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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Cyde (talk | contribs) at 03:08, 22 May 2016 (→‎Cydebot is thrown by invisible control characters). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Category moves

Hi Cyde,

Could you make it so that, when moving (or speedily moving) a category from an old title to a new title, Cydebot will delete the old title as a default? This does not appear to be happening currently and can be very problematic depending on why the category was renamed. While a category redirect is often useful, they should be created as a result of human judgment, not mass-created by bot except under very narrow parameters.

Thank you, -- Black Falcon (talk) 05:22, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ping, to keep the archive-bots away. -- Black Falcon (talk) 05:57, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly support this request. If the bot is currently keeping redirects that have incoming links from user pages, please ignore User:RussBot/category redirect log and User:Mdann52/CfD. – Fayenatic London 20:18, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Mind you, the best of all worlds would be a way for the admin who lists the category to choose whether the redirect gets kept or not. Maybe on the Working page, split the Speedy and the Move/merge sections into two? Or use a prefix e.g. ** to indicate keeping a redirect? – Fayenatic London 17:01, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Black Falcon and Fayenatic london: Changing the CFDW format would be a bit more work, and we can consider that if we feel that it would be genuinely useful. As a stopgap solution, how about if I simply update the bot to not leave behind a redirect at the old page? Is that better default behavior? That's how the bot was running for a long time (almost a full decade), if I recall correctly. --Cyde Weys 01:52, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I do believe that would be better default behavior for Cydebot. I think Fayenatic london's idea would be optimal, but I do not know the amount of work that would be involved and so hesitate to ask you to take on that burden for a task that takes only seconds to perform manually—literally just typing {{Category redirect|}} and copy-pasting the name of the destination category. Thanks! -- Black Falcon (talk) 02:14, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that not leaving the redirect would be a better default.
Black Falcon, if the category was renamed (as opposed to merged), a much easier option is to Undelete the redirect that is (temporarily) created by moving the page. – Fayenatic London 12:20, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Black Falcon: Exactly how often are redirects desired on the old category page anyway? You'd know better than I. I'll change the default redirection behavior as soon as my other pending fix for edit summary messages goes in. --Cyde Weys 02:44, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
While Cydebot has been generally not deleting them, I've been deleting some but leaving more than 50% in place. Before, I used to create/undelete a lot less than half. So for me, whether they are "desired" depends quite a lot on whether they need any action on my part. Objectively, I prefer to have a redirect where the old name is a plausible category that someone might well add to an article, esp. variant spelling/punctuation, or short/former names e.g. for sports teams.
Pinging @Good Olfactory: as well. – Fayenatic London 12:20, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 2 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 17 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:33, 17 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cydebot misbehaving

How can it happen that User:Cydebot repeatedly empties out a category after an editor reverted the bot's erroneous edit? Category:Vosges was renamed in that CfD, but was recreated by myself as a distinct topic. Basically that's what the CfD was all about. See Sport in the Vosges and Mountain passes of the Vosges for the bot's erroneous edits that even caused the whole category to be nominated for speedy deletion. I think we need to fix this bug ASAP, not just for the individual case but more generally for this type of cases. Thanks, --PanchoS (talk) 10:45, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@PanchoS: it's not a bug. This was happening because the instruction to the bot had not yet been removed from the Working page. User:Od Mishehu added the instruction yesterday[1] and it was still there.
AFAIK there is no guidance on who should remove instructions after they have been processed; in practice, sometimes admins remove instructions left by others, sometimes we leave them there for the original admin to check and follow up. Whoever removes them, WP:CFDAI states that we should first check backlinks etc. I've done this batch now, so go ahead with your re-creation. – Fayenatic London 13:30, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Fayenatic london: Ah, thanks, I didn't know about that. But why don't we require User:Cydebot to mark an instruction as "processed" once it has been successfully processed? This would still allow the original admin to doublecheck and followup, while preventing the bot from processing it again and again? Cheers, PanchoS (talk) 13:44, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely a good idea. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:33, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cydebot is thrown by invisible control characters

Hi, I've noticed that Cydebot sometimes doesn't move a few articles when it renames a category. Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Openmind_Projects&diff=721440632&oldid=721431310 – the page had an invisible control character at the end of the category name. Please can you program it to catch these as well? – Fayenatic London 21:44, 21 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The specific character in question was LINE FEED. How the hell did that even happen -- was someone editing with an electric typewriter? I'll try to figure out how that impacts the regexes that pywikibot uses. --Cyde Weys 03:08, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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