This is the discussion page for the AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) project. It is also the place to discuss using the AWB program (for help, questions, or general inquiries about AWB). Specific guidelines on where to make particular reports or requests are provided in the § Before you post section below. Before asking a question, please refer to the read the § Frequently asked questions below.
Try to report bugs in the current version of the software. Update to the most recent version and check to make sure your bug has not already been reported on Phabricator. See How to Report Bugs Effectively for advice on how to write bug reports.
Before posting anything related to non-Wikimedia Foundation wikis, verify that the site is running a recent version of MediaWiki with enabled Bot API. Older versions of MediaWiki or without the Bot API are not supported. Be sure to mention the exact URL of your wiki.
Request a feature details
Please use the feature request button to submit new feature requests. This format helps the developers track and manage requests efficiently. Before submitting, take a moment to search the archives—both on-wiki and on Phabricator—to see if a similar request has already been discussed.
When I start it up I get one of the following errors:
"The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click on OK to terminate the application.", or
"To run this application, you must first install one of the following versions of the .NET Framework..."
This error means your computer does not have the .NET framework version 2 installed properly. You can choose from various versions for download here, or you can run Windows Update and select version 2 of the .Net framework from the "Optional Updates" section, if you want the choice made for you.
Many Wikimedia projects and languages are supported, see the "User and project preferences" option in the general menu. Other languages will be added on request, though at the moment the interface is always in English. You are also able to use AWB with third-party wikis: Options > Preferences > Site, you can change the wiki there. The wiki must support the Bot API required by AWB. This means that it should have latest HEAD version of MediaWiki or something close to that. The wmf-deployment branch is also recommended, as this is what is currently live on WMF sites.
Under Windows Vista (and newer), AWB is using wrong font size, which results in clipped text and lost buttons and options, (see example here). How to fix it?
Solution #1: Go to "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Display" and switch resizing of the fonts to 100%.
Solution #2: Right click on AutoWikiBrowser.exe --> Properties -> Compatibility (tab) --> enable the "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" option or for Windows 10, if available, select System (Enhanced).
AWB puts stubs after categories, though categories are always rendered the last by MediaWiki?
According to WP:STUB#Categorizing stubs, by convention they are placed at the end of the article, after the External links section, any navigation templates, and the category tags, so that the stub category will appear last. If your wiki uses another order, please let us know here.
I don't like or use Internet Explorer; please use Firefox instead.
AWB does not use Internet Explorer per se. It does, however, use the same web browser control (MSHTML) as Internet Explorer; the equivalent Firefox component does not provide the needed functionality.
How do I open the page in another browser if I can't use the one in AWB?
Right click on the edit box in the bottom right side of your screen. Select "Open page in browser".
How do I edit a page that doesn't exist?
Uncheck "Ignore non existing pages" in the "Skip articles" box.
How do I skip certain articles?
Use the "Skip if contains" and "Skip if doesn't contain" on the "Skip" tab
Can't you leave up a "stable" version, so I don't have to download new versions?
It is important to keep people up to date with the latest versions, because their use of the software doesn't just affect them, but the whole of Wikipedia. As any bugs that remain will be trivial, hopefully releases won't be too frequent.
How can I stop AWB clicking when it changes pages?
This is a Windows sound theme setting. This page explains how to turn off the clicking sound.
Alternatively, delete the following key from the Windows registry:
AWB randomly crashes upon page load on my system, and I always use a browser other than Internet Explorer when using Wikipedia.
You may have installed custom scripts incompatible with IE. Wrap the contents of your monobook.js into conditional:
//Detect IE5.5+
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE")==-1)
{
// Previous contents go here
....
}
I get Just In Time Debugger Messages when loading AWB/loading pages.
In Internet Explorer, go to Tools → Options → Advanced. Make sure 'Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer)' and 'Disable Script Debugging (Other)' Are both checked. Press apply and close.
Why does AWB run very, very slowly if I try to make changes in the edit window on larger pages, especially pages with long lists or tables?
If running on Windows, exit the Speech Recognition software that is built into some versions of Windows; don't just turn it 'Off', you must 'Exit' the software if you have started up Speech Recognition.
When I do a clean install of AutoWikiBrowser the application seems to find old setting data somewhere. I'd like to do a really clean install. Any ideas?
Clean up your registry and remove the folder "C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Local Settings\Application Data\AutoWikiBrowser" (Windows XP) or "C:\Users\user name\AppData\Local\AutoWikiBrowser\" (Windows 7). Note that the application data folder may be hidden.
AWB prompts that there is a newer version but won't update
Check the version number of your AWBUpdater.exe. The current version is 2.4.0.0. If you have an older version, you have to download the latest AWB version and make a clean install.
Which .NET Framework version do I have?
You can find your .NET Framework version in Help → About box.
Where are the default settings stored?
Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\AutoWikiBrowser
Windows Vista onwards: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\AutoWikiBrowser\Default.xml
I cannot copy text from the diff window using the Control+C keyboard shortcut.
You must have Microsoft.mshtml.dll available for AWB to use for this functionality to work. You can try downloading the file (there are a number of third-party websites offering DLL file downloads) and putting it in the same folder as AutoWikiBrowser.exe. This is reported not to work for all users, presumably due to .NET Framework problems.
Is there any way to set AWB to not use https? (GFW blocks 443 port)
In preferences, set project to "custom". Set the left box to http. In the webpage box, type en.wikipedia.org/w/ (English Wikipedia) or zh.wikipedia.org/w/ (Chinese Wikipedia). Note that leaving off the /w/ will result in a "root element missing" error.
How do I login to AWB with accounts enabled with two-factor authentication?
AutoWikiBrowser and searching for pages with capture regex.
I'm looking for pages that have strings like [[Alpha Phi Alpha|Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity]] So I'd like to search for these with something like \[\[[A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*\|\1 and while AWB does capture, it looks like that is only for internal, not for looking for them in the first place, is that something that wikipedia or AWB can do, or is this something where I need Cirrus or something else more powerful? Naraht (talk) 22:50, 24 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure what you are after. You have a specific string 'like' then use a generic form of string search entry. Just plain old search is reasonably powerful. If I search for (articles only) ~"Alpha Phi Alpha" I get 799 entries, for ~"Alpha Phi Alpha" insource:/\[\[Alpha Phi Alpha/ I get 683 entries and with this ~"Alpha Phi Alpha" insource:/\[\[Alpha Phi Alpha\|/ I find 15. Neils51 (talk) 23:57, 24 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You have to put round brackets into the search string to tell the regex code what \1 is intended to match. I began a database scan for \[\[([A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*)\|\1 but quickly aborted it; there are tens of thousands of matches. Typical examples are [[Global Positioning System|Global Positioning System (GPS)]] and [[Some Company Name|Some Company Name Ltd]]. I restricted the search to the names of Greek letters and dumped the results at User:John of Reading/X2 (permalink) -- John of Reading (talk) 08:10, 25 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you both. While I expect the majority of occurances to be from a group of 9 Fraternites and Sororities, there are hundreds that are possibilities. John, that is exactly what I wanted, I expected to have to trim down some. What software is needed for that Database scan and is that something a non-admin user will have access to?Naraht (talk) 13:50, 25 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Naraht: I used AWB's "Database Scanner". AWB normally needs this permission but if you're only using it to create a list of articles, you can use it without logging in. BUT to use the database scanner, you'll need a copy of the text of Wikipedia on your hard drive - the file enwiki-20241120-pages-articles.xml.bz2 is a 20 Gigabyte download from partway down this page, and that has to be uncompressed to 102 Gigabytes before AWB can use it.
I'll have to dig through the code, but I don't think so... on the other hand, there's an "if template exists" function so there might be an "ifexists" in general. Primefac (talk) 21:00, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is an API that lists the pages linked from a page, and another that will report whether pages in that list exist. AWB already has a mechanism for detecting and unlinking links (the de-duplication function). So all the main pieces are in place, although it would need a new option flag if you wanted to make it happen without interaction. Still, it would be a project, and couldn't be classed as maintenance. David Brooks (talk) 22:48, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Daily stand-up: a module is working on some relatively short articles. Running into an undocumented limit in a MediaWiki API. Higher-priority commitments rn. David Brooks (talk) 19:33, 6 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you've read it: yes, I know. I wrote it in a hurry so I'll probably be tweaking it for efficiency and robustness (and bugs :-O ). If you are interested in it, you may want to add the module to your watchlist. David Brooks (talk) 14:32, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you! And, of course, I just found a bug (a link with a ' character in it, and possibly other punctuations). Please copy and reload the module. David Brooks (talk) 21:07, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Due to (19 December 2024) changes to CSS on enwiki, output is now OK with two blank lines, one blank line or no blank line before a stub. AWB no longer needs to force two lines before a stub for enwiki. No idea about other wikis — GhostInTheMachinetalk to me23:50, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Bot saving blank pages
Since there's not much information on this that I'm aware of, I think it's important to keep track of the circumstances that this bug presents itself. Tom.Bot was running on Wikispecies nearly continuously for 2 weeks, from Dec 7 to Dec 21, after 492,026 successful saves in the same instance of AWB before it started intermittently saving blank pages, despite failing a "Skip if doesn't contain" check that I thought would help prevent this problem. Very shortly prior to that, I "Reset saved/skipped counts", which usually produces a large negative "Edits/min" value, which may or may not be related. Before restarting the AWB instance, I reran the bot on some of the blanked pages and they were not blanked again. Restarting the instance fixed the problem. ~Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)19:40, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
