User talk:Andrewpullin

andrewpullin's talk page

Bot Approved

Just thought I would drop by and say that your bot has been approved :) ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 14:49, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

SpaceFactsBot

Seems to be adding blank lines to the beginning of the section. Rmhermen (talk) 22:38, 19 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Think I found the issue. Thanks for spotting it! Andrewpullin (talk) 03:31, 21 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

EU flag / ESA "flag"

First of all, thanks for the work of your bot - it is greatly appreciated.

However, I have one request. The problem is the bot added back the EU flag to represent the ESA. The ESA is not an sub-organization of the EU (ESA and EU have "only" a "framework agreement establishing the legal basis for cooperation"), and it would be better to add the ESA "flag" icon (named "Not the esa logo" – a story of its own…) which is now available as SVG.

So could you be so kind to replace this:

 
{{Flagicon|EU}}

With this:

 
[[File:Not the esa logo.svg|24px|link=European Space Agency]]

?

Kindest regards, Tony Mach (talk) 14:20, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

While we are at it: Could you add a link for ESA as well and modify the color? The light blue seems out of place there…

ESA

Tony Mach (talk) 14:38, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Done. I Tested it and it seems to work. Thanks for finding the ESA flag. I had meant to track one down but never go around to it :) Andrewpullin (talk) 14:53, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry... now it is actually done. I didn't see your second note about formatting the ESA link. That is now done as well. Andrewpullin (talk) 15:02, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Now I need to track down all the other places where a better ESA flag is needed…

And I have actually not tracked down the ESA flag,I just created something that looks very close to the ESA logo: Simply the letters "esa" in Arial font. (The original ESA logo has additionally a little piece missing in the "e", but at that font size it is invisible anyway…) Tony Mach (talk) 18:08, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

SpaceFactsbot

Andrew - might I ask the purpose for this bot, and the change of the numbers on an apparent regular basis? Alan Davidson (talk) 08:24, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Soyuz TMA-18M SpaceFactsBot

Hey, there was a crew change-out for Soyuz TMA-18M. Aidyn Aimbetov and Andreas Mogenson landed on Soyuz TMA-16M at the end of their 10 day mission, and now Mikhail Kornienko and Scott Kelly are on the crew of TMA-18M for their return flight next year. Your bot is continuing to treat Aimbetov and Mogenson as "in space". A direct transfer like this hasn't happened since you made your bot, so I think some code might need to be changed to address scenarios like this.Astrofreak92 (talk) 19:16, 13 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Astrofreak92. You are correct, this was the first transfer to a new vehicle, which is definitely causing a problem. My code uses the data from spacefacts.de, and they do not include active missions in their calculations of cumulative time in space, they only update that when they land. I wanted this to be a bit more "live" information, so I calculated based on the time in orbit of a particular crew vehicle... another piece of information available on spacefacts.de (I simply subtract the current time from the launch time). However, on cursory inspection, there is no quick way to determine how the crews have switched vessels. I should be able to hack it together, but I'm a little busy right now. In the interim, I propose updating the bot to: show the cumulative time in orbit based on spacefacts.de stats, and not include those currently in orbit. That way it will at least be accurate to the most recent landings. I will also add a note saying that those in orbit are not currently shown. I'll then work on updating my code ASAP assuming I can find some useful info at spacefacts.de to consistently handle this scenario (which may be more frequent with NASA considering making spare seats on SpaceX/Boeing available for tourists). If you have any further feedbacks or suggestions, let me know. Andrewpullin (talk) 14:03, 15 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your responsiveness! Astrofreak92 (talk) 21:03, 15 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Took a bit of work... but I think it is working properly now (and calculating totals properly). Fans of the Danish and Kazakhstan astronauts / cosmonauts will be disappointed that they plummeted down the rankings.... Their 9 day trip was up to 28 days I think before this fix. Let me know if you notice any problems. Andrewpullin (talk) 09:29, 18 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

HTTP, HTTPS and bots

Hi! Soon (June 12) all traffic to Wikimedia sites and API:s will need to go over https:// instead of http://. Your bot SpaceFactsBot seems to be affected by this.

There's more information here. If you need help updating your bot, maybe that mailing list or w:en:Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard might be good places. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the note, as I completely forgot about that changeover! I have updated it and given it a try, seems to work. I'll continue monitoring. Andrewpullin (talk) 16:51, 28 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Spacefactsbot

Hey, so I've noticed that the space facts bot has not updated the country time in space table in about 5 days. It also has incorrect crew information at the bottom, which I think may be related to whatever issue it's having. Are you active and available to address the issue? Thanks. Astrofreak92 (talk) 17:21, 19 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Astrofreak92. Yep, it was not working. I host that on a server at work, and we had a network outage that persisted for several days. I've brought that server up now and ran it, and it is working again. We'll see if the cron job kicks in tonight as usual. There is one small bug (a strange astronaut name problem at the bottom). I'll check into that once I get home. Thanks for reporting! I haven't had a chance to check up on it with all the rest of the chaos happening. Andrewpullin (talk) 20:52, 19 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hey again. Has the plug been pulled on the bot, then? Astrofreak92 (talk) 16:19, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No... thanks for the reminder. I've put in 100 hrs of overtime the last few weeks, so this got back-burnered. I've put a reminder in to try to do this over the weekend. Andrewpullin (talk) 17:41, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

SpaceFactsBot is back online. I still have a few bugs to update, but they don't currently affect the final table generated (more future proofing it). I will try to make sure it is operational each night for its scheduled update. Thanks again Astrofreak92 for pestering me! Andrewpullin (talk) 09:00, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

New Year 2018 Error - Had an error that resulted in current in-space missions not being added to the List_of_spaceflight_records#Total_human_spaceflight_time_by_country as of the new year. This was introduced during testing for the earlier problem discussed above. This has now been fixed Andrewpullin (talk) 18:16, 3 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, SpaceFactsBot does not seem to recognize a country for American astronaut Serena Aunon-Chancellor, so it's had the US at 2 astronauts since she launched. Just wanted to let you know there was an issue, thanks for all your hard work on this! Astrofreak92 (talk) 14:06, 18 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. I'm at a conference today, but I'll try to look into it tonight. Thanks for spotting! Andrewpullin (talk) 14:59, 18 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

SpaceFactsBot and embedded tables

Have you considered placing the tables that SpaceFactsBot updates into templates? This would reduce the bot edit frequency on the main article, and also allow you to create a documentation page for the table and its updates. I'm not complaining per se, I just noticed that most of the edits to that page were from this bot by quite a large factor: https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/List_of_spaceflight_records

Great work on the bot by the way, I especially love the very clear timestamps. I do love timestamps. :P It does make me wonder if there should be a bot-specialized version of Template:As of which takes ISO datetimes, display-formats them, and handles categorization of outdatedness (EG if a bot or its data source dies) appropriately for the given dataset. Suppose I'll suggest this on its talk page. djr13 (talk) 10:40, 21 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I hadn't considered it, but that would be a sensible thing to try. I'll try to do some investigating over the new few days. Andrewpullin (talk) 15:05, 22 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi djr13. I've implemented your suggestion. Please take a look and let me know if this is what you were expecting. This will get rid of the SpaceFactsBot "noise" from the page, which I think makes sense. Now when people view the history, they will see more of the major changes submitted by real people, rather than these daily updates. Thanks for a great suggestion! I'm posting information about this in the Talk:List_of_spaceflight_records#Countries_by_time_in_space_table talk page for the article so that others can comment on whether they agree with the change. Andrewpullin (talk) 17:10, 23 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, that works. I'd recommend using regular sentence-capitalization and spacing for the template name. I'd do this myself but I'm not sure if the bot would recognize a page move? I noticed the bot will revert any changes at all made to the table, which is important to mention in documentation; I had assumed it was just updating the numbers when I made a change to a column header. Would you prefer I suggest this header change on the talk page? Maybe also consider adding {{navbar}} (the V T E thing) to the table somehow so editors can access it easier. (...Though now that I'm looking at {{navbar}} for the first time in years, I'm noticing there's no definitive way to embed it in a table like this. Nor even a category for actual tables. God damn template categories are a mess in general.) djr13 (talk) 13:34, 24 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi djr13. I'll work on your recommendations above. And yes, this bot completely over-writes the table, though that can be modified as well as technically only the nation stats and astronauts and vehicles in space are changed regularly. That being said, I was having a problem early on with users modifying the columns in the table, adding "notes" and other things, and this would completely mess up the format. So because of that I am still leaning towards having at least the headers included in the Bot's work... Anyway, we can see. I'm flexible as I ultimately want the bot to do what the community users want... I just don't want to have to come manually fix the table every couple weeks when someone breaks something :) Andrewpullin (talk) 22:54, 24 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I totally get what you mean by editors messing with the columns, I had wondered if my change would've confused the bot. I don't know a way to solve that with columns that might drastically change other than adding a hidden comment to each column header to identify the column in a standard way for the bot, which'd likely take complex code to recognize and edit accordingly. Doesn't sound terribly easy, I'd probably go the same route to just take over the whole table. Just have a message on the template page that says "if you need changes say so on the talk page!" and link a template sandbox. djr13 (talk) 10:40, 25 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]