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Archive for April 2012

Blank lines after headings

Why must ‎MiszaBot I fight over whether there should be blank lines after each section heading? I know the "New section" link adds one, yet most editors don't because it's common practice not to. I also know that it doesn't matter and isn't worth edit waring over. So why program the bot to manipulate white space, especially in the newer threads that aren't being archived at the time?! – voidxor ^{(talk | contrib)} 15:16, 1 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Invitation to events in June and July: bot, script, template, and Gadget makers wanted

I invite you to the yearly Berlin hackathon, 1-3 June. Registration is now open. If you need financial assistance or help with visa or hotel, then please register by May 1st and mention it in the registration form.

This is the premier event for the MediaWiki and Wikimedia technical community. We'll be hacking, designing, teaching, and socialising, primarily talking about ResourceLoader and Gadgets (extending functionality with JavaScript), the switch to Lua for templates, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Labs.

We want to bring 100-150 people together, including lots of people who have not attended such events before. User scripts, gadgets, API use, Toolserver, Wikimedia Labs, mobile, structured data, templates -- if you are into any of these things, we want you to come!

I also thought you might want to know about other upcoming events where you can learn more about MediaWiki customization and development, how to best use the web API for bots, and various upcoming features and changes. We'd love to have power users, bot maintainers and writers, and template makers at these events so we can all learn from each other and chat about what needs doing.

Check out the the developers' days preceding Wikimania in July in Washington, DC and our other events.

Best wishes! - Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation's Volunteer Development Coordinator. Please reply on my talk page, here or at mediawiki.org. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Volunteer Development Coordinator 19:54, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:Western betrayal

I set the bot template up on Talk:Western betrayal a few days ago and to date it has not worked. Please could you have a look at the template and fix any mistakes I have made so it starts to work. -- PBS (talk) 07:49, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've tweaked it and moved it below the div tags which may be interfering. Also, the archive count is 3...the "Archive 0" is actually linked to a talk page by a different name but that wouldn't have stopped the bot from working. Let's see if that archives.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► 14:06, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that the bot still isn't getting all the way through the alphabet; for the last few days it's run longer, but it still poops out in the 'M*'s.

—WWoods (talk) 19:01, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Placement of archive box

Miszabot places the banner linking to archive pages in the middle of the talk page header, instead of at the bottom as recommended in WP:TPL. This makes the links hard to find. RockMagnetist (talk) 23:40, 5 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Miszabot fixed?

For the last few days it seems to be working, all the way through the alphabet. Are things back to normal, or was a better temporary fix set up, or what?
—WWoods (talk) 16:00, 8 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it should now run normally again. I had to lenghten the maximum allowed run time for some scripts (apparently, the default of 6 hours was not enough) before cron auto-kills a job. I'll be looking into why it's still skipping some pages (like Cirt mentions above) later. —Миша 13 08:41, 10 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ah okay thanks very much! — Cirt (talk) 14:28, 10 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:Narendra Modi

Hi Misza. The bot is archiving the threads on this talk page to /dev/null. Can you please fix this? Best, — Nearly Headless Nick {c} 13:43, 11 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Done —WWoods (talk) 15:11, 12 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

MiszaBot III talk page archival

The last time MiszaBot III (talk · contribs) archived my user talk page appears to have been 6 February 2012, any idea why it hasn't swung back by there since then? Thanks for your time, — Cirt (talk) 15:27, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I have it figured out, partly. The game-breaker was this change - I wasn't entirely aware that 1000 years into the future was simply too much for the bot - the standard Python's time library fails to parse that date correctly.

What puzzles me, however, is that for the life of me I cannot find that thread in the current version of your page (not even the string "3012") anywhere. Yet the bot keeps saying that

:Note to self, don't archive. — '''[[User:Cirt|Cirt]]''' ([[User talk:Cirt|talk]]) 04:32, 11 February 3012 (UTC)

is the offending piece of text. Makes me think I've lost my marbles by now. I'll get to it back in the morning. —Миша 13 19:48, 13 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yea, I was tired, apparently. The bot was seeing the thread in the archive (archive pages pass through the parsing engine as well) and not on the main talk page. I have changed it to simply clamp such years down to 2500, which for all itents and purposes has the same effect, but parses correctly. —Миша 13 10:44, 14 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much! — Cirt (talk) 00:33, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Requesting newsletter delivery

Sorry for bothering you at this late date in the month, but if you would see fit it would be very useful if we could get the Christianity newsletter to be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity/Outreach/April 2012 delivered to the people listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity/Outreach in the "Subscriptions" section, it would be very much appreciated. John Carter (talk) 01:23, 10 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

EdwardsBot would be a better Bot choice to handle the task MiszaBot only archives.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 00:48, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Repetative archiving

Not sure why, but MiszaBot II seems to be archiving the same thing over again. See [1] and then the same thing a minute later [2]. ~~Don't know if this was an isolated occurrence.~~ Apparently it's not an isolated occurrence: [3] -- œ ^™ 15:10, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This has happened before but I don't know the cause (or the fix).
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► 20:36, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Your Bot?

Hi!I see you have that MiszaBotIII. I request to make archives for me too.--Monareal (talk) 17:06, 14 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Would you like me to set it up for you?—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 00:50, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I won't be home today so we can do it tommorow--Monareal (talk) 03:05, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's easy to set up. I just need to know how old the threads need to be before they're archived, the number of threads that need to be archived before they are, the minimum number of threads that are kept on your talk page, where they are to be archived, include format, and maximum archive size before it goes to a new page to archive, assuming you don't want to archive by year.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 20:36, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well from June 1, the Bot should archive any threads more than 20 days to User:Monareal/HRD1. I think it or you can follow the instructions in the page. And I will make edits in between. Now I have messages more than 30 days old--Al Sheik!Woiu! (talk) 05:25, 16 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is that archive permanent or is the 1 supposed to increment to 2 after a certain point?—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 22:49, 16 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

MiszaBot can't do it the way you like it to. The best I can do is: User talk:Monareal/Archives/year/month.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 22:52, 16 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This page is must! User talk:Monareal/Monareal Museum I had adapted the page as much as I could for Miszabot III, II or I!--Al Sheik!Woiu!I do not fish! (talk) 06:16, 17 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No need, I set up the bot all by myself--Al Sheik!Woiu!I do not fish! (talk) 04:45, 20 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia talk: WikiProject Texas archiving

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Texas has been set up with Miszabot II for archiving, at 10 days. It had been set up for 14 days, but wasn't doing much, so I changed it to 10 days on April 4. It has not run. We have talk on that page going back to January. It archived this year on January 9, January 13, January 24, February 2 and March 17. On January 25 there was some redesign of the page happening, so maybe that affected it. Can you get this running on a regular basis? Maile66 (talk) 19:54, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. You have six level 2 headers however the last one (GLAM) does not have a datestamp therefore the bot would recognize five level 2 headers. Since you do not have the minthreadsleft parameter in your setup it defaults to 5 which is what it sees. In short, the bot is functioning correctly.

You can reduce the number of threads but I wouldn't recommend that as five is reasonable. The next time someone starts a new thread, the ~~first~~ oldest one should archive. Alternatively, you could place a backdated stamp on the GLAM thread to achieve the same thing.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► 20:27, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It'll be the first that's old enough, not necessarily the absolute oldest. And I don't think it matters if there are sections without datestamps; I believe the bot counts them as sections, but they never age out, so they drift up to the top of the page.

—WWoods (talk) 04:27, 17 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestion - better error handling when pages are moved

I recently came across a case where somebody had moved an article and talk page that was being archived by MiszaBot I, but they neglected to move the talk page archives, or update the MiszaBot template. (See talk:Vaccine controversy which was renamed to talk:Vaccine controversies in October). This meant that although the bot was still archiving messages to the old Talk:Vaccine controversy/Archive 3, the archive was not readily accessible. (The automatic header was looking for subpages of vaccine controversies, so it showed no archives, etc.) Since I had dealt with the article before I knew there had to be a talk archive, but I imagine that many users might not have realized that the archive was missing.

I fixed the problem in this page (by moving the archives and updating the miszabot template), but this is probably not the only time this has happened. I thought it might be possible for the bot to do a bit more error checking, and either make editors aware of such cases, or possibly fix the problem itself.

Perhaps it could display a message on the talk page, telling editors they need to move the archive pages? It might also add the page to a category of pages that need to have their archive subpages moved.

When I was fixing the error I forgot to update the miszabot template on the talk page for a little while after I had moved the archive pages. I don't know how it would have handled that error (where the instructions pointed to old subpage, but the archives were subpages of the talk pages current location), but hope it would have either been smart enough to update its own instructions, or to have indicated a problem so that editors would have known to fix it. It might be well to check the bots behavior in this case as well to make sure it does something helpful.

I note that the bot instructions say you need a special key to get it to archive to a page that isn't a sub-page of the current page. It seems like that isn't the whole story, since it appears to have gone on archiving to a sub-page of a different page in this case. Thank you. Zodon (talk) 07:16, 26 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What defines what the bot posts? Horse_racing/Wikipedia is lacking new data

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Portal:Horse_racing/Wikipedia was last updated 21 October 2010. I'm wondering what defines a new story that the bot would pick up or if it's working. Kirk33707 (talk) 19:38, 26 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

MiszaBot III question...

Is there a minimum number of threads to a user talk page for MiszaBot III to run through it?

It seems to have stalled on archiving my talk page on the April 11, and even then it missed a thread.

Thanks,

- J Greb (talk) 16:16, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The defaults are to keep a minimum of 5 threads on the page and archive only a minimum of 2 each time. When your page has its 7th post the bot will archive 2 of them. Use the |minthreadsleft = and |minthreadstoarchive = to change this. Brad (talk) 17:20, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]