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Automatically substituting Template:Unsigned and friends

Resolved

 – These templates are now being substituted. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:09, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Would anyone object to automatic substitution of Template:Unsigned and other similar signature templates? There are almost 30,000 transclusions of them, so it would be better to make sure there is a consensus to do it before letting a bot loose on them. Please see the discussion at Template talk:Unsigned and the corresponding edit request here. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:47, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

• Yes, I object. This request not only assumes bad faith on the part of an editor who may have simply forgot or been unable to sign ( the ~ isn't available on all mobile devices and copy and past if you have edittools or charinsert isn't always easy ) it is also a change to the content of a discussion that isn't visibly apparent in the rendering and fails COSMETICBOT. I've commented as such and closed the edit request until there is a consensus which should've been obtained first. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 03:21, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

  How does it assume bad faith? The templates are already there, so I don't see how substituting them makes any kind of statement about the editors who made the posts. ekips39 05:59, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I thought there was a consensus for this. I put a whole bunch of unsigned templates on a talk page, then tried to get bots to archive, and Clubot refused to archive the transcluded unsigned templates (thus, this is a real problem and not just cosmetic). When I posted about it at the bot's talk page, I was told that the bots behavior is intentional since the unsigned template should always be substituted, and the user then went the the talk page and substituted them all. So, to fix this, I put it in this bot's category, but the bot doesn't do it if there's over 100 transclusions. Unsigned has over 20,000, so it would be way too much work for a human. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 03:20, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Does anyone know the rationale for (a) us wanting all these occurrences to be substituted, (b) the bot not wanting to perform too many substitutions at once? Is the latter due to fear of temporarily overloading the system, though the end result is still desirable? EdJohnston (talk) 04:25, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any special rationale for (a), although with this kind of template the reason for substing is usually to make sure that users are guaranteed to see the message as it was originally sent. (If the message is not substed, and someone changes the template after the message is sent, it could look completely different to what the sender intended.) As for (b), this is to prevent vandals from maliciously substing templates with thousands of transclusions, as reverting all the edits would take a disproportionate amount of time and effort. The edits themselves don't put much strain on the system; they are (I think) done at the rate of 6-10 a minute, a similar rate to other bots. This means that while the system load wouldn't be very high, a run of 30,000 substitutions would take a few days to complete. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 06:31, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

SmackBot, which was operated by Rich Farmbrough, used to do this work; here's an example. Graham87 08:32, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

As far as (a) goes, I assume this to be the dating; a transcluded template containing the current date will always contain the (now) current time (it doesn't, off course, because of bugs/reasons, but it does after an action=purge), while the substituted template will have the time of substitution. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 13:16, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I'd thought (a) in this case was mainly to make pages render faster for the server for templates that would be transcluded probably hundreds of thousands of times without subst:, especially if User:SineBot didn't add them substituted. These templates were almost added to Anomie's auto subst list in 2012; only a lack of interested admins at the time prevented it. ‑‑xensyria^T 15:13, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

It's a pretty minor issue either way. But I would be perfectly willing to restart this task, should circumstances permit. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 18:34, 4 February 2015 (UTC).

• {{subst:unsigned}} is less readable than {{unsigned}}, so I think that {{subst:unsigned}} should be deprecated instead. Any bots which can't handle {{unsigned}} should be corrected. --Stefan2 (talk) 23:53, 4 February 2015 (UTC)