User talk:Anomie/Archives/2023

Small JS exception

I was looking. through some logs and noticed that User:Anomie/useridentifier.js is throwing some exceptions. TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'match'). This can be solved by changing u=a.match(/[?&]title=User:([^&]+)/); into u=a && a.match(/[?&]title=User:([^&]+)/); just like it is used two lines higher up. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:24, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Noticeboard notice

Hello Anomie, a noticeboard discussion regarding potential problems with bot edits of yours has been opened at WP:BOTN, please see the discussion there. Best regards, — xaosflux ^Talk 19:32, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Vandal report

I'd like to report some vandalism. A user called Binksternet is always removing genres from templates with no cites reason. Could you do something about this? 2600:6C5A:417F:794E:F47E:5B35:8067:73AA (talk) 23:35, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Binksternet is an established/regular contributor to Wikipedia and mentioned that the edits in question were a problem mentioned in the edit summary. Binksternet is not intentionally disrupting the project. Tropicalkitty (talk) 23:43, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

@Binksternet: should be pinged for such an allegation. — Moops ^⋠T⋡ 23:43, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Tropicalkitty beat me to it. :) — Moops ^⋠T⋡ 23:43, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Our friend here uses multiple IPs from the general area of Atlanta, Georgia. We've crossed swords many times before this, involving the IPs Special:Contributions/47.36.25.163, blocked for one month last July, and the range Special:Contributions/2601:C7:C201:C640:0:0:0:0/64, blocked for three months. Our friend likes to make sweeping changes to music genres based on personal observation, and perhaps guided by playlists on YouTube. They don't bother with WP:Reliable sources, so that's the main problem here. Several times now I've directed this person to go read any book about any music genre, which does not appear to have happened. Binksternet (talk) 00:12, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Anomiebot on Ascension Island

After years of seeing Anomiebot's helpful edits (sometimes fixing my own formatting mistakes), for the first time I have an unhelpful case to report: it keeps restoring mysterra. org (which redirects to spam) as a source in the article on Ascension Island. Thanks, UrielAcosta (talk) 15:27, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) @UrielAcosta: So long as there is no full ref for <ref name="mysterra">...</ref> but there are one or more no-content refs named <ref name="mysterra" /> in the article, this last type counts as an orphaned ref, and AnomieBOT will rescue the full ref from an older edit, as it did here. The bot is working as designed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:54, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip, I've gone back & eliminated the remaining references. UrielAcosta (talk) 20:57, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		For all you've done for Wikipedia. Love the bot! -ASHEIOU (THEY/THEM • TALK) 02:52, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

AnomieBOT III

Hello, Anomie,

I am trying not to overreact with bots don't publish their reports on schedule so I waited an hour before posting this notice that AnomieBOT III seems to be down. Sometimes the bot is 10 or 15 minutes late with a report but it's been over an hour so it might have to be "restarted". I checked the replag but there is nothing going on in the system and it seems to be an issue with the bot. And it's not Thursday so I'm not sure what is going on! Thanks for any help you provide in helping us address those pesky broken redirects. ;-) Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:56, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, when I checked the bot's status page it was full of "pod missing", apparently something made most of the jobs exit. Restarted everything now. Anomie⚔ 00:08, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks so much, Anomie! It's much appreciated. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:21, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello, again, Anomie,

It looks like AnomieBOT III has missed two updates now to their Broken Redirect lists. Time for a restart? Thanks for checking on this. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:01, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

According to the bot status page, the bot is updating but nothing appears on Special:Contributions/AnomieBOT III. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:08, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Looks like something is broken in Toolforge, it can't connect to the DB replicas. So BrokenRedirectDeleter, EnDashRedirectCreator, TemplateSubster, and TemplateTalkRedirectCreator are all not working at the moment. Anomie⚔ 01:56, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Filed phab:T331763 about it. Anomie⚔ 02:26, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for filing the ticket. The pages were just updated an hour or so ago so I guess things are back to normal. Thanks for checking on things so quickly. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:54, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello, again, Anomie,

Another missed update from AnomieBOT III. It was working so well, maybe it's a system problem. I hope you can check on it and restart your lovely bot. Thanks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:01, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

It says "pod missing" on the bot status page but I don't know what that means. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:03, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, restarted. "Pod missing" means the virtual server ("pod" in Kubernetes) it's supposed to be running on doesn't exist anymore. Anomie⚔ 20:26, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, that was quick! Many thanks, Anomie! Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:40, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Another missed update. They can't be shutting everything down AGAIN, are they? What's up at WikiMedia HQ? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 16:15, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

They're doing a bunch of different upgrades. Last Monday was moving the NFS file system to a new server, Thursday was updating databases, and today was a new version of Kubernetes. I don't think they have any more scheduled, at least. Anomie⚔ 16:47, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Hello, Anomie,

I know that the database or server for s1 was down for 5 days but, supposedly, it got all caught up yesterday. But AnomieBot III isn't issuing its regular reports. I had expected one gigantic report after five days with no broken redirects reported but it was only medium-sized. And then, nothing. Is this an ongoing problem with bots right now? There doesn't seem to be a replag so I'm not sure what the problem is. I tried to get some of this information through Quarry queries but they are not providing much information either. I just anticipated a big backlog and so far, it hasn't appeared. Thanks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:00, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I see AnomieBOT listed a bunch yesterday at 18:55 that were fixed by the next update. Then a few more after that which again were fixed by the next update. Anomie⚔ 23:22, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, it just missed a midday reporting. It is scheduled to report again in about 20 minutes and we'll see what happens. I might have misplaced expectations, I just assumed after 5 days, we'd have a long list of broken redirects. Thanks for the response. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:45, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

It's missed two reports now and hasn't actually produced a list of broken redirects in the past 24 hours. I was looking at Phab and there was some discussion about a problem with "indexes" (see here), I'm not sure what that's about. Other bots whose reports I use are having some issues as well. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:20, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

All I can say is that the bot is running, it's just not finding anything to report. I see it did update Special:Diff/1157991867 on one of those "missed" updates. Anomie⚔ 11:56, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Okay, well I guess that's what it is. I don't have the technical knowledge to speculate on why the reports are briefer than they were in the past. I've noticed that some editors are running queries on Quarry to find some broken redirects so maybe they are just being caught between the times when the report is compiled and issued but I don't think these queries can account for everything. The bot is certainly more thorough and finds broken redirects in every namespace. Thanks for checking into this. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:52, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

AnomieBOT for UzWiki

Hi, Anomie. Can you allow us to use AnomieBOT for UzWiki? Laziz Baxtiyorov (talk) 19:10, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Anomie bot work at CAT:UAA

Hi Anomie! I like what you did with creating Category:Wikipedia usernames with possible policy issues from August 2023. Are there any plans to implement this further and perhaps sort existing ones? I was just thinking about writing a (non-editing) script to find myself the oldest ones to sort of tackle in FIFO order but if you're already planning to improve the categorization, why duplicate the effort? I also just wanted to add that I am excited at the possibility of another admin taking an interest in helping out with reviewing reports in CAT:UAA; I've been the only one that I am aware of since I started working with it in ~2019... TheSandDoctor ^Talk 07:51, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm sorry to disappoint you. AnomieBOT created that because Special:Diff/1168218050 added {{Parent monthly clean-up category}} to Category:Wikipedia usernames with possible policy issues, causing it to be in Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month, which causes AnomieBOT to automatically create monthly sub-categories each month. I'm not planning on starting any work in the area, but if there's bot work that might be useful (that you don't feel like having User:TheSandBot handle) I could take a look.

I see none of the templates involved ({{uw-username}} and so on) currently have any capability to sort into dated subcategories. Unless someone changes them to do so (e.g. adding from {{{{{|safesubst:}}}CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{{{{|safesubst:}}}CURRENTYEAR}} to the category invocation in the templates), the monthly categories will not be populated.

P.S. You might find this API query useful for your script. Anomie⚔ 13:20, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Darn. I got excited for a sec there haha. Where in the templates would you insert that bit of code to add that capability? I deal with advanced templates regularly but I tend not to end up editing/writing templates that often for fear of breaking something. Thanks for that API query! I didn't realize it was that easy to get the timestamp a template was placed.

Thinking out loud for a bot, how would you recommend going about retroactively updating so that pages are sorted properly? I would think getting the timestamp the template was placed and then swap out the page category accordingly? If you already have an idea of how to execute this/have experience with this, I am all ears (and also willing to defer to your bot). TheSandDoctor ^Talk 15:18, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the templates, you'd do like this: Special:Diff/1168938706. Regarding the API query, it's not that easy to find when a template was added to a page, but it is for a category as the timestamp is recorded in the categorylinks table. If you wanted to seek approval for a bot run to update the categories to sort them into dated subcategories, what you outline is what I'd recommend doing. I don't have any code ready that would do this, although it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to write. It could be pretty similar to what you already do for some of TheSandBot's existing tasks, except replacing one category string with another instead of replacing it with an empty string. Anomie⚔ 01:31, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! Figured it out and filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/TheSandBot 11. TheSandDoctor ^Talk 03:56, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

@TheSandDoctor: Don't forget to make similar changes to {{uw-coi-username}}, {{uw-botun}}, {{uw-username69}}, {{BlockUsername}}, {{uw-uall}}, {{welcome-agf-group}}, and {{uw-isu}}. You may also want to add {{always substitute|auto=yes}} to the last four of those to ensure they always get substed. Anomie⚔ 11:07, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for creating the image hider userscript. I modified it to decrease false positives on things like non-mainspace pages and chemboxes. Evanultra01 (talk) 01:43, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

A question on substitution

Hi Anomie. Is it possible to point AnomieBOT at an article that has templates needing substitution, or is does it just 'scan' for such articles? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:10, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

It just scans for such articles. It uses the replica DBs on Toolforge. If there's something you think it should be substing and isn't, I can take a look at why not. Anomie⚔ 00:21, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

No it's working correctly. There's been a string of translated articles with untranslated cites, which have large quantities of no target errors. AnomieBOT substs the cites and then I mass fix the referencing, I was just wondering if I could get the bot to act quicker. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 09:29, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

In case it helps, normally the bot works something like this: Get the list of all auto-subst templates having transclusions using the DB, then for each template fetch the transclusions via the API. If all templates' transclusions are processed within 5 minutes, wait an hour before running again. Otherwise stop processing after about 5 minutes, then run again immediately after running any other tasks in "Bot 3" that are ready to run (and mostly each of those has similar up-to-5-minutes logic).

The recent reports of replication lag may have influenced this process, as if the DB isn't updating with the newest transclusions then the bot know to try processing those newly-transcluded templates. Anomie⚔ 13:07, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Anomie that would coincide with the delayed subst, I'll keep replication lag in mind if it comes up again. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 13:14, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Three years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:59, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Request

I've started a revamp of Wikipedia:Tools/Optimum tool set.

Please take a look and let me know if there are any essential techniques or must have tools that you think should be included.

Thank you.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   08:03, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Heh. I don't use anything listed on that page with Wikipedia. Anomie⚔ 13:45, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

What's missing from the list? What tools and techniques do you find essential?    — The Transhumanist   19:23, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm probably not a good one to ask. Mostly I just use my own bot and my own scripts. Anomie⚔ 02:38, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Sounds like power user know-how to me. Are there any userscript-building tools or advice you would like to tell the rest of us about? Are the bot or the userscripts you've built power tools?    — The Transhumanist   03:03, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

No tools I know about. No advice that's wouldn't be general coding advice. Bot isn't easily usable by others beyond knowing how to interact with it on-wiki when appropriate. Some of the scripts might be useful. I use User:Anomie/diffcur a lot when following discussions via diff, User:Anomie/previewtemplatelastmod is really useful in tracking down recent template changes that broke a page, User:Anomie/unsignedhelper can be helpful when User:SineBot doesn't trigger, and User:Anomie/linkclassifier is a super-powered version of your Wikipedia:Tools/Optimum tool set#Enhanced vision. Anomie⚔ 12:42, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Ooh. I'll take a look at these. That last one sounds especially interesting. Thanks!    — The Transhumanist   12:54, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

AnomieBot created a category in the main namespace?

Clean-up categories from September 2004? Fram (talk) 10:04, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Eek. Fixed. Anomie⚔ 14:03, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) it also looks like the best clean up on this is to revert what appears to be vandalism and delete that useless category; which I've now done. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:32, 24 November 2023 (UTC)