User talk:Scs/Archive/2011

This is an archive of past discussions. Please do not edit.
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The Scsbot and its deletions

Cheers - I had actually put my own back by myself, but didn't fix other deletions that had happened. I noticed a few of my own (simply because they were mine) and one edit by someone else had also been deleted. I had suspected it was this bot that had done it. Anyway, thanks. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 03:42, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Scsbot adds a month when day doesn't exist

Scsbot created Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 January 29 with a wrong link to "Mar" at top of the page where the following month "Feb" should have been linked. Looking back at other Help desk archives, it appears a month is added whenever the corresponding day doesn't exist in the previous or next month. For example, Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2010 May 30 correctly links to "<< Apr | May | Jun >>", but Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2010 May 31 links to "<< May | May | Jul >>". PrimeHunter (talk) 22:11, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Archiving the Computing Reference Desk

Isn't it time to archive the Computing Reference Desk again? It's now over 170 kilobytes, over two and a half times the size when it was last archived. JIP | Talk 16:23, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay. The archiving will catch up tonight. (There was a bug in the bot -- exposed, I guess, by a recent MediaWiki change -- which I've just fixed.) —Steve Summit (talk) 18:18, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Something weird with Scsbot

In this edit, it appears that Scsbot ate a random chunk out of the Humanities Desk when it added the date header. Any ideas what happened there? There's a short thread at Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#Missing question that would appreciate any followup you can provide. Cheers! TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:02, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks -- I'm on it. —Steve Summit (talk) 17:11, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Renegade

In your edit summary[1] you characterise me as:

• renegade n. 1.An outlaw or rebel.
  2.A disloyal person who betrays or deserts his cause, religion, political party, friend, etc.
  

In the absence of any explanation or apology, this will be seen as personal abuse. Please read both the statement at the top of my talk page and the Wikipedia policy WP:NPA. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 20:52, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

My dictionary includes the definition "a person who behaves in a rebelliously unconventional manner" which, for me, accurately characterizes your practice of moving talk page threads when replying. —Steve Summit (talk) 21:17, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Being an expert on English, one could say he's A Rebel with a Clause. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:43, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Scsbot malfunction

Just a note that your bot deleted a bunch of threads (not old enough to be archived) at Wikipedia:New contributors' help page/questions and then replaced them with date headers (in the wrong order). I'm not sure what happened, but you may want to look into the bot's behavior. Deor (talk) 13:12, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Ugh. Thanks for catching that and fixing it up.

There's a recent failure mode which I haven't tracked down yet, but so far it hadn't resulted in damage like that. —Steve Summit (talk) 13:53, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

An idea occurred to me, but I know nothing about how bots (and Scsbot in particular) work. A number of editors, including me, have been having trouble lately with page loading on Wikipedia—pages, especially long ones like many discussion pages, will take forever to come up or will "hang" when only partially loaded. Could something like that be confusing Scsbot? Deor (talk) 22:13, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

I think you're right; that's the failure I'm suspecting. I need to teach the bot to detect that it's happened. —Steve Summit (talk) 01:10, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Done, I think. (If the fetched page doesn't end with </html>, there's a problem.) —Steve Summit (talk) 03:05, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

It happened again, unfortunately: [2]. Deor (talk) 14:33, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Sigh. Thanks for fixing it, again.

It may be that my "look for </html>" fix isn't adequate.

Or it may be that this particular failure resulted from my killing the bot last night (which I did) at just the wrong moment, when it seemed to be taking forever (which it was).

The good news is that I think the server problems may have been addressed, meaning that these problems will probably go away.

I wish there was a better way for the bot to detect that it had failed, rather than you (or me) having to double-check it all the time. I thought I'd invested it with more than adequate double and triple checks of its own, but somehow they haven't been sufficient in this case. —Steve Summit (talk) 01:31, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Math reference desk redux

A minor issue, but I'm still correcting dates in the math reference desk when it's slow. See this edit for example. I think the initial error is that it doesn't do an update if there are no updates on the previous day, so the date is incorrect when it comes time to do the next update.--RDBury (talk) 04:25, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

This error is finally fixed. —Steve Summit (talk) 02:40, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Help desk

I reverted the archiving of the help desk, as I was in the middle of responding to a post when it archived (and therefore also deleted that day's archive and undid its link at the August archive page). I thought the bot might need to be reset to understand that it's archiving of August 17 has been undone. I'd also like to request that it no longer archive at three days and then fill in the rest over 24 houra, but just do it once at the last possible moment. The timing is a bit short.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:06, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

The bot is specifically designed to figure out what needs doing, and to interact with parallel editing by humans, without needing "resetting". So it'll probably be okay, but thanks for your concern.

I'm not sure what you mean by "filling in the rest over 24 hours"; the intent is to archive one day's worth of content all at once.

Any changing of the archiving strategy would have to be discussed on the talk page. —Steve Summit (talk) 02:31, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Scsbot issue with date headers.

The bot just added headers for Oct 4 and Oct 3 to the Maths RD at the same time, in the same place in the wrong order. It seems not to have added the Oct 3 header before, possibly as there was nothing added Oct 2 so that date is empty. The correct thing to do though would have been to add it at or below the Oct 2 heading: if it mislikes having one heading below another it should have removed the Oct 2 heading. But it makes no sense to not add Oct 3 at the correct time only to add it later in totally the wrong place.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 01:53, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, sorry, the bot has a few lingering issues which I really should fix some day. Thanks for cleaning up after it. —Steve Summit (talk) 03:32, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Here's a strange instance of this Scsbot bug: [3]. The bot added headings for October 10 and October 8, in the wrong order, skipping October 9, because it already had a heading? —Bkell (talk) 01:21, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

The bug is finally fixed. —Steve Summit (talk) 02:40, 6 September 2012 (UTC)