Badly Bradley

Hello, Although I don't mind responding to comments, please note that I only rarely check this e-mail account, sometimes as infrequently as once a month. Please don't be offended if I seem to be unresponsive. Brad

{{helpme}}

I normally login from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&returnto=Main_Page the address I saved when I first created my account.

Beginning earlier today the following message began appearing:

To avoid becoming a victim of phishing, please verify that you are currently viewing the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Userlogin

So I went to the main page and clicked the "Sign in / create account" link from there. To my surprise, it goes to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&returnto=Main_Page the address I've been using all along.

I decided to try the secure login feature at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Main_Page and was greeted by the following dire warning: Unable to verify the identity of secure.wikimedia.org as a trusted site.

Further explanation relates that the certificate from CAcert, Inc. could not be authenticated, possibly because CAcert, Inc. is not in the browsers catalog of known agencies. I noticed upon examining the certificate it was very incomplete (missing info).

I got the same result from both Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) and Firefox 2.0.0.3, both the latest versions with up-to-date certificate catalogs.

What's going on here? It looks to me like someone is tampering with the Wikipedia's security. At the very least, the certificate is screwed up.

Badly Bradley 02:25, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Administrators accounts were hacked today. Real96 02:34, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank You! I was suspicious something bad was happening. I just changed my password to many more characters of many varieties.

Can anything be done about the certificate problem? Or is that really a bogus webpage? I'd really prefer to use a secure sign in page.

Badly Bradley 02:54, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

No, someone's just hacking in to administrators accounts to cause disruption. Just get a secure password which isn't easily identifiable. If you are on a wireless connection, then I really suggest you to try the secure website above. Cheers! Real96 06:11, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

An odd (& hopefully rare) Spell Correction Error

After perusing part of the foregoing I am pleased to see you take very seriously the matter of improving your bot.

Eventually you would notice this anyway, but I prefer you hear it directly from me, the perpetrator.

I performed the following UNDO a few minutes ago:

2007-11-26 (diff) (hist) . . Cardinal direction‎; 11:13:17 . . (0) . . Badly Bradley (Talk | contribs) (Undid revision 173789399 by CmdrObot (talk) Wrong to correct spelling inside a direct quote + it is not even an English quote!)

It is noteworthy that you DO ignore errors inside quotation marks. Unfortunately this event was in the reference section, inside the title of a book which was written in (AFAIK) German. This particular editor opted to italicize the titles (an acceptable practice) rather than use enclosing quotes.

This causes me to wonder: 1) Is your bot blocked from editing Talk Pages, and certain other classes of pages? 2) Is your bot blocked from redoing an UNDO? (It should trigger an automated message back to you if it finds its work undone.)

By the way, I subscribe to the philosophy that editors should only perform a revert once, except for vandalism. I've NEVER had to revert a bot edit before...

I Hope This Helps,

Badly Bradley (talk) 16:56, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Hi Bradley, thanks for catching that. It was a silly mistake on my part, and I can only assume I must have been distracted at the time. I've added the word "orienteering" in that article to my list of exceptions, so the bot should leave it alone in future.

To answer your questions, no, I don't edit talk pages with the bot, and I have some heuristics to avoid pages that look like they might be discussions of some sort (I look for links to user pages, and if there's more than a couple in an article, I ignore it).

Unfortunately, the bot does not ignore quoted text, mainly because it's difficult for a bot to decide what is and isn't quoted text. I mention a couple of the problems [User:CmdrObot/archive1#Quotations|here].

I'm afraid my bot also doesn't know anything about the edit history of an article. All it sees are the current contents of an article, and the article title. Your suggestion for the bot to alert me when reverts to CmdrObot edits have been made is a good one, but unfortunately it isn't terribly easy to integrate into my system as it works at the moment. I'll have a think about it though, and see if there's anything I can do.

Thanks again, CmdrObot (talk) 21:00, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Input requested at Sunset

Hi Badly Bradley,

After a quick browse through the history of Sunset I've noticed you've previously edited the page. Your input is now requested in choosing a new lead picture here. Thanks for your time, --Fir0002 00:33, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:36, 23 November 2015 (UTC)