User talk:UnderBot

Kill switch

Throw it here if necessary.

C and F

What happened in Category:C and Category:F? --Mwn3d 22:57, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I rolled back those changes. I wonder what triggered that. --Michael Mol 23:43, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Oh! I see it. "C#" and "F#" --Michael Mol 23:47, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry about that. I've changed UnderBot to no longer attempt to create pages with pound signs in their titles. —Underscore (Talk) 13:50, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the fix; on the whole, this is a minor glitch in the time saved manually creating all those categories. :) (Thinking of which, could you add "X User" to the job queue. I looked at User:EdK, and noticed that a lot of the User categories he's listed in don't have page bodies.) --Michael Mol 14:22, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

It's on the queue; I just had to iron out another bug, or rather, design oversight. —Underscore (Talk) 23:58, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Category redirects

MediaWiki doesn't support category redirects, but it's plausible that a bot might be able to handle it. The particular case I'm seeing right now are the pages that found themselves in Category:F_sharp, when they belong in Category:F_Sharp. Now, someone kindly put a #REDIRECT in the former category, but MediaWiki doesn't directly support category redirects. I think Underbot might be able to enumerate the categories that have #REDIRECT in them (I don't know offhand how to do that particular query, though), and then do a string replace for [[Category:oldname]] to [[Category:newname]], and replace cases of {{*|oldname|.*}} to {{\1|newname|\2}} (with a better regex!). Remind me to send you a T-shirt or mug when I've got all that set up properly; I think this bot is going to wind up being even more work for you if its maintenance doesn't split up among more folks. --Michael Mol 00:48, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Heh, well, that sounds like something that I could implement on my own. Although, again, I don't know when I'll get 'round to it. At any rate, it's now officially on my to-do list. —Underscore (Talk) 17:25, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Not saying it isn't. It's just that I remember my experience with ImplSearchBot, and how change requests kept stacking up. The more features that got added, the more things needed to be fixed, and the less time I had. I don't want you falling into the same trap. --Michael Mol 18:25, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

I see. I think I'll just play it by ear. If I accidently implement more features than I can maintain, I'll comment out the buggy ones until a volunteer steps up. Fortunately, Rosetta Code has no lack of Perl programmers. —Underscore (Talk)

I was thinking more along the lines of cleaning up the source a small bit and throwing it on github. --Michael Mol 22:45, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

That… is not a bad idea. Now also on my to-do list. —Underscore (Talk) 11:10, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

It's only one file, so I'm just hosting it on Rosetta Code; MediaWiki's edit history ought to provide all the version control we need. —Underscore (Talk) 14:45, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

This works now. You just have to make sure that the category for the alternate name is in Category:Alternate language names. —Underscore (Talk) 12:31, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Double redirects

Look at the listing on Special:DoubleRedirects every once in a while (maybe once or twice a week) and change the redirect in the first page in the chain to point to the last page in the chain. Broken redirects is probably more of a manual task. Usually the solution is to delete the redirecting page, but sometimes the solution is to re-redirect. --Mwn3d 19:01, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Why would you delete a redirecting page, unless it was pointing in the completely wrong direction, or unless the content it was pointing at was removed? --Michael Mol 19:05, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

That was talking about broken redirects (pages that redirect to deleted pages). I wanted to say my piece about why the bot shouldn't fix those because I thought about it, but then decided that sometimes you might need to re-redirect. --Mwn3d 19:50, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

It doesn't look like there's a way to list double redirects with the API. I could try scraping the HTML, but I'm afraid that would get messy fast. —Underscore (Talk) 11:25, 1 May 2010 (UTC)