User talk:SuggestBot

If you're looking for recommendations, you have two options. Should you want to try it out just once, please go to User:SuggestBot/Requests. If you want recommendations regularly, you can add yourself to the list of SuggestBot Regulars.

Feedback on recommendations, ideas for new features, questions about how SuggestBot works, or anything else related to SuggestBot are all examples of topics welcome below. A bot moves older feedback to the archives regularly, there is also an archive in User:SuggestBot/FeedbackArchive. Thanks for stopping by to let us you what you think! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 11:07, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Not working

Hey! So SuggestBot is not working for me. This has happened 3 times now but I'll use today's example. I put the template on my talk page and I did some other things here at Wikipedia. I finished those things two hours later and I was going to my talk page to check the suggestions from SuggestBot. But there is none. The last edit was me. I know I did it right because I have done it before. Ping me. –DangerousJXD (talk) 09:21, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

@DangerousJXD: Sorry to hear it's not working, and thanks for reporting that! I've done my best to test the bot and see if there is something that doesn't work, but there didn't seem to be anything I could do to trigger this behaviour (it was happy to post to my sandbox page, and correctly detects the template on your talkpage). Could you try adding the template again? I've set the bot up so I can monitor it more closely and see where it goes wrong, so we can get this problem solved. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:41, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

It worked. No idea why it didn't before. –DangerousJXD (talk) 22:12, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

It has happened two more times. :/ Same way. Check the edit history of my talk page for when I did them. DangerousJXD (talk) 07:44, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@DangerousJXD: Sorry about this! I've noticed that we've been having problems saving edits, they fail with an API Error ("invalid token"). Just updated the Python library we use to communicate with the Wikipedia API (pywikibot), hopefully that'll make things more stable. I'll keep monitoring SuggestBot, and if it fails again I'll start digging into the details to figure out why it happens. Sorry again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:12, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

It has failed again. —DangerousJXD (talk) 09:40, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

@DangerousJXD: Sorry to hear that it's not working, again, and thanks for reporting it! I did make a change to our code last week that I was hoping would fix it, but obviously it didn't. I've restarted the bot, so it should be working again, and I'll get in touch with the pywikibot developers to see how we can get this taken care of. Again, sorry about the outage and thanks for keeping me updated about it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:46, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

This will be very helpful!

Hi. I have seen what this bot has done for other people. I decided to try it because by latest edits are grammar fixes on a random page. It has been a while since I put the template and it has not worked. You can find the link to the page I put it on on my user page. Thanks! Will give love once this works Hungryce (talk) 13:59, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

@Hungryce: Thanks for being interested in SuggestBot! I'm sorry that this did not work as you expected. The template that you use is checked twice a day. That process is starting in a minute (literally), so you should receive your suggestions within the next hour or so. If you want suggestions faster, the template to use is User:SuggestBot/suggest, which is checked every five minutes. While the latter is faster, the format of the suggestions provide less information about each article compared to the subscription service. Again, sorry that this didn't work as you expected. I hope this clears up any confusion, but feel free to ask if you still have questions, I'll happily do my best to help you out. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 23:15, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

@Nettrom: Thanks. I had thought it had said somewhere that it takes 15-20m. I guess I was wrong! Thanks again for the help. I am happy that this bot exists for all to use and is not something that you have to request and have edits like AWB. Thanks Hungryce (talk) 00:36, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Suggestions

Thank you for suggesting articles! I received the first set today! But what should I do to get them regularly?
Any ways, thank you for them!
aGastya  ✉ let's talk about it :) 15:34, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi aGastya, thanks for trying out SuggestBot! To get them periodically you can either use a template or our userbox, and you can get them weekly, every two weeks, or every four weeks. The process is described in more detail on User:SuggestBot/Getting Recommendations Regularly. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll help you out! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 17:50, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Not loading suggestions

I placed {{User:SuggestBot/suggest}} on Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Technology/Edit articles, and almost a day later there is still nothing there. Did I do something wrong? (Pinging Nettrom). Harej (talk) 19:36, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Harej: I'm sorry that it's not working as it should. And no, you did not do anything wrong. We've been having some issues with getting the recommendations posted. I'll be looking into this tomorrow, hoping this get the problem permanently fixed. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:50, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. Just spitballing, but the number of pages where /suggest is transcluded is being overstated since I have it on one page, Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Technology/Edit articles, which is transcluded into two other pages: the main project page, and an experimental user space page. So if the bot is looking for the template on a page and isn't finding it (because it's actually on another page that is being transcluded), and if somehow there is unusually poor exception handling, that would explain it. Harej (talk) 19:06, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

@Harej: Sorry for not catching this the previous time around, but we currently don't check for templates outside of the User and User talk namespaces. It's partly due to the bot request referring to those two, SuggestBot has so far been mainly a user-driven bot (thereby focusing on individual users). Secondly, we've got checks in place to make sure users can't spam each other with suggestions. I could probably rewrite the check so it allows for transclusion of User:SuggestBot/suggest on WikiProject pages, and if said page is a "task template" it'll fall in under the task template BRFA. At the same time, might also want a parameter that'll make SuggestBot wipe existing content in the template so it's an actual update? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:18, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Those updates would be much appreciated. Also, there is no need for a section header or the message copy above or below the recommendations list; just the recommendations will do. Thanks, Harej (talk) 17:19, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Suggestion:Copyedit column

Hello, I really like the suggestbot suggestions, and I like the columns indicating what needs fixed (sources, content etc.) However, I really like copyediting work. Would it be possible to add a copyediting column to the suggestbot output? Thanks! Happy Squirrel(Please let me know how to improve!) 14:47, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Happy Squirrel! SuggestBot already does have articles needing copyedit, but they do not have their own task type. Instead, it collects articles from Category:All articles needing copy edit and put them into the "Cleanup" task category, together with articles from a few other categories as well (each task category is documented here). I'd be a little reluctant to make copyediting its own task because every now and then the Guild of Copy Editors go through a whole lot of them fairly quickly. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:27, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Missed Opportunities focus in SuggestBot

Your recent work on "Wasted Effort and Missed Opportunities: Content Production and Reader Interest in Wikipedia". GroupLens Research. May 11, 2015. shows categories of articles that have more readers than quality. It's clear that SuggestBot has something of this feature already, since you include readership counts and quality stars. Do you have any sense from your usership whether people focus their efforts based on those readership/quality columns? Is there a need for more algorithmic focus on "missed opportunities"? Runner1928 (talk) 15:29, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Third party, series of suggestions, external access

I have three quick questions:

1. Is it possible to generate recommendations for a third party user? For instance, if there were a WikiProject with 3 members, would it be possible to generate a one-time consolidated list by invoking {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|User:member1|User:member2|User:member3}}?
2. Related to the above, is it possible to have multiple series of suggestions on the same User/User_talk page? For instance, is it possible to have one section containing suggestions for {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:WikiProject_Human_Computer_Interaction_articles}} and another section on the same page for {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Seattle|University of Washington|Pike Place Market|Space Needle|Lake Union|Burke-Gilman Trail}}?
3. Lastly, and this may be a long shot, but is there any type of API to access recommendations for a given user/article/category, or a collection of any? It doesn't look like the recurring recommendations currently allow for receiving recommendations based on category or article. The ability to receive one-time requests as a JSON structure could be a neat way to facilitate more access by external tools to generate customized recommendations.

Thank you very much for your time.

Md gilbert (talk) 21:40, 27 May 2015 (UTC)