Talk) 18:32, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Looks to me like it worked, let me know if you have more problems. —Krellis (Talk) 13:28, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

User:HBC NameWatcherBot templateusage

Think it could be useful for the bot to change to {{user-uaa}}. _→AzaToth 23:09, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Done. —Krellis (Talk) 11:27, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

AIV?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this edit summary. I don't see a block for that IP. Thanks. - Mdsummermsw (talk) 17:31, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

that IP is blocked. _→AzaToth 17:34, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it is blocked... not sure why you wouldn't see the block, but it's there. —Krellis (Talk) 19:05, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

A question about the Indexerbot template

Hi Krellis. I've got a question that you may or may not be able to answer: Talk:Adolf Hitler uses the User:HBC Archive Indexerbot/OptIn template to manage the archives, and all of a sudden it's gone haywire, listing a node-count limit exceeded. Do you have any idea what's causing the template to fail? Thanks for any help you may be able to provide. Regards, Parsecboy (talk) 21:47, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, seems to be working fine now. Parsecboy (talk) 04:33, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Weird. I don't know what would have been causing that, but I'd guess maybe something funky under the hood of MediaWiki, since the template hasn't been changed in a while (and is, in fact, full protected). —Krellis (Talk) 12:17, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

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I don't know what you're talking about I didn't edit any pages

Got message saying my edit was removed, I've never edited anything on wikipedia —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.27.190.29 (talk) 12:15, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

You specifically may not have, but at your IP address did. If you didn't do it, then simply ignore the message. If you do intend to edit Wikipedia (or even use it on a regular basis) you may want to create an account to avoid getting messages intended for other users of the same IP address. —Krellis (Talk) 20:56, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Indexerbot and subheadings

Hi Krellis. Do you know whether any support for subheadings will be added to the Indexerbot. It has been on the to-do list for a while, but I don't know if anything has been done about it. ~~ [Jam]^[talk] 16:05, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Nothing that I know of. I don't really have much (any) time to put into work on Wikipedia or the bots these days, other than to ensure that they keep running as-is without errors, so I can't say when the feature might be added. The code is GFDL licensed, and I'd be happy to look at and integrate patches, so if you (or someone else) are willing and able to put in the time on the feature, that would be great, otherwise, it's really anyone's guess as to when I might have time to look at it. —Krellis (Talk) 17:28, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply Krellis. I'll have a look and see if I can figure something out. ~~ [Jam]^[talk] 17:51, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

HBCAI creating Duplicate index entries from page moves?

I had posted this to the bot's talk page, but no response yet, so just pinging you here. I recently had the AIDS talk sub-pages moved into sequential archives (Talk:AIDS/NPOV dispute → Talk:AIDS/Archive 6, etc). It looked to have been properly done, but now the indexer bot is creating duplicate entries for all pages that were part of the move (6 and up,current archive). Is there something that needs to be adjusted that is causing the misfire? -Optigan13 (talk) 06:10, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

There's a problem with the way the indexerbot watchlists and/or caches pages, I think, when they get moved. I've seen it a couple of times but haven't really had a chance to look into it in great detail yet. I'll see if I can find some time to look into it more. —Krellis (Talk) 11:25, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Broken?

Seem that User:HBC AIV helperbot3 made it's last edit 00:13, 5 June 2008 (hist) (diff) m Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism‎ (1 IP & 2 users left. rm 24.137.126.230 (blocked 1 day by Jeepday (AO ACB)).) then stopped cleaning the page. Jeepday (talk) 00:37, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Looks like it's working fine to me - there are a number of redundant copies of the helperbots, it's not uncommon for some of them to sometimes get to a bunch of work first in a row, making the others seem idle for a while. That doesn't mean they're not running, though. —Krellis (Talk) 11:23, 5 June 2008 (UTC)