This is an archive of past discussions with User:Legobot. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
I moved Legobot over to the stretch grid last night, which totally might have messed stuff up. Will look a bit more deeply tonight. Legoktm (talk) 15:52, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
Is there a reason Legobot does not follow MOS:ORDER?
According to MOS:ORDER, {{good article}} and {{featured article}} templates should be placed in the bottom matter of articles, but Legobot places these templates at the top of articles. Is there a particular reason for this? I looked in the talk page archives and couldn't find any discussion on this question. Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 23:56, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
I'm not certain of the rationale for the choice in MOS::ORDER. I think it had something to do with putting the permanent tags at the bottom and the temporary ones like dispute ands maintenance tags at the top. I can't do anything about GA, but I can have another look at FAC and FLC. There are some technical reasons why the top is better:
The icons appear at the top, so this is where people expect to find them in the markup;
It is easy for the Bot to place templates at the top, harder to locate the right place at the bottom, since {{Defaultsort}} may not exist;
If the article contains too many templates, the net effect is that the star appears at its default size, which is huge.
@Hawkeye7: Thanks for the info, and sorry for the belated reply. I personally think that something should be changed: either the templates should be placed in the bottom matter of articles per the MOS, or MOS:ORDER should be altered. I wouldn't describe myself as a MOS stickler, but it feels odd to be ignoring it on such a mass scale. I can't speak to how feasible it would be to alter the bots, so it would be good to hear from Legoktm as well. Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 18:01, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
The FACBot was already placing the template for FLs down the bottom. I have corrected the fac.pl run so the same now applies to FAs. I can't do anything about Legobot. I already tried to change MOS:ORDER without success, but go ahead. Hawkeye7(discuss)19:00, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
Legobot deleted my comment at the GAN page. My comment showed other readers that I was already taking on the second opinion request. Legobot unhelpfully removed this. Axl¤[Talk]10:23, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
It's not "bureaucracy", the bot is designed to search for uses of the {{GA nominee}} template on article talk pages, and examine those uses for particular parameters, such as |status=. Based on the results from that search (and some other information), it builds a fresh copy of WP:GAN. If you try to edit that page directly, it no longer matches what is indicated on the article talk page, and so the bot rebuilds WP:GAN based on what is on article talk pages. You can't do it backwards.
It's like working for an hourly wage. You arrive for work on Monday, punch in at the time clock, do the work, punch out and go home. At the end of the week, the payroll department give you wages based on the hours worked, those hours being obtained from the times recorded when you punched in and out. But if you did the work without punching in and out, there is no record of the hours so they won't pay you - if you go to the office at the end of the week and write on the wage sheet that you are owed for 8 hours work on the Monday, they will check Monday's time clock records and find no punch times, and alter it right back to zero.
So if there is no |status=onreview on the {{GA nominee}} template on the article talk page, a second opinion is not yet occurring. Reports reflect reality: reality is not affected by an amendment to a report. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:38, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
Done, as a manual job - I have found that Legobot has difficulties with pages that have certain diacritics in their names, including the macron. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:05, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Note: the problem appears to have been with the Miscellany for deletion nomination itself: the timestamp was malformed, which doubtless caused Legobot to choke on the bad data. I've fixed the nomination page; hopefully, some admin will come along and unblock this. This has been reported at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Legobot blocked. With any luck, an admin will unblock Legobot soon, so it can go back to its many tasks, including generating updated WP:GAN pages. BlueMoonset (talk) 06:38, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
@BrownHairedGirl, BlueMoonset, and AGK: It has been known for a long time that the only timestamps recognised by Legobot are those that are in the same format as would be produced by signing with four or five tildes. Anything else will simply be treated as plain text and not be processed as a timestamp; in such a situation, Legobot will continue searching until it finds a valid timestamp, and if none is found, it uses 00:00, 1 January 1970 (UTC) which is indeed the start of Unix time. This was the right action; blocking the bot was the wrong action (see WP:BLOCK#Blocking bots, there is no evidence that the bot was not operating as intended). Other bots and scripts behave similarly: GIGO applies here. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:36, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
@Redrose64, I blocked the bot because it was malfunctioning. It is no part of the bot's purpose to move a just-open MFD to the backlog space. I was not aware of the cause of the malfunction, and the block was a way of making sure that the problem stopped while diagnosis was made and fixes applied. Once the problem was identified and fixed, unblocking was of course the proper next step. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 19:07, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
It was not malfunctioning, it was working as intended. It couldn't find a valid timestamp. Timestamps that are not in the same format as those produced by a normal four-tilde signature are invalid. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:27, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
Are you deliberately missing the point?
It was malfunctioning by moving a just-open MFD to the backlog space. Whether the cause is in code or data, that is a malfunction.
I couldn't find the cause, so I stopped the machine pending diagnosis and repair. If I had known what the fix was, I'd have implemented it. There's no need to repeat the description of the problem with the data: BlueMoonset explained that 15 hours ago, and your repetition adds nothing. -BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 20:07, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
I am not missing the point. The point is that if a valid timestamp is absent, you must expect that to cause difficulties. Do you deny that you removed a perfectly valid timestamp, and that Legobot only moved the nomafter that edit was made? You state I couldn't find the cause - it's clear that you blocked the bot because you don't understand how it operates. That is a very bad policy. If I went around blocking people because I didn't understand why they had made their edits - or even worse, blocked somebody else because of a mistake that I had made myself, I'd be hauled up to explain my actions with the possibility of sanctions including desysop. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:49, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
Sorry, but which part of this is unclear to you: I couldn't find the cause, so I stopped the machine pending diagnosis and repair. If I had known what the fix was, I'd have implemented it.
I did NOT "block somebody". I blocked a bot, because it kept on causing the same problem. And, no, the problem was not caused by my edit. It was because another editor made a trivial formatting variation after a minor omission by me, both of which which I was unaare of.
I am not obliged to know how a bot is coded. As an admin, my responsibility was to intervene because its actions were producing undesired effects.
If it was a human editor, we would have been on the BRD cycle, discussing it. However, bots only do the B, not the RD. That's why the policy on blocking bots is different to that on blocking editors. (see WP:Blocking policy#Blocking_bots)
Anyway, if you want to call for me to be reprimanded or desysopped over this, WP:ANI is thataway. Otherwise, your stubborn missing of the point looks like a petty determination to find fault, and it is just wasting both our time.
The principle is GIGO. If you create a malformed MFD nomination, expect the bot that processes MFD to entirely mishandle it. No doubt, Legobot could handle it better by yelling at the people who created the malformed MFD nomination, but all the bots are in maintenance mode and lack anyone willing to make code changes that aren't unbreak nows. Legoktm (talk) 21:56, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
Once the error was detected and fixed, all was OK.
But the input was not garbage, and the MFD was not malformed. It was just formatted in a common date fmt by a editor who added it in good faith after I inadvertently omitted one "~". Neither of us had any reason to know that it would upset a bot, or that the bot would handle the non-recognition so inelegantly.
Fine, the code is as it is. But so long as it remains like that and it quirks are not advertised, then anyone in the situation I faced has to act on the information in front of them. --BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 22:13, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
@Legoktm: I have added the following line to my talk page: {{User:HBC Archive Indexerbot/OptIn|target=User talk:MrClog/Archive index|mask=User talk:MrClog/Archive <#>|leading_zeros=0|indexhere=yes}} and created an index page with the required text (<!-- Legobot can blank this -->), but Legobot didn't create an index last time it ran. Anyone know why? Thanks. --MrClog (talk) 09:45, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
Obviously this can be manually fixed, and the bot also adds the topic to the appropriate subtopic list, but I was wondering why it didn't work in these cases specifically. It's possible Taiyō-class escort carrier (and other articles with special characters?) is related to the diacritics issues (1, 2).
All the nominations without the GA icon were removed from the GAN list with the edit summary "Maintenance"; I assume that means the bot did not recognize the GA was closed, and just assumed the GAN was withdrawn without being closed.
More diffs can be seen in the collapsed tables below.
Extended tables about the nomination closing
Here's articles where the bot failed to add the GA icon:
I may have missed some diffs because I noticed the bot can perform silent "maintenance" changes in the same edit as doing annotated changes (example: Mithridates I of Parthia). In general, I think it would also be better if the bot explicitly mentioned nomination removals in the edit summary as Removed (or maybe Disappeared, to be specific about the type of removal). After all, it already mentioned Passed and Failed in the edit summaries, so I see no reason to omit the useful information about removals by using the generic and undescriptive edit summary "maintenance". Retro (talk | contribs) 03:09, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
@Legoktm: But judging by this above, I guess Legobot is just performing the tasks previously performed by GA bot, but the task is not actually being actively maintained? I've seen the code at User:GA bot/goodarticles.php (though I'm unsure if it's up to date), and I'm hoping to get involved at Toolforge (membership request pending). I'd probably be interested in updating GA bot if I can set aside some time to understand the current codebase. Retro (talk | contribs) 03:45, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
The source for the GA tasks is, I believe, at goodarticles.php. It appears that the edit summary 'Maintenance' is the default when nothing else was selected by the function generate. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:19, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
It's probably the presence of the {{FailedGA}}. If you look back through the archives of this page you will find several related threads. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:34, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
No longer receiving RFC notices
Can anyone watching this page try and figure out why I've stopped receiving RFC notices from this bot? I haven't changed the FRS list, and ClueBot III's archiving is still working fine, so I have no idea why this is happening. Here is a diff from Legobot's last edit to the current version of my talk page. Thanks for any assistance. Iffy★Chat -- 09:14, 22 November 2018 (UTC)
@Iffy and Redrose64: I haven't received anything since October 25th, and I used to get stuff regularly. If it's because there aren't a lot of open Rfc's and Legobot is all caught up, then that's great. But if that's the case, what's the explanation for this: there's an Rfc at Talk:Anatolia with only one responder since it opened on Nov. 25, and that user has no FRS notice, so nobody has responded through a notice. Is there a way to look at whether Legobot has paged anyone to that Rfc? And if not, why not? Is there someplace we can go to view an English description of the algorithm Legobot uses, or view the code directly? Mathglot (talk) 23:30, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
Short answer: Legobot has not used FRS to inform anybody about the RfC at Talk:Anatolia.
To see which FRS subscribers Legobot has informed, go to its contributions (they're linked in the left margin of this page), and restrict to User talk: space, which yields this list. Then search for "Please comment on Talk:Anatolia: new section". You need not go back earlier than 00:01, 26 November 2018 (UTC) because Legobot begins sending out FRS notifications at midnight each day, and that RfC was initiated on 25 November 2018. If you like, you can expand to 250 or 500 edits rather than 50. Of course, this method would fail if there was more than one open RfC at Talk:Anatolia, but there isn't.
I also have received any RfC notices since around the same date (October 24 for me) after previously receiving them every few days prior to this date. Something must be going on with this bot surely, if at least three editors have experienced this around the same time -- Whats new?(talk)03:01, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
Hi. I posted this above, but got no response, as part of the section on not receiving notices. That issue seems to have been resolved, but I have not yet received a single RfC notice. Did I add myself incorrectly or something? Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 00:55, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
There is evidence that Legobot has been sending the messages to various users pretty much every day, going back several months - apart from a brief interval in mid February 2019, see contributions in user space and search for "Please comment on". It might be that it works its way through a list and for some reason is not reaching the end of the list. Perhaps one of the entries at WP:FRS#Requests for commentis malformed; it doesn't necessarily have to be yours. What we need to do is prepare a list of known successes from those contribs, and compare this against the FRS list to see who has never been informed. One of those people is probably the culprit. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:06, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
Going by Peppery's theory of October, and the apparent success of the blank-line removal (see previous post and subsection), I looked at the edits for October - and found only one where blank lines were added, it was this one by L3X1 (talk·contribs). We need to document that somewhere (along with all the other Legobot quirks): Thou shalt not introduce blank lines. Not only does it violate WP:LISTGAP, it also causes users to be skipped. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:57, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Took my name off list for RfC, still getting messages
Is Legobot working from a too-old list? If so, then new signups will be missing out while people who un-signed-up can't stop getting them. It is a great service, just that I am super busy now. HouseOfChange (talk) 11:21, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
Thanks @Redrose64: for taking a look. I re-added my name with the parameter set to zero. This now appears on the page as "HouseOfChange (talk · contribs) – Limit: no limit per calendar month." If I keep getting notices, I will re-set the number to 1 per month, which will not be much of a nuisance. HouseOfChange (talk) 22:46, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
Update, I tried setting parameter to zero. This displays on the page as "unlimited messages." I continued to get messages, so I have re-set the number to 1 so that I get the minimum possible. Still, it would be good if there was a way to remove one's name. HouseOfChange (talk) 03:55, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
Still receiving messages despite unsubscribing a while ago
@Legoktm: this still seems to be a problem. is there anything I can do about it? Legobot doesn't seem to be exclusion compliant. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.--Breawycker (talk to me!) 17:47, 29 August 2019 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) @Anomalocaris: Hi, please note that Legobot (talk·contribs) is a bot, it cannot read the summary of an edit. It also did not revert any edits: it reconstructed the pages based upon information held elsewhere. Edits such as this, this and this, whilst effective at the time, are ultimately pointless because Legobot will merely overwrite your edits when it next runs (1 minute past each hour). You should have seen a notice like this when editing those pages.
You need to fix the problems at their sources, which in these cases are the RfCs linked. When doing so, you should be aware that Legobot copies from the {{rfc}} tag (exclusive) to the next valid timestamp (inclusive), that is to say, it stops copying at the (UTC) time zone indicator. It copies verbatim, and so cannot make corrections to what was already invalid HTML in the page that it copies from. This is covered by WP:RFC#Example and WP:RFCBRIEF. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:33, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
I wonder if it would be possible to include, in the message that Legobot sends to notify editors that a GA nomination is being reviewed, a link to the review page? It would save quite a few clicks, and to my not-tech-savvy self it seems like a simple thing to do. Vanamonde (Talk)23:34, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
@Wei4Green: To the first question: yes; to the second: because the opening statement was about 4,000 bytes, which was far too long, see WP:RFCBRIEF. Consider that “庆祝中华人民共和国成立70周年大会”, whilst 19 characters, is actually 53 bytes - even the four characters 唯绿远大 occupy 12 bytes. I've added a shorter version. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:34, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
Oh great Legobot, why am I not receiving RFC invites?
Users expect that everything inside <nowiki></nowiki> is static and they can safely put whatever they like there. Bots should preserve this expectation, so Legobot should ignore content inside <nowiki></nowiki>. — UnladenSwallow (talk) 02:52, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) @UnladenSwallow: Yes they should, and no Legobot doesn't; this is a known problem, and unless somebody picks up Legoktm's long-outstanding request for someone else to take over the bot's functions, the chances of Legobot being amended to prevent this are small to nil. So we work around it. This is why Template:Rfc says
If giving an example of the use of this template, do not use the construct <nowiki>{{rfc}}</nowiki> because the bot may consider that it is an actual RfC, and will add an RFC ID or remove the template entirely, as it sees fit. Instead, use one of the template-linking templates such as {{tlx}}, as in {{tlx|rfc|bio}} which produces {{rfc|bio}}.
and is also why WP:RFC says "Do not enclose the {{rfc}} template in <nowiki>...</nowiki> tags ... since Legobot will ignore these and treat the RfC as if it is still open – and may also corrupt the RfC listing pages.".--Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:43, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
I have been incessantly receiving RfC notices on my talk page after trying everything possible to opt out of it. (I removed my name from the list, set pages to 0, tried negative numbers, it's all broken). So I decided to put the deny bots=legobot tag on my talk page and I still got an RfC. What is wrong? How can I stop this whole thing!! Please see my talk page! Nikolaiho☎️📖07:14, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
How can that be ok with Wikipedia? Shouldn't there be a warning text on the page where people sign up for Legobot stating that once you sign up you can NEVER stop receiving notices? I think that fact deserves more publicity than being hidden on Legobot's user page. HouseOfChange (talk) 21:06, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
Legobot's user page says: "For most things, {{bots|deny=Legobot}} should work." Now that you have tried it, post here if you continue to get RFC notices. My mistake; it looks like you put in the deny statement and Legobot continued to post on your page. My dumb guess is that your username is still listed on some page, somewhere, that the bot is using as an opt-in. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:38, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
Well, the approval was six years ago, so I don't remember any additional context beyond what you can see in the BRFA. I suspect this task was directly taken over from Chris G without code changes, hence it might be missing some features the other Legobot tasks have, like proper exclusion compliance. If that's the case, it should be definitely added—if nothing else, I think Lego should be able to manually remove Nikolaiho from the user list. I'll see if I can get a hold of him in case his misses this message. — Earwigtalk00:25, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
