The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Approved.

HBC AIV helperbot

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Operator: HighInBC, Alphachimp, Krellis

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic

Programming Language(s): Perl

Function Summary: Fix/reset the instructions comment block on Wikipedia:AIV if it is modified/removed

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Continuous

Edit rate requested: Occasional, as needed whenever the instructions are broken, not more than once every 30 seconds.

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y

Function Details:

The instructions for creating a report on Wikipedia:AIV are contained in an HTML comment in the page source, so that reporters see them when editing the page. Unfortunately, despite all attempts to make the instructions clear and explicit, sometimes reports are placed incorrectly, often within the instructions block itself. This causes further confusion for later reporters, and also may cause reports to be accidentally ignored (since they will not be rendered if they are inside the comment). This request is for a new feature of the HBC AIV helperbots which would allow them to fix the instructions in these cases, automatically moving any mostly-correctly-formatted reports that were placed in the comments to the correct location in the process.

Due to the way MediaWiki parses edits inside HTML comments, signatures for reports made inside the instruction block are lost - they are not expanded by MediaWiki until the bot moves them out of the HTML comment, and then look like the bot's signature. The bot adds a small superscript to the signature in these cases, indicating that the original signature was lost when the bot moved the report out of the comments.

The instructions to use for resetting the page are read from a sub-page of AIV, Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism/instructions, once every 30 minutes. Once a consensus is reached over the instructions to use (I have begun discussion of this on WT:AIV), this page will need to be fully protected to prevent abuse.

This feature is controlled by a new parameter in the HBC AIV helperbot parameter string, FixInstructions, which enables the function when set to On or on, and disables it when set to any other value.

Discussion

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This functionality has been coded, and I have done a good bit of testing in my sandbox at User:Krellis/Sandbox/HBC Helper Testing. A list of some of the tests performed so far:

I believe this feature is ready for testing in the real-world environment, and am requesting approval to do so. Any test run will be operated under HBC AIV helperbot3, the instance that I operate. —Krellis (Talk) 20:07, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Good for trial. Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 21:10, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

First trial edit after enabling the function looks good: [1]. Will continue to monitor closely. —Krellis (Talk) 22:22, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There was a bit of a SNAFU early this morning caused by HagermanBot. I actually consider this a bug in HagermanBot, and have reported it as such to Hagerman, but in the meantime, I have added some code to allow the bot to work around the issue in the future without making the situation worse. The sequence of diffs showing the problem is: [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

In the last diff, you can see that the bot actually worked properly once WJBscribe removed the duplication of the comment. I've tested my fix for this in my sandbox, and it now functions as expected, moving the report that was signed by HagermanBot out into the main reporting area and making any other repairs needed to the instruction block. I'll continue to monitor the test closely and report any further problems. —Krellis (Talk) 16:24, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This code has been running for just about a week now, and there haven't been any further problems. The bot has had several chances to update the instruction block on Wikipedia:AIV, and has been successful in each (including several where it moved reports into the proper location so they could be addressed by admins): [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]. I'm satisfied that it is working as designed, and believe it to be ready for final approval (and deployment to the other helperbot instances). Please let me know if there are any questions or concerns, and thanks for your help! —Krellis (Talk) 03:05, 28 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Task Approved. Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 02:57, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
PS on a side note could you configure the bots to work a different page aslo. I have a reporting script that I use to flag usernames that logs to User:Betacommand/Log might you be able to work that page too? Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 02:57, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see any problem with that - the page would need to have a parameter string for the bot on it (see the top of Wikipedia:AIV - the entire line with ((noadminbacklog)) <!-- v1.x.x ... --> is what you need, and you'll probably want to turn everything except RemoveBlocked off). The other thing is that the bot keys on the ipvandal/vandal/userlinks templates, so it would be easier if you could use one of those rather than user6 - if that's a big deal, I can alter the checking to look for user6 as well, but that regex is in a bunch of different parts of the code, so I'd rather leave it alone :) Let me know when you have the parameter string in place (I'd add it myself, but don't want to trample in your userspace, let me know if you'd prefer I do it for you), and I'll have my instance of the bot start servicing it as a test. —Krellis (Talk) 03:54, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
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