Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 12

message: A bot that welcomes new users, providing they arn't vandals or don't have offensive usernames.  The bot uses the new user list combined with a "memory", then waits for a specified amount of time (eg. 30 minutes) before welcoming them.  If the user account is blocked before the time limit, the account won't be welcomed.
67.60.52.155 14:34, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think this is a bad idea. I believe it's like 5% or less of the users who actually create an account actually stay, so it would be a resource hog to continuously make new user talk pages. Plus, I think the Welcoming committee does a better job, even if slow sometimes, I know I would prefer to be welcomed by a human.  Plus each user has their own welcome message that is unique, and you can reply to them and ask questions, it's part of being in the community. IMHO, I prefer there not be one. «»Who?¿?meta 15:15, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your feedback - all opinions are welcomed.  With regards to the "resource hog" issue, the robot can be made a little more sophisticated by only welcoming users who have made edits, using the User Contributions feature.  While I agree that it is better to be welcomed by a human, there is no reason why the message could not indicate a person to contact on the welcoming comittee, designated on a rolling basis. 67.60.52.155 16:30, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have put a note on the welcome committee page asking for any feedback they may have. 67.60.52.155 16:35, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If we want to do this (and I'm not sure we do), why not just make it the default content for the talk page of newly created users? Should be a trivial mediawiki patch. --fvw<SMALL>*</SMALL> 18:42, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually I was thinking the same thing, having a default message for the talk page. Wouldn't be a bad idea, and there are plenty of users already on WC that could probably come up with something decent. «»Who?¿?meta 18:57, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

text: The point of a greeting isn't to give information to newcomers.  The point is to welcome them into the Wikipedia community.  A bot can't do that.  Isomorphic 02:57, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

text: I had the same thought months ago.  We have bots to show people the door, we have humans welcome them to a community of humans.  --AllyUnion (talk) 11:52, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Welcome bot 

message: I'd like permission to run a bot to find and list orphaned afds, of the sort that I've been doing by hand for the last month and a half or so.  It is written in Perl and will be manually-assisted.  Since it will probably only be making a dozen or so edits a day, I don't plan on asking for a flag. —Cryptic (talk) 20:37, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You could easily generate a list of stats...  actually, I've been asked for the AFD Bot to generate a list of a summary, but I haven't yet figured out how that could be done.  Well, I just had a small thought, but that would assume everyone's sig ends with a "(UTC)" at the end. --AllyUnion (talk) 11:56, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I actually already use a script to generate a list of pages that are in :Category:Pages for deletion but not listed on a current afd subpage; the point of the bot is so I can take the list it generates and say "Y Y Y Y Y N Y Y" to have it timestamp the relistings and put them on afd instead of copy-pasting it in by hand.  My current method of doing the last part by hand still takes me about an hour of repetitive work every day, and it's starting to get really old. —Cryptic (talk) 06:02, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[User:Crypticbot|Crypticbot]] 

message: As requested at Wikipedia:Bot requests#Archival Bot and announced at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Village Pump Archival Bot and Wikipedia talk:Administrators' noticeboard#AN&ANI ArchiveBot, I'm planning on adding a archival feature to Crypticbot (unless, of course, the editors of both WP:AN and WP:VP, or those here, object).  The way this will work is:
#Fetch the current contents of the page.
#Split it into separate sections (using ^==[^=].*==\s+$ as a delimiter) (for those reading this who don't speak regexp, that's any line starting with exactly two equals signs, followed by at least one character where the first isn't an equals sign, and then ending with at least two equals signs, optionally followed with whitespace).
#Find the latest timestamp in the section's text.
#Optionally look for comments like  or , if folks think such would be useful.
#Add any sections where the latest timestamp was more than seven days in the past to the respective archive page.  (In the case of Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive and the other village post archives, the sections are instead just removed.)
#Replace the current contents of the original page with all the remaining sections.
Like Crypticbot's current AFD-orphan task, this will be run once a day; unlike the AFDs, I won't be vetting the edits beforehand.  Not sure if it merits a bot flag or not; if used on all the village pump (six, and their archives) and administrator's noticeboard pages (three, and their archives), it'll be at most eighteen edits a day.  Perhaps one more to update Template:Administrators' noticeboard navbox, but I expect to be doing that by hand at first. —Cryptic (talk) 20:02, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Expansion for archival duties 

message: I am requesting permission to expand the operations of RussBot to include a regularly scheduled counting of links to disambiguation pages.  I have a script that performs the link count and formats the output.  For sample output, please see User:RussBot/Disambig maintenance bot test.  If this is approved for regular operation, I would run it weekly and direct the output to Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages maintenance instead of to the User page.  Russ Blau (talk) 11:16, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: So it would count the links for every disambig it needs to every time it runs?  Or for only new links?  What happens when the list is excessive, is there anyway for you to control the bot on the number of pages it needs to count links for? --AllyUnion (talk) 11:59, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  The bot would count all the links to pages that are listed on Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages maintenance.  There are about 365 pages listed currently.  For each one of those articles, the bot retrieves Special:Whatlinkshere/Article title and counts the number of links there.  It does not retrieve all the referencing pages.  For pages that have more than 500 inbound links (currently there are only two pages out of 365 that fall into this category), it makes one call to Special:Whatlinkshere/... for every 500 references.  So the bot would send about 370 HTTP requests to the server.  It uses the pywikipediabot framework, so the throttle spaces these requests out several seconds apart. What type of controls do you think would be appropriate?  --Russ Blau (talk) 13:26, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  RussBot: proposed expansion