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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 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical).

You may need to restart your bots twice[edit]

Hi everyone,

Ops is planning a major data center migration during the week of 21 March. From the POV of a bot owner, there are two major effects:

• Your bot will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes at the start and end of the main action, on Tuesday, 22 March or Thursday, 24 March. ^[1]
• Some bots may need to be re-started after the read-only window ends.

This is being announced in m:Tech/News and through the wikitech-l mailing list. phab:T124671 seems to be the central task. You can follow those for further updates (or {{ping}} me). Please share this information with other projects and bot owners.

— Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:28, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm a little confused as to why the bot needs to be restarted. Won't the API simply return an error during the period, or do we have to deal with bad session data again?—^cyberpower_{Chat:Limited Access} 17:14, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, the API will return an error. But some bots are a little brittle about this, and the error may not be the same one that we "usually" see (read-only mode isn't the same as the 'blue screen of death'). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:15, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Postponed until mid-April[edit]

Ops has just postponed this until the week of 18 April. Some backend services will migrate to codfw during the week of 04 April (maybe on the Thursday?). If your bot might rely on RESTbase, Parsoid, or other things like that, then {{ping}} me and I'll see if I can find a list.

I hope that everyone survived the five-minute test yesterday with no problems. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:41, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Legobot error: Good article nominations[edit]

As documented at Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations#Legobot error?, we've positively identified a bug in the Legobot code that is supposed to pass good articles. The bug is: If a reviewer passes an article as GA and places the passed {{GA}} template immediately above an earlier placed {{failedGA}} template from an earlier review, the bot will become confused by the presence of both templates and will fail the GA rather than pass it. It happened again today at Talk:Gene Roddenberry. It happens nearly every day. When it happens, the successful nominator receives notice that the article failed instead of passed, and the GA icon is not placed on the article; it must be manually placed. A possibly separate bug: Sometimes the GANotice template is not placed on the nominators talk page at all. Pinging Legoktm; can you please help us. Side note: We're also wondering if you can help us add a few subtopics as documented at Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations#RfC: Subcategories on GAN page. Thank-you. Prhartcom (talk) 22:28, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

• I did notice a delay with the notification of the nominator when Aucanquilcha was passed: Spinningspark closed the GA nomination as successful 16th November 2015 but the bot informed me on 2 January 2016. Wonder if these issues may be linked.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:56, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

• The errors continue to occur, causing both incorrect edit summaries and incorrect posts to user talk pages. Is this kind of delay in responding to a report here typical? Legoktm (Legobot), it would help a great deal if we knew about how long a fix of this bug is likely to take. Thank you for your attention to this matter. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:48, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Rotten Tomatoes subtemplates[edit]

Theo's Little Bot (run by Theopolisme) has been recreating some of the subtemplates that were slated for deletion in this TfD. It's just been recreating them as an error. The bot owner hasn't edited for a few months, but is anyone able to disable only this task? It seems unreasonable to monitor the bot for when it decides to recreate one of these. Example: Template:Rotten_Tomatoes_score/0118688. ~ Rob^Talk 15:07, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Template:Rotten Tomatoes score/1300854 as well. The bot only seems to be recreating the error pages, namely pages that will never be used anyways. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:37, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't believe it's possible to disable one of a bot's tasks without blocking the bot entirely. I ran into this issue several months ago; the solution is to template-editor-salt them – see my rather brief protection log. – wbm1058 (talk) 22:49, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Another editor contacted Theo offwiki to see about shutting down just task 22. In the meantime, I guess I'll just re-nominate as WP:G6 with a note to WP:SALT as they come about. Thanks. ~ Rob^Talk 22:58, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

• If an admin could take a look at Theo's Little Bot's recent contributions and delete/salt the newly recreated Rotten Tomatoes subtemplates, that would be helpful. There are couple dozen of them all created with an error today. ~ Rob^Talk 23:11, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

  Done — xaosflux ^Talk 23:20, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

• This bot has been blocked for creating pages against community consensus. Any admin may unblock this bot after the operator has repaired it. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:16, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

  Note: The userpage controls lacked a control to only disable this one task. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:40, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

• FYI, the bot is also having issues with another one of it's tasks, resizing images. See User talk:Theo's Little Bot#Task 1. Elisfkc (talk) 03:59, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
  • That's a different problem. The Rotten Tomatoes problem is that the bot makes edits it's no longer supposed to do, which is problematic and lead to a block of the bot. The problem you mention is that the bot sometimes doesn't make edits it's supposed to do, which is less problematic (a backlog is generated, but it isn't as disruptive for the project and isn't a reason for a block). It would be nice if the bot operator could fix both problems, but only the Rotten Tomatoes problem needs to be fixed in order to unblock the bot. --Stefan2 (talk) 10:09, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
    • True, but it's something else that needs to be fixed with that bot. If there is an old version of the bot's code, maybe that will fix both issues. Elisfkc (talk) 15:52, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
      • Problem 1 (Rotten Tomatoes) is fixed if the bot operator removes a line from a cronjob (or whatever job scheduler the operator uses for this purpose). Problem 2 (file size reductions) is fixed if the bot operator corrects a bug in one of the bot's scripts. However, the problems can only be fixed by the bot operator, and the problem is that he isn't responding. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:29, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: I emailed Theo and he said the offending task has been disabled and the bot can be unblocked. I'll leave that decision up to your discretion. --Closedmouth (talk) 09:30, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Closedmouth Thank you for the update, I am unblocking as I trust your message. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:31, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Hazard Bot[edit]

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Hazard-Bot 33

How did this get approval without site-wide consensus such as from Village Pump? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:07, 21 March 2016 (UTC).

See Wikipedia:Research help/Proposal#Project steps. VPT is in step 7. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:13, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Cart. Horse. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:17, 22 March 2016 (UTC).

• This approval really was quite premature. The template being placed on pages was outright nominated for deletion recently and it reached a "no consensus" outcome with significant support for deletion. There's not even a clear consensus that this template should exist on the project at all, let alone be added to thousands of articles. See the TfD itself. I have a strong feeling this process is going to leave everyone annoyed. Editors have invested large amounts of time into this proposal, botwork, reversion of the botwork, etc. before bothering to check if the community at large is ok with this. Why isn't this link just placed on the left sidebar for all articles? ~ Rob^Talk 02:18, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
• I agreed to a small (100 edit) trial - just to have something tangible but easily removable to demonstrate to the community what was being attempted., The_Earwig was there other pages besides the ones link that led to ramping this up to 10000 pages? — xaosflux ^Talk 02:55, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
  • @Xaosflux: Just to be clear, I wasn't blaming you, Earwig, or anyone else handling approvals. I'm sorry if my message gave that impression. I'm hoping this can just be remembered as a sanity check for the future. Consensus developed in small groups really isn't sufficient when we're talking about basically adding something to MOS:LAYOUT. ~ Rob^Talk 03:09, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
• Well, I mostly hate it, but that's beside the point. The idea here was a relatively small and short trial to get some attention and data, because we had basically twenty users expressing support, no opposition, and one neutral in the pre-bot discussions. The 100-edit trial passed with no real catastrophe and was too small to get wider attention. It's not dangerous and it can easily be blanked if notable opposition came about. My hope was to generate discussion, which has happened. — Earwig ^talk 03:40, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

  There was and is opposition, going back to 18 December last year [[1]]. And advice from User:Green Cardamom that they believe it would be healthy to voice other points of view outside those immediate parties who this is benefiting. And advice to take it to VP, which was ignored.

But the "easily blanked" was reverted. Oh well.

I raised the matter at VP(Proposals) and there is consensus to blank the template, until a VP proposal passes to utilise it more.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 00:39, 1 April 2016 (UTC).

User:AlexNewArtBot/ArchitectureSearchResult[edit]

This bot is causing spam to fill up "what links here". For example a new page created by me Columbjohn which has very little to do with architecture now has dozens of links to user pages due to this bot. Have never seen anything like it since 2010. Seems a totally useless bot to me, can it be stopped? I note the user has already been blocked. Thanks.(Lobsterthermidor (talk) 21:35, 1 April 2016 (UTC))

@Lobsterthermidor: That page is updated by User:InceptionBot which I operate. The "what links here" stuff will disappear about 14 days after an article is created. --Bamyers99 (talk) 22:51, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Good! Thanks.(Lobsterthermidor (talk) 08:43, 2 April 2016 (UTC))

Incorrect category creations[edit]

(crossposted from User talk:DumbBOT) This bot is incorrectly taking some categories by misposting some templates, see Category:Wikipedia files with no copyright tag as of 5 April 2016 and Category:Wikipedia files with no copyright tag as of 6 April 2016 for examples. It seems to be limited to the "files with no copyright tag" categories. It looks like the bot creator is no longer active but perhaps another editor can help resolve this problem. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 15:18, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Hopefully this isn't another Rotten Tomatoes (see above) situation where a botop has left but left their bots running. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:57, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Template:Images with no copyright tag subcategory starter was deleted following Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 March 5. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:29, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Based on that TfD and this AN discussion, this bot likely needs to be blocked until the botop returns. Other botops can adopt any useful tasks in the meantime/indefinitely. ~ Rob^Talk 16:42, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm 100% in support of broken bots being blocked, however if the bad actions are significantly outpaced by good actions, a bit of time may be warranted for reply. How many bad edits are being made? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:02, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ One per day among 50 useful edits, some of which are important to the project. Maybe it would be beneficial for some bot-ops to start work to adopt the two remaining tasks (creation of daily subpages and removing protection templates from unprotected articles). In the meantime, an admin could preemptively salt Category:Wikipedia files with no copyright tag as of 8 April 2016 through Category:Wikipedia files with no copyright tag as of 30 April 2016 to buy us development time. ~ Rob^Talk 00:14, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

I'd rather speedy delete them then salt them. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:26, 4 April 2016 (UTC)