Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Joe's Null Bot 5

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Joe's Null Bot 5

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Operator: Joe Decker (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 21:29, Tuesday May 21, 2013 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): PERL

Source code available: On request, it should be two or three parameter changes to the code for task 1.

Function overview: Traverse Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion with purge/forcelinkupdate

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Template_talk:Db-meta#CSD_C1_template_issues

Edit period(s): 1/day

Estimated number of pages affected: ~250 (revised to 25-50 after trial)

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): y

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): y

Function details: Traverses Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion , does a purge/forcelinkupdate on each item. Checks for server congestion and has a backoff strategy.

This is another maintenance category update issue from templates that do conditional category inclusion based on time, which creates a known caching/category table issue. (See bugzilla #s 5382, 12019, 31628). This time it's empty categories marked with CSD C1, which allows them to be deleted after a four-day waiting period. The categorytable won't get updated when the four days expire, unless and until the empty category is edited or special-purged after the four days are up.

(Additional Null Bot News: I have recently deactivated task 2 and 3, as the project they related to, the deployment of WP:TAFI on the Main Page, has been discontinued.)

Discussion

Approved for trial (3 days). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 21:44, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! --j⚛e decker^talk 23:11, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Trial complete.' tl;dr nattering: Three cycles complete. I manually reviewed the resulting category placements after each run and everything seems to have functioned as expected. One small surprise: I hadn't realized how many of the items in the category when I got to it were long-term stuck (weeks at least). The average workload for this task will be significantly smaller (25-50 purges/day, rather than 250) than originally predicted. No reports of trouble that I could find. --j⚛e decker^talk 20:25, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

 Approved. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 14:04, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.