[[:Image:Touched by His Noodly Appendage.jpg|thumb|right|This Pastafarian award goes to Steve Summit in recognition of his elaborations on building a spaghetti bridge. Unceremoniously presented by Sluzzelin ]]
Hello Steve Summit. I found your insightful elaborations on building a spaghetti bridge interesting and appetizing. I prepared myself some pasta and decided to award you one Flying Spaghetti Monster for your answer at the Science Reference Desk. ---Sluzzelin23:13, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Archiving caught up. (I'm traveling, and for all sorts of mundane reasons this complicates the archiving task, not least because where I am now 00:00 UTC isn't nearly as convenient a time as when I'm at home. Also my traveling computer had a couple of glitches which ended up affecting archiving but not date header adding. Finally got those fixed today.) --Steve Summit (talk) 18:47, 17 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Error in RD/Entertainment archiving - March 26
Bot must have lost its senses for a moment and it grabbed the March 26 thread as a part of the March 30 contents. For the actions, see Special:Diff/835179617 (RD), Special:Diff/835179698 (archive index). Strangely, it left the March 26 header in RD. I've fixed archives manually, but I leave this message just in case you'd like to investigate what went wrong. --CiaPan (talk) 19:25, 7 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
P.S.
For details, please see my today's contributions: [1]. --CiaPan (talk)
P.S.
I'm very sorry I forgot to switch to the operator's talk page, so I've posted the above message at User talk:Scsbot and probably stopped the bot... --CiaPan (talk)
Similar example with Language RefDesk June 13 thread archived within June 14. Another case reported by IP user at my talk page (and fixed already, too) was Miscellaneous, November 30, 2017 archived withind Dec 1 '17. As far as I noticed, all those cases were a single thread within a date, but IMHO that's too weak coincidence to take it seriously. --CiaPan (talk) 06:39, 22 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@CiaPan: Actually, it turns out that is part of it. The archiving bot was written back in much higher-traffic days, and it considers a 1-message day anomalous, a sign it might have made a mistake, or might need to do something different. (And then as I've just discovered, the "something different" has been breaking down, for other reasons.) I think I've fixed at least one aspect of the bug; we'll see if it works better tonight. —Steve Summit (talk) 19:35, 24 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Bot a bit too bold in reducing HTML character entities
I have no idea. I have never noticed such behavior, but I also have never had a reason to watch external links in RefDesks for such modification. It's not that common case to post a URL with quotation marks in it after all. And I have no hope to find any examples (or counteraxamples) in archives, either – searching for " character is not very promising. CiaPan (talk) 20:18, 16 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Scsbot feature request
Hello, please see this edit by a human. Would it be possible to adjust the bot's programming so that it removes an unused header in this fashion? [I assume you'll need BAG approval, but I also assume that would be simple for this kind of thing.] Since it adds the header after midnight, it could check to see whether the previous date's header is immediately before the new one (i.e. there's nothing in between), and if so, it could just remove the old header. Nyttend (talk) 02:38, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Worldbruce: The archiving bot is partially broken, and I have been doing the archiving semimanually for the past week or so. To be honest, I forget that AFCHD needed archiving. I'm sorry about that. Thanks for doing it manually, and I'll include it in my semimanual schedule until I get the automated mechanism fixed. —Steve Summit (talk) 12:54, 2 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. The bot was having trouble on those days, and I thought I'd fixed it, but I didn't realize my workaround left the headers off. (The bot was confused about whether the page existed or not, whether it should create a new page with a new header or append text to an existing page, because of the text "Wikipedia does not have a user page with this exact title" in this question.) But, yes, trying to retroactively add the headers manually is a royal pain. —Steve Summit (talk) 18:55, 9 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Vchimpanzee: Nor I. Thanks for noticing. Will fix.
I think I did what had to be done and found a possible reason. When I edited the Help Desk in the last edit before the history said the archiving took place, I copied everything from April 13 and put it in the proper place. I got a big pink box telling me a URL was blacklisted. I removed said URL in just one instance and that worked. I put the URL back and the edit was still saved.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:54, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
When you want to ping several users as you did in this edit Special:Diff/896214062 you can put multiple usernames as parameters to a single {{re}} template:
An article you recently created, North River (Albemarle Sound), does not have enough sources and citations as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. CASSIOPEIA(talk)10:05, 29 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@CASSIOPEIA: Are there exceptions to the policy you're enforcing? The article I created was a mechanical split of an existing article. The existing article was in need of references, true, but it had existed for years. Moreover, the article I created covers, inadvertently, the older and more relevant (in the sense of more inlinked) of the two topics which had been covered by the article I split. (See Talk:North River (North Carolina)).
There is just about no chance that I am going to be able to find "proper" references for any of these articles. So if you're saying there's no exception to this rule that as of today articles can't be created without more references, I shall have no choice but to restore North River (North Carolina) so that it talks about the river, delete all information at North River (North Carolina) referring to the town, and revert all the links I changed as part of the split. (This has the side effect of leaving Wikipedia with no data about the town.) —Steve Summit (talk) 10:23, 29 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Scs. Good day. For a page to be merit in Wikipedia mainspace, the subject needs to be notable and the content needs to be supported by multipleindependent, reliable sources. Sources can be digital or print version and can be in any languages. Sources from major newspapers and books are the best sources. There are many article in Wikipedia mainspace failed to meet the notability requirements, either no interest editors come along to notice of such article as all of us are volunteers - see WP:OTHERSTUFFEXIST. The draft page will be in Wikipedia system for 6 months before it will be nominated for deletion under G13. Try to find the sources if possible and check Google books if you would find any. Let me know anything else I could help. Cheers. CASSIOPEIA(talk)10:35, 29 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to restore North River (North Carolina) to more or less its state as of [2] (compare the more recent [3], which is hideous), fix links and wikidata references, and be done with it.
Done. 03:05, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
(And if now that attention's been drawn to North River (North Carolina), it gets deleted, too, that's fine. I could go and find some references for these articles, but it's simply not worth it -- they're not that notable; there are plenty of other articles far more worthy of attention.) —Steve Summit (talk) 11:11, 29 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
CiaPan Hi Greetings. Not to say that the "stuff exists" is ok. I just pointed out that (1) we the editors are all volunteers, there are thousands of article which no interested editors to either improve the article or AfD them. (2) we the reviewers, would accept articles as per guidelines. Some of the reveiwers are new and accepted pages which fails the notability guidelines or reviewers would accept a page is not quite pass the nobility guidelines and in hope other editors would help to improve them or we have only a limited reviewers and the backlog of articles waiting to review is huge and some article slip through the system (We have currently 10K backlog (2+months) of articles in the "waiting for review pool") that are some of the reasons why Otherstuffexist. (3) content and info added need to supported by sources which is the WP:BURDEN of the editors who added the content as the content claimed to be verified. The page is not deleted but moved to draft space for the editor to look for sources. Any articles in mainspace could be nominated the article for deletion by any editor if they deem the article fails notability requirement even the article has been in Wikipedia for 10+ years. Articles that truly pass the notability requirements will permanently stay in Wikipedia mainspace. Cheers. CASSIOPEIA(talk)11:24, 29 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Then 'August 21' didn't appear at a proper time, so an 'August 21' question has been added in 'August 20' section – Special:Diff/911816375. Luckily an IP editor fixed that in Special:Diff/911818588.
And finally the bot went wrong on archiving 'August 17': the section was previously collapsed by User:Guy Macon on 18 August and the bot archived the contents as August 18 Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Mathematics/2019_August_18. I suppose it was misled by Guy Macon's signature inside the collapsing template {{collapse top}}. Due to the same error, it didn't remove the 'August 17' section title, which remained there till 26 August, when User Double sharp removed it manually – Special:Diff/912587334.
@CiaPan: Yes, it looks like things were all messed up on that day; it's no wonder the bot got confused.
In other news, I see you've been manually adding date headers for the past few days. Thank you. I managed to get things with the bot patched into shape tonight, so normal automated processing should be resuming. —Steve Summit (talk) 04:49, 13 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. Yes, I tried to take care in the bot's absence, but I managed just to add or update headers for two days. Alas I had not enough time to perform a manual archiving routine. Cheers to MarnetteD for keeping things going, too. --CiaPan (talk)
In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply edit the submission and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.
If your submission has already been deleted by the time you get there, and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.
@Lapablo: Please delete it at your convenience. IIRC, I didn't create it in the first place; it was created by an overzealous New Articles patroller who was concerned about some minor refactoring work I was doing and which I utterly abandoned in response. That draft was doomed from the start and need never have been created in the first place. Zap it with a clear conscience; I don't mind. —Steve Summit (talk) 13:12, 7 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This hot Tom and Jerry is an old-time drink that is once used by one and all in this country to celebrate Christmas with, and in fact it is once so popular that many people think Christmas is invented only to furnish an excuse for hot Tom and Jerry, although of course this is by no means true.
No matter what concoction is your favorite to imbibe during this festive season I would like to toast you with it and to thank you for all your work here at the 'pedia this past year. Best wishes for your 2020 as well Scs. MarnetteD|Talk01:54, 17 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Dates
I noticed you made an edit to Template talk:Date and then reverted yourself. You may find the following page instructive:
There was a massive discussion in 2009 about trying to present dates in articles according to the reader's preferences. What I think are the two key points that came out are
The mechanisms proposed looked at the user's preferences, but the majority of readers do not have Wikipedia accounts, so do not have preferences. Thus, articles will look nice to editors who are logged in, but most readers will see a mess that is invisible to the editors who could fix the mess.
Because the terminal punctuation differs in the dates given in this bullet, it is not possible for any proposed mechanism to correctly render dates in all situations. Example: the first human object to reach the moon was the Luna spacecraft on September 13, 1959, and the first manned mission to the moon was Apollo 11 which landed July 20, 1969. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:44, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Jc3s5h: Oh, my, thank you very much! You have perfectly answered a question I hadn't even asked yet!
I thought I remembered a widely-used mechanism for what I guess is called "date linking", which is why I asked the question you saw, but then I discovered there currently isn't one, which is why I deleted that question. Later today I was going to head over to WP:VP and ask my second question, about the long-lost mechanism I thought I remembered, but now I don't have to, because you've already answered it! (And, oh dear, that was a truly epic Arbcom imbroglio back in 2009, wasn't it? I certainly have no desire whatsoever to reopen any of that!) Thanks again. —Steve Summit (talk) 18:58, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Vchimpanzee: Thanks. I vaguely remember the problem that would have caused that, although for whatever reason I focused on a different aspect of the problem, and didn't notice the missing headers. Thanks for fixing. If it happens again, I'll have to remember to check for that part of the problem, too. —Steve Summit (talk) 12:28, 9 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure how this could have happened but there was no table of contents. I use that to link to a section when I tell someone there was a response. I'm a month behind but slowly I'm catching up. I let people know if I can find no evidence they know how to go back to the Help desk to read their responses.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:19, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Gonnym: My memory is — but this is only a memory — that the archive headers were specifically designed to be substed. Certainly, that was the way the Reference Desk header had always been handled. I don't know if the same consideration(s) (whatever they might have been) truly applied to the Help Desk header, but the bot has always applied the same strategy for all desks.
In summary: there was a good reason, but I don't remember what it was. :-\
Regardless if it should be subst or not, my main concern is that it isn't setup correctly for being subst as it's leaving much of the background code inside (all the ifs, ifeqs, switches, etc). If its subst then the only thing that should appear on the pages is the actual end result header. Gonnym (talk) 14:48, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Wqnvlz: The bot ran into an error last night, and I was careless in not properly investigating and determining the impact. Fixed now. Thanks very much for letting me know. —scs (talk) 16:54, 1 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Discussions updated very recently were archived
In this edit, User:Scsbot archived Help desk discussions such as § Multiple PD notice template, updated as recently as 19:09 8 January. I would have wished to respond to User:Scope creep's recent message (diff), but was prevented from doing so because it disappeared a mere 2 1/2 hours after it was written. Can you explain? Aren't bots supposed to base archiving decisions based on timestamp of the most recent comment in the discussion? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 04:14, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Mathglot: A bot, like any computer program, is supposed to do what it's designed to do. Some Wikipedia archiving bots, it's true, are designed to look for recent activity, but scsbot was never intended to work that way, because when it was designed (back in 2007 or so) to archive the reference desks, a fixed archiving interval was what was desired.
scsbot won't be rewritten to behave differently, partly because it would be too much work, but more importantly because there's no reason to: there are other bots that are designed to look for recent activity. Starting a discussion to consider switching a desk to a different archiving bot and strategy (as you've done) is the right thing to do. —scs (talk) 04:56, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The archiving function at WP:RD/MA seems to have fallen behind. New date headers are being added, but old topics are there, the oldest one being 12 days old. I thought one week was the time limit, so has there been a change? RDBury (talk) 23:24, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That explains it, thanks. I think 14 days will work better, at least for WP:RD/MA. Sometimes during the holiday season or over the summer there are no active questions and the pages are left empty, and I assume it's a bit discouraging to a potential poster to see a blank page. RDBury (talk) 03:25, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Lambiam: It's basically, "It does that sometimes". The basic algorithm for inserting the new August 10 header is simply to find the last question dated August 9, and insert "= August 10 =" right after it.
So the next question is, why was there already August 9 header after the August 9 question? I suspect that question was actually posted on August 8, after which the bot (during the previous day's run) added the August 9 header after it, after which someone added the "Preceding unsigned comment" comment to the question, with an August 9 date baked into it.
The bot used to insert date headers out of order all the time. Eventually I put in a fix for the most common case (namely an empty day), but I think the bot still gets confused in the case where a "Preceding unsigned comment" comment got added to an unsigned question a day later than the question actually appeared.
Or, at least, that's what I assume happens — I'm not sure I've ever dug all the way down to the bottom of this issue. —scs (talk) 14:13, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The August 9 question was added on August 9 above the already existing August 9 header: Special:Diff/1239515506. The edit summary shows that the poster added their question by editing the section of the preceding question. --Lambiam19:09, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
