User:ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ/style talk

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Oldest – 1 February 2022 2 February 2022 – 31 December 2022 1 January 2023 – pres.

Are you using my regexes to fix font tags with your bot? It seems that it is able to fix a font tag with face wrapping font tags with color... (example)

Also your bot seems to fix font tags with uppercase A-F in hex colors... Your bot with your safe regexes initially didn't fix font tags like these. Sheep (talk • he/him) 16:23, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No, I developed and tested them on my own. What I am using is similar but not as extensive as yours, I'm not comfortable using regexes for font with color outside link. About half of the regexes I am using were there before, with others added later. The most important change for now is to skip pages if it can't replace all font tags, something I didn't use when there was a much larger backlog before. Its easy for watchlisters to complain about multiple edits (ignoring options available to hide them), but the previous ground work done my the bot has made things easier for yours and Legoktm's bot such that there is a real possibility that we will have less than a million errors by the end of this year. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 17:28, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This edit and and this one introduced div span errors. Not a big deal, I'm about to fix them, but mentioning so that the issue can be potentially corrected in the code for future. Zinnober9 (talk) 03:16, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

When a block element follows font, I can replace it with div instead of span. However a look through this shows most of such pages have other existing bad markup. There are a few that can be handled fully but most have other Lint errors that has to fixed manually. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 04:54, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

When you get a chance, can you please ask the bot to process font tags in these 500 pages? I am working on clearing Linter errors from all of the Wikipedia Signpost pages. Each of these pages is transcluded in a page in Wikipedia space and a page in Wikipedia talk space, so every error fix removes three errors from the overall list. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:01, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Done, along with center tags. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 10:23, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:50, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Can you get your bot to *stop* visiting talk pages? It keeps editing the content of random people’s signatures, which is unnecessary, arguably improper, and adds spam to everyone's watchlist. –jacobolus (t) 03:57, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Bots should not be making this kind of edit. –jacobolus (t) 03:58, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is an approved bot that is replacing obsolete, deprecated code with updated code. Bots are approved all the time to make changes like this to a variety of pages, including talk pages. This bot currently skips pages on which it is unable to fix all of the font errors in a single visit, so you should not see it visit that page again to fix more font errors. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:20, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The bot is spending all its work modifying people's signatures from comments left in 2008 (which, we might add, are perfectly fine HTML that renders as expected in every browser in existence, but just happen to violate someone's nonsense linter rules). Which is an absurd distraction. –jacobolus (t) 17:03, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The <font> element is actually deprecated, not “perfectly fine HTML” (and in fact appears nowhere in the current HTML specification). Avoid using it, and update existing code if possible […]. Be aware that this feature may cease to work at any time.. Also: Warning: Do not use this element. Use the CSS Fonts properties to style text. —151.132.206.250 (talk) 18:28, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

They are marked as both 'minor' and 'bot' edit, you can hide them from your watclist easily if they distract you. Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SheepLinterBot for the same task was approved recently and one more is in trial, so you are likely to see more edits. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 17:16, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This bot should be halted until it stops with this. The pollution of people's watchlists is abusive, and telling people to stop checking for bot edits is not an adequate substitute.

Cleaning up 15-year-old talk page comment signatures is something that is a waste of everyone’s attention, and arguably improper without the support of each user whose comment is being changed.

If someone's linter doesn't like font tags, stop running the linter on talk pages or fix the linter to stop complaining. –jacobolus (t) 00:32, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't mind these talk page changes, but you (User:ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ) should seriously consider asking MediaWiki devs to prevent users from introducing lint errors in their signature from this point on, and to automatically remove lint errors from pre-existing signatures. That way, these talk page changes can stop for good once the bot is done fixing all old posts. DFlhb (talk) 07:53, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That is a great idea, and we have asked. So far, the MediaWiki developers have declined, saying that it is up to the English Wikipedia community to decide. See T140606 (from 2016; imagine if we had stopped adding signature-related Linter errors six years ago!), and T248632 (from 2020; see especially the links from the task description and from a comment dated 28 May 2020). Sometime in 2020, the MediaWiki software stopped allowing editors to save new or modified custom signatures with other types of Linter errors, and a small handful of editors sent helpful messages to a few hundred active editors with invalid signatures with instructions on how to fix them (see this talk page message for an example). That change has helped reduce the creation of new signature-related Linter errors on pages. If you want to start a conversation on VPR or somewhere similar about preventing obsolete tags in signatures here on en.WP, feel free to ping me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 08:31, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@DFlhb: The vast majority of users have stopped using font tags in their signature upon request. There have been a few uncollborative users who have refused, but is a small problem. Most pages will indeed not need to be edited again, unless there are other major changes to MediaWiki. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 08:42, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Good to know. DFlhb (talk) 08:44, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ, a discussion regarding one of your bot tasks is open at BOTN. Please see the discussion there. Best regards, — xaosflux ^Talk 01:23, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding this discussion, can you change your bot to assert the tag that @Legoktm created? I'm not totally certain how to do that since I also don't know how your bot works these days but I guess he can help. Izno (talk) 23:10, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I can if it is technically possible, I can't find any option in AWB to assert tags. Ideally this tag should be applied by the software so that Lint fixing by normal editors gets marked as well. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 02:20, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah I discussed adding support to AWB with Reedy the other day and now filed T329136. I don't think having an automated tag is a good idea, the intention is to allow people to hide edits that solely fix lint errors. If someone is editing a page and happens to fix an error as well, it should not be hidden. Legoktm (talk) 04:32, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, hope your 2023 is off to a good start! I see your username in my watchlist quite a bit, so I just wanted to say thanks for the work you do here at English Wikipedia and elsewhere. If you ever do translation work, I'd love to see the entry about me translated for knWiki one day! For now, thanks again and happy editing! ---Another Believer _(Talk) 16:09, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome Another Believer, thanks for your contributions to Wikimedia as well. Translation is  Done, see kn:ಜೇಸನ್ ಮೂರ್. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 17:50, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Very cool! Thank you so much. I had actually meant to type "konWiki", per your "kon-N" template at kn:ಸದಸ್ಯ:ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ, but an entry at knWiki is appreciated just as much. Thanks again and take care for now! :) ---Another Believer _(Talk) 01:25, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, Konkani Wikipedia (gomwiki) is a relatively niche Wikipedia that has few readers and even fewer editors. Most articles there are on topics that are of interest to Konkani speaking population, especially students. Kannada Wikipedia (knwiki) on the other hand has a larger reader base and has a better chance of anyone reading it. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 10:49, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is a bit of GIGO that is easily fixed, but if there is a way to prevent the bot from doing it, that would probably help. I've never seen it before, so this might be the only one in 50 million pages. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:12, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, this search had only one other result which I have fixed manually. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 10:51, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This edit went sideways and introduced a misnested span tag. It's a bit of GIGO, but the bot may need a custom pattern for that signature. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:15, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. I found 3 variations of their signature, which I have replaced without skipping if all other font tags in the page can't be replaced, since this also has stripped font tags. There are 4k+ pages with nothing or white space between font tags. I have set the bot to remove them such as [1]. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 04:24, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good. I fixed all of the instances that I was able to find, and cleaned up a couple hundred high-priority misnested tags in other sigs while I was at it. Progress. Working on these XFD pages is bringing the total count down quickly. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:06, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The bot's having some minor issues with Red Sunset's signature here (due to the staggered nestings, I'm betting), and Raaggio's signature here and here (although to be fair, Raaggio's was a junky mess before any fixes).

Mentioning so that the bot can be further improved. Thank you for all your beneficial efforts, Zinnober9 (talk) 07:01, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This was because I ran it by overriding "skip if not all font tag replaced" condition for ~70 pages to replace User:SRX's sig in the section above. It would have skipped the page entirely in its normal configuration, leaving everything for gnomes or further specific replacements. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:10, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, of course. I was a little surprised to see that it had attempted the staggered Red Sunset signature, and that it had skipped some other sigs on those three pages since I knew it was skipping pages it couldn't complete. That would explain why. Thank you for the prompt reply, Zinnober9 (talk) 07:30, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The bot blanked a whole bunch of pages in the last two hours. It is probably not the bot's fault; I have seen this happen with AWB in the past. I have, in good faith, stopped the bot until the problem can be investigated. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:33, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Damn. Thanks for stopping it, I will go and revert the blanked pages now. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 16:39, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if you can put a check into the bot's code before it saves to stop it from saving a change of more than negative x bytes. Of course, if the bot thinks it is only changing a few things and then an AWB or server glitch saves a blank page, you're out of luck. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:46, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have reverted all blankings. This is an AWB glitch that had happened before with Task 13, though it wasn't a problem then since blanking pages was the purpose of that task. Upon searching VPT archives, I found Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 194#AWB bot page blanking. I have added the check suggested there, which should prevent this from happening again. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 17:15, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for sorting this, you had me worried when I saw my talk page had been blanked... Dsergeant (talk) 17:56, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you see any easy way to help the bot process these, go ahead. I have no problem cleaning up this GIGO, which is the sort of thing that crops up in maybe one in a thousand bot edits, probably less. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:41, 13 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Another page from the batch in #A few wonky signatures above. Normally it would have skipped this since there were pending font tags. Thanks for cleaning up these edge cases, which I assume stick out among the most recently edited pages in Lint error reports. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 04:33, 13 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, and that is what I am doing. They are truly edge cases. For the two editors who are vocally sad about their watchlists, I figure that it's better to tidy up right after the bot goes through so that the same page won't pop up later. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:44, 13 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

	The Technical Barnstar
	Good shout on Special:Diff/1138968290, glad to see that dead weight dropping off our list! Primefac (talk) 11:12, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! That was a tiresome merger to complete. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 12:15, 16 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ,

Thank for clearing out old maintenance categories that had been lingering around for a decade or longer. And it seemed like it only took you about an hour to take care of all of their contents! You're a whiz! Thanks again. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:49, 20 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome. This was part of merging {{Over-coverage}} with {{Globalize}}, taking out all of its monthly categories. In some cases it merely replaced one maintenance cat with another, in many other articles full removal was appropriate. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:07, 20 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have been steadily tidying high-priority errors on pages in the Talk, Wikipedia, User, and User talk spaces, most of the time clearing them of Linter errors other than font tags. It might be worth feeding the pages in my Contributions to the bot, as long as they meet these criteria: (1) they are in one of the above namespaces, (2) my edit summary contains the word "Linter", and (3) the pages were edited in February. Thanks for keeping your bot running; it's making a huge difference in the Linter count. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:40, 21 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Done, using query/70295. It edited 90 of 282 pages that met the above criteria. The others still had font tags after applying changes and were skipped. I will check them later after the bot is done with easy replacements. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 06:47, 21 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds great. I have seen some crazy font tag structures while fixing these high-priority tags. You'll probably find some productive additions to make to your bot code. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You might also look through the signature submissions page for signatures and other patterns with misnested font tags, like that of User:Sting_au. Adding those to the bot's fix list might make a few thousand pages fixable. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:56, 21 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, I noticed your bot attemped to fix center tags in section headers like this. This is actually a very bad fix per MOS:HEAD which says not to use template transclusions. The correct fix would be to remove the center as that isn't how section headers should be used anyways. Could you revert those changes? Gonnym (talk) 10:23, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oops. Will set it to remove them. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 10:33, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

All of those should be gone now. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 11:02, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The bot appears to be paused after working non-stop for weeks. When it is done having a cookie, it might want to resume checking the alphabetical list of User Talk pages starting with User talk:Sp..., which it put on hold while working on some more interesting patterns. Keep up the great work! – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:19, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It had done alphabetical pages after User talk:Sp... earlier in descending order before I switched it to ascending. Its run with current regexes has ended after 960k edits, clearing ~3.9 million errors. I think there is still more than a million easy font tags sitewide that it skipped due to the presence one or two in a page that it couldn't replace. They will have to be picked one by one and done in small batches, so will be slower. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 04:32, 8 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I see. I agree about the million-plus remaining font tags. I have been working at a human pace to identify and fix misnested, stripped, and unclosed font tags in pages, leaving fixable tags for the bot. As you have seen, I put a whole bunch of links to searches on the "signature submissions" page; as those examples are painstakingly integrated into the bot's code, more pages will be bot-fixable.

If you want to provide lists of pages where there are font errors that humans need to fix before the bot can work on them, I'd be willing to focus on those pages. I imagine there are tens of thousands of such pages though.... – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:13, 8 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have put together User:ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ/Pages with Lint errors other than font tags. This is a list of pages with any Lint error other than font tags. These are less likely to be edited by bots, so are ideal for humans to work on. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:05, 8 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I am looking through the tidy font link error list, and I'm finding many errors that your bot could have fixed. Is another run through User space on your to-do list? – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:44, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I hadn't worked on font link bug this time. I think most of the remaining ones there are things that WOSlinkerBot couldn't fix, so I can't really do much with MalnadachBot. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 18:29, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have made ~250 supervised edits clearing font link bug. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 08:00, 10 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

An article that you have been involved in editing—List of acting chief justices of Sri Lanka—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Snickers2686 (talk) 22:53, 2 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, user with non-English characters on the English Wikipedia. I don't even know what to call you. In my head, I just think of you as "Mr. Squiggles" because your username just looks like a bunch of squiggly lines to me.

You might remember me as the editor that has loudly complained about how annoying and useless I find your bot that fixes lint errors. I even started an RFC to determine consensus on whether your bot is in violation of WP:COSMETICBOT. Sadly, there wasn't consensus, so I decided to crawl back into my hole and shut up. I went through the trouble of hiding your bot's edits from my watchlist, in the hopes that I could minimize the annoyance caused by your fixing of trivial cosmetic non-issues on ancient pages that no human will likely ever view again for the remainder of human civilization as we know it. But today I opened my watchlist, and I find more lint error edits on some of my ancient user talk page archives. How is that possible if I've already hidden your bot's edits? Well, it appears that now you're making lint error edits from your main account, not your bot account. And you're not flagging them as bot edits anymore.

• [2]
• [3]
• [4]

Why are you doing this? And why did you choose my user talk page archives as the target of your annoying edits? Are you trying to annoy me on purpose?

If these edits are automated, it's likely that they are in violation of WP:MEATBOT. I would ask that you stop immediately, or explain why you're making bot edits from your main account. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 20:15, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Scottywong since you have taken the trouble of listing all 3 of my contribs from yesterday, you have obviously checked my contribs and seen that I have only 3 edits yesterday, the closest of which is spaced 11 minutes apart. If you really think that is a MEATBOT violation, it makes me worry about your judgment in performing administrative tasks. A more realistic explanation of course is that since having failed to stop Lint fixing sitewide, you are reverting this in WP:OWN userspace out of spite and purposely annoying me by pretending that I am violating MEATBOT.

Coming back to why I have made this from my main account, I feed a bunch of insource search lists to my bot and check those lists after the bot has run through them to see why it skipped some pages. In most cases that is because there are still font tags in the page the bot couldn't replace in a single edit, so I give it regex for that replacement and let it run again. In this case in your archive pages, it was because they have {{nobots}}, so it correctly skipped it. I recognised you and thought we have settled the matter in the RFC, so edited them and fixed all errors in a single edit. You had placed the nobots tag last year when the bot didn't replace all font tags in a single edit. As you know, that issue is fixed now. The number of pages in Special:LintErrors has greatly shrunk in the last few months and will continue shrinking as the bots work through more errors. Pages that bots couldn't edit will attract human editors to fix them. So you reverting them will put them back in error lists, attracting other gnomes to fix them and appear in your watchlist again.

To save you from further annoyance, we can do two things; remove the nobots template to let bots edit or I can manually fix errors in your whole userspace in a day so that they won't need to be edited again. What do you say? ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 03:26, 22 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The {{nobots}} template was added to those pages specifically to prevent you (and only you) from editing those pages any further. And despite our history, and despite noticing the {{nobots}} template on the pages, and despite noticing the timing with which the {{nobots}} template was added directly after your bot ravaged my talk page archive, your reaction to seeing that your bot correctly skipped those pages is to edit them manually from your main account instead? Seriously? I'm really starting to suspect that there is a potential WP:CIR problem here, between your decision-making in this situation, to your bot's historical performance record, to your username that uses non-English characters, to the hideous font on your user page, to the annoying rainbow border on your user pages, etc., etc., etc.

I would propose a third option for dealing with this situation: in the future, please do not edit any page in my userspace from any of your accounts for any reason, with the exception of my user talk page if you wish to send me a message. I don't know how I can make it any clearer than that. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 05:31, 24 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]