This is an archive of past discussions with User:Shubinator. 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.
Hello Shubinator, I'm not sure why this bot blanked its own userpage - but as an admin bot we really need to have some information available to people landing on that page, and the categorizations are somewhat useful. If you are retiring this bot please let us know so that it have flags removed. Please let me know if I missed something else that may be going on. — xaosfluxTalk13:01, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
Looks like it's an extremely rare bug, under normal conditions the bot shouldn't be blanking its own userpage. Shubinator (talk) 13:47, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
Bot not clearing queue after promoting
I just manually cleared Queue 2. The bot updated the main page hooks 20 minutes ago, but did not clear the queue afterwards. — Maile (talk) 14:46, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
Makes sense to me. DYKUpdateBot is using the same form its predecessors used. Looks like the documentation used to align with the bots, but was changed with this edit, so you may want to double-check with that editor as well. Shubinator (talk) 15:14, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
Updating "DYK is almost overdue" message
Shubinator, it was just pointed out that the auto-generated overdue message by DYKUpdateBot needs a bit of updating.
Step number 1 currently starts with the admonition Check the prep areas. The problem is that "prep areas" is a hard link to Prep 1, which is not always the next available prep. We now have six preps; the next prep that should be promoted (and is the first one they should check to see whether it has been filled) is recorded at Template:Did you know/Queue/NextPrep (it's an integer from 1 to 6).
The message has been like this for years, but it take new eyes to notice that something doesn't make sense in old boilerplate, and MPJ-DK noticed the discrepancy. I'm guessing it won't be a difficult fix; how soon do you think you'll be able to find some time to update the bot? Thanks, and I hope you're having a great summer. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:12, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
And again, thanks. I look forward to seeing it soon—but not too soon or too often, since that means we have a queue that needs to be filled pronto, which gets annoying if it happens too frequently. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:32, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
A new draft
Hey. So there's this new draft I've written at Draft:Devonshire White Paper and I would really like to see it at DYK some time in the future. Would you mind checking it out. Really sorry to bother you like this, but I'm so new to this DYK thing. Thanks, MediaKill13(talk)10:50, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
Welcome to DYK! Unfortunately I myself haven't edited or reviewed articles at DYK in a few years, so it's best to ask one of the regulars over at WT:DYK. (Talk page stalkers, if you'd like to help, feel free to chime in.) Shubinator (talk) 00:20, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
August 31 Labs maintenance appears to have halted DYKHousekeepingBot
There were a couple of maintenance operations performed on the Labs servers today.[1][2] It would appear that one of them took out DYKHousekeepingBot (this addition occurred over an hour ago and the bot has not made an appropriate update). DYKUpdateBot has not had a scheduled update since DYKHousekeepingBot's last update but if we lost one bot then it is likely we lost both. When you get a chance, please check both bots and restart them if needed. --Allen3talk21:41, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
It looks a little off, for example the ellipses after "that" are unnecessary. Best to ask the folks at WT:DYK to double-check, I've been away from the nominations page for too long to give good advice :) Shubinator (talk) 14:49, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
Extended confirmed protection
Hello, Shubinator. This message is intended to notify administrators of important changes to the protection policy.
Extended confirmed protection (also known as "30/500 protection") is a new level of page protection that only allows edits from accounts at least 30 days old and with 500 edits. The automatically assigned "extended confirmed" user right was created for this purpose. The protection level was created following this community discussion with the primary intention of enforcing various arbitration remedies that prohibited editors under the "30 days/500 edits" threshold to edit certain topic areas.
In July and August 2016, a request for comment established consensus for community use of the new protection level. Administrators are authorized to apply extended confirmed protection to combat any form of disruption (e.g. vandalism, sock puppetry, edit warring, etc.) on any topic, subject to the following conditions:
Extended confirmed protection may only be used in cases where semi-protection has proven ineffective. It should not be used as a first resort.
Please review the protection policy carefully before using this new level of protection on pages. Thank you. This message was sent to the administrators' mass message list. To opt-out of future messages, please remove yourself from the list. 17:49, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
DYKUpdateBot didn't do 00:00 1 October 2016 update to main page
Shubinator, DYKUpdateBot didn't do the daily DYK update at midnight, 1 October 2016, and the update is currently about 4 hours overdue. I hope you'll see this soon and be able to get the bot working again. Thanks!
The DYKHousekeepingBot seems to have survived whatever happened to DYKUpdateBot; it has already done three separate updates today. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:58, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
The message proposes two different paths forward. If the nominator would like to continue, the message links to the nomination procedure. If the nominator would not like to continue, the message suggests steps to clean up the nomination. Feel free to edit the message, it lives here: Template:DYK nomination needs transcluded. Shubinator (talk) 06:25, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
Should I edit it in place? I do not understand the instructions below. In any event, here is what I would have done:
Hello! Your submission of [[]] at the Did You Know nominations page is not complete; if you would like to continue the process, you need to link your nomination page to the main DYK nomination page, see step 3. If you do not want to continue with the nomination, tag the nomination page with {{db-g7}}, or ask a DYK admin. Thank you.
Shubinator, the bot hasn't done any updating since 17:49 UTC on the 25th, over 19 hours ago. There have been a number of events that would have triggered a bot update, including the new day. Thanks for getting it restarted. (DYKUpdateBot seems to be fine; it did the midnight update as usual.) Thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 13:05, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
Back up and running :) Not sure why it went down in the first place, possibly server maintenance. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 14:10, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
Shubinator, I believe that the bot is down; it hasn't updated since 00:10 November 9, and there should definitely have been an update at approximately the same time today (November 10) with the shifting of the dates, but it's 00:47 and the date shift was at 00:04. Thanks for any help you can give. (Note: DYKUpdateBot ran at 00:00 as scheduled, so it's apparently still up.) BlueMoonset (talk) 00:52, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
I'm not sure why Wikipedia thinks the bot is edit-conflicting. It's possible Wikipedia doesn't think the bot is signed in. I can take a longer look over the weekend, unfortunately the bot will be out of commission until this is sorted out. Shubinator (talk) 01:49, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
One of your attempts seems to have worked, though it oddly isn't showing under the DYKHousekeepingBot contributions list: the page says it was updated at 01:28, 10 November 2016 (UTC), but not since. Thanks for the manual run. I hope you don't mind, but I removed that "0" you added, which hadn't managed to provoke an automatic update (and also two empty days, since those dates have been removed). If you can do a manual run once a day until the bot is fixed, at some point after the new day has been added to the nominations page (usually by 00:10), that would be fabulous, but if it isn't convenient, we can certainly continue muddling along. BlueMoonset (talk) 19:20, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Two-Factor Authentication now available for admins
Hello,
Please note that TOTP based two-factor authentication is now available for all administrators. In light of the recent compromised accounts, you are encouraged to add this additional layer of security to your account. It may be enabled on your preferences page in the "User profile" tab under the "Basic information" section. For basic instructions on how to enable two-factor authentication, please see the developing help page for additional information. Important: Be sure to record the two-factor authentication key and the single use keys. If you lose your two factor authentication and do not have the keys, it's possible that your account will not be recoverable. Furthermore, you are encouraged to utilize a unique password and two-factor authentication for the email account associated with your Wikimedia account. This measure will assist in safeguarding your account from malicious password resets. Comments, questions, and concerns may be directed to the thread on the administrators' noticeboard. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:33, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
A new user right for New Page Patrollers
Hi Shubinator.
A new user group, New Page Reviewer, has been created in a move to greatly improve the standard of new page patrolling. The user right can be granted by any admin at PERM. It is highly recommended that admins look beyond the simple numerical threshold and satisfy themselves that the candidates have the required skills of communication and an advanced knowledge of notability and deletion. Admins are automatically included in this user right.
It is anticipated that this user right will significantly reduce the work load of admins who patrol the performance of the patrollers. However,due to the complexity of the rollout, some rights may have been accorded that may later need to be withdrawn, so some help will still be needed to some extent when discovering wrongly applied deletion tags or inappropriate pages that escape the attention of less experienced reviewers, and above all, hasty and bitey tagging for maintenance. User warnings are available here but very often a friendly custom message works best.
I'm not sure what went wrong; the bot's logs cut off more than a day ago. That said, I've restarted the bot, and it looks normal now. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 02:52, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Shubinator, whatever you did doesn't seem to have taken; the bot hasn't made an edit since November 15. I'm going to see whether there's anyone around who can do a manual update. Please take another look. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 00:44, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
It looks the bot process was killed, which is different from whatever happened yesterday. I've started DYKUpdateBot back up again. Shubinator (talk) 02:03, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
As an admin you can upload the image on en.wiki under the same name and full-protect it here. The image will be deleted later. This is a regular procedure. Materialscientist (talk) 01:22, 19 November 2016 (UTC)
Thank you. So kind of a reverse thing. It's on Commons, but I could upload it as a File on Wikipedia and protect it that way. — Maile (talk) 01:27, 19 November 2016 (UTC)
Hello, Shubinator. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority 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.
A tag has been placed on File:ThunderII.jpg requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section F2 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is an image page for a missing or corrupt image or an empty image description page for a Commons-hosted image.
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 10:17, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
DYKUpdateBot didn't complete last night; it might or might not need to be restarted
Shubinator, last night the DYKUpdateBot died before it did any of the notifications; basically, it updated the main page, archived the old set, and set the time for the next update. That's it. It didn't to the notifications, and more crucially it didn't clear out Queue 1 or update the next queue to be Queue 2.
I've put out a call for an admin to reset the next queue to 2 and to empty out Queue 1, as well as do all the uncompleted notifications to article talk pages and user talk pages, but in case you're around, I was hoping you could keep an eye on the bot and make sure it started up again at midnight UTC. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 20:00, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
Possible changes to the DYK nominations page and DYKHousekeepingBot
Shubinator, the problems we were having with the DYK nominations page (T:TDYK) not being able to transclude all of the nominations has been recurring since the end of November, and getting steadily worse. I think it's now attributable to the overall increase in template usage in individual nominations—it's now a rare one that doesn't use the ping template, for example—and the increasing number of extant nominations.
While a number of suggestions were bruited about in the most recent DYK talk-page discussion, including when to close nominations and the like, it seems like the one that received general support is the one to split the nomination page into two pages: one for nominations still needing approval (Regular), and one for approved nominations (Approved).
It seemed to me that this split would require changes to the DYKHousekeepingBot:
To build the List of DYK Hooks by Date table that's currently included on the Queues and Preps and Nominations pages, it would need to check and extract data from both the existing Regular nominations page and the new Approved nominations page.
Ideally, the bot would also take any nominations on the Regular nominations page that have been approved and move them to the Approved nominations page.
Also, the bot would take any nominations from the Approved nominations page that have run into trouble, and move them back to the Regular nominations page.
However, I imagine that the code to move hooks from one page to another could take some time: new date sections might need to be created as part of a move, for example. You'd also need to protect against editing collisions: people adding new template transclusions to the Regular page, moving hooks to the Special Occasions section (which would be located on the Approved page), and the bot adding a new day and rotating the New section of the Regular page, which happens once daily. Also, I rather suspect some people will move hooks by hand between pages rather than wait for the bot to do it.
So, the big question would seem to be whether you have time to take on this project, and how long each phase would take. The crucial one is the first one: getting the DYKHousekeepingBot to be able to read and combine the data from the Regular and Approved pages into a single table. Once that is ready, we can go live with it and manually move the hooks between the Regular and Approved pages. (It will be a bit of a pain, but at least all nominations will once again be visible.)
I suppose, technically, we could set up the Approved page and just have the hooks moved there disappear from the Nominated page, while you're working on the code for the List of DYK Hooks by Date; I think it would be confusing to have them just disappear, though. Do you have a suggestion on a name for the Approved page? Or should we put it directly "below" the nominations page: Template talk:Did you know/Approved?
I can get the first step up and running later this week. Would be great if someone could create the Approved page with one or two (possibly fake) noms so I have something to work off of. Template talk:Did you know/Approved works for me :) I should have time this Friday, so if the Approved page is created before Dec 23 00:00 UTC, I can likely get the bot reading both pages by Dec 24 00:00 UTC.
As you mentioned, moving the nominations around is likely to cause edit conflicts, and right now neither bot handles edit conflicts gracefully, so it might best for the bots to not do these tasks. Shubinator (talk) 01:08, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
Shubinator, I imagine that any moving will be done by the bot Wugapodes will be building, so we'll let him worry about that when the time comes.
In the meantime, I have just created the Approved page. Sorry it's a day later than you were hoping. Based on the most recent discussion at DYK talk, it seems clear that this page will not be date based; while it may have sections, I think for the time being you should ignore the possibility and just list/count all of the hooks regardless of section (yes, including the special occasion ones).
I've structured the page with an overall first-level Nominations section like the current Nominations page, and second-level "Approved nominations" and "Special occasion holding area". However, while the Special occasion second has third-level headers (by date), the Approved nominations section does not. Will your bot look up and count the nominations in both sections even if they're at different levels, or would it be better to put in a third-level header under Approved nominations (called, say, "Ready for promotion")? Also, it seems to me that since there won't be any dates on the Approved page, would it make sense to give the page its own line on the "List of DYK Hooks by Date" table, and perhaps (because there won't be dates there) rename the table?
I should mention that it is possible for hooks to be on the Approved page and not be approved, since subsequent reviewers can come in and find issues with them, so there may be more total hooks than verified hooks.
I stocked the Approvals page with four approved but unpromoted hooks. (They're all from December 6 on the Nominations page.) There are also three approved hooks in the Special occasions section; I basically duplicated everything there that hadn't been promoted, all of which were from the New Year.
Please let me know if you have any questions or preferences, or would like adjustments to the newly created Approvals page. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 00:01, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
Thanks! As long as each nomination has a fourth-level header, the bot will be able to parse it out. For the table, is something like this what you were thinking?
Shubinator, thank you. Yes, that was what I was thinking of. It's good to know about the fourth-level headers; since all nomination templates are built with those headers, then we should be all set—I'm guessing that it doesn't matter whether the structure above them includes third-level headers or not. Can I make a minor request regarding the dates at the bottom of table? It's always seemed odd to me that the "Last updated" line uses an mdy date, while the "Current time" uses the dmy format. Any chance that they could standardize? (I'd imagine dmy should be used if so, since it's what we get in edit histories and user contribution pages and the like.) Once you have a test version ready, some input from the others would make sense: would "Approved" or "Approved page" be clearer, should it have a white background or pink or another color, and so on. The page will eventually need to change again once the other features have been nailed down and implemented, but this allows the two-page solution to be implemented. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:10, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
The bot version currently being tested (you've just been pinged from one of the discussion pages) has date sections for the Approved page, so it would be nice if you'd tweak your bot code in that direction. It has been pointed out, however, that the links do go to the Nominations page, which isn't helpful if you're working on the Approved page. Right now, the links work differently depending on whether you're on the Queues page or the Nominations page. How feasible would a three-way test/formation be when adding the Approved page into the mix? I'm guessing it's more complicated, and not only because both Nominations and Approved pages have the same top-level directory... BlueMoonset (talk) 16:34, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
I'll try to make the change within a week. Tweaking the links to support the Approved page should be doable, the table would always link to sections within the Approved page if it detected it was on the Approved page. Shubinator (talk) 05:39, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
I've updated the live version of DYKHousekeepingBot with the above changes, so it now picks up nominations on the Approved page that are in date sections. Hopefully everything will work seamlessly when Wugapodes's bot is started up. Shubinator (talk) 05:29, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, Shubinator; it looks good! Wugapodes has just posted that the power and wifi are both out due to a storm, so the Wugbot runs are delayed by a day. BlueMoonset (talk) 06:49, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
