User talk:Cyde

Cyde's talk page        Leave a new message

Archives
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 A B C D E F G
H I J K L M N O
P Q R S T U V W
X Y Z 10 11 12

Open Proxies

Hi. Your user name appears on the list over at Wikimedia as someone who may be able to help with open proxies. I'm trying to populate the IP Deny list on my domain with proxies, as I have a person who I am trying to block from seeing my site openly circumventing. I have found and blocked a few already - Hide My Ass, Easy Security, Guardster, Web Warper, Hidden Tunnel, Anonymizer, The Cloak and Anonymous. I've also found Snoopblocker, Proxy Web, Surfola, Proxify, Megaproxy, Uncork the Web, Sneak Me and a school filter of some sort. Do you know of any others? I'm very keen to block this person from viewing my website. If you don't do you know who I could talk to? Curse of Fenric (talk) 22:17, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Let me get this clear, you want help to secure a non-Wikipedia website from reading of all thing?! Sorry, I don't have the time. And what you're trying to do is impossible anyway; they can always use the Google cache, or any number of countless read-only proxies. --Cyde Weys 04:05, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

The answer to your question is yes - and I have to. The person I'm trying to stop is a crazed and deluded person that I am unable to control, even by ignoring him. Anyway, as long as I can block the sites that provide like the ones I named. I know that he doesn't know how to configure his computer to use the others. That's not all of them. If I can frustrate him enough I can stop him, and that doesn't need every proxy blocked. Even if you have just say half a dozen that I don't have, it would help. The more the merrier of course, but I don't expect you to give me all of them. Curse of Fenric (talk) 08:34, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Trying to prevent someone from being able to read a public website is a losing proposition. Even if you do somehow block out every website that allows one to browse from a different IP address (which is quite the impossible feat), all this person would have to do is use a laptop on any number of unsecured WiFi access points, or go to a library and use their computers. In other words, what you are attempting to do is impossible. --Cyde Weys 21:40, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Not with this person it's not. He can't afford a laptop or WiFi, and he hates libraries. He does everything from home and hides it from his family and friends. I've already blocked his provider completely, so all I need is the main proxies. It's the only way to control him. Nothing else works. I think I've caught his latest proxy (through the Raw Access logs) and I've blocked it. Curse of Fenric (talk) 00:20, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

You asked for my help and you got your answer. I'm sorry you don't like it, but it is what it is. Trying to prevent read access to a site on the public Internet is a fundamentally unwinnable proposition. --Cyde Weys 04:04, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

I see I've been wasting my time. I'll talk to someone else who is willing to understand the gravity of the situation. You clearly don't. Goodbye. (Curse of Fenric not logged in)124.181.127.98 (talk) 11:24, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

No, you didn't waste your time. You came to the perfect person to ask your question. That you didn't like the answer is your own problem. By the way, I don't know you or owe you anything, so the gravity of your situation is irrelevant to me. --Cyde Weys 15:10, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

A crazy deluded monster stalking my friend CoF is irrelevant?? Mal Case (talk) 06:47, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it is irrelevant to me. I don't even know who you are, let alone who CoF is. --Cyde Weys 19:11, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Bot has deleted two categories incorrectly.

This bot deleted two categories based on CFD's from 22 months ago! Category:United States Senate candidates and Category:United States House of Representatives candidates. I have recreated them, but their contents are also gone. Can they be fixed?—Markles 23:57, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I had the bot speedily delete the categories based on them being re-creations of identical material deleted by consensus. I've advised Markles that we need an intervening WP:DRV to re-create the categories since as far as I can tell there's been no consensus decision to re-create them in the past 22 months. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 00:23, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for handling this Olfactory. --Cyde Weys 14:27, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Magic 8-Ball#Standard answers

• The probability of getting a positive result in a magic 8-ball is 50% or 10/20.
• The probability of getting a negative result in a magic 8-ball is 25% or 05/20.

Must be my luck this year. :) -- Cat ^chi? 11:13, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Oooh, I do give you kudos for your response. --Cyde Weys 14:26, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks... I think... :P -- Cat ^chi? 14:36, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Your post

Thank you for you post on my page, I suppose when one has been about the site as long as we all have, we come to see, albeit reluctantly, each others' good points - even old sparring partners like you and I . Thanks. Giano (talk) 21:22, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

No problem. I'd hate to see you run out on a rail for something you didn't do. --Cyde Weys 00:47, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Question about a speedy delete tag

I was quite shocked to see that a set index page, German submarine U-164, was tagged with a speedy deletion tag as a redirect to a nonexistent page (which it is most assuredly not). The speedy notice on my talk page did not identify any responsible party, so a quick look at the links to that page brought me to a subpage of yours, User:Cyde/List of candidates for speedy deletion/Subpage. If you have any knowledge of this, can you clarify for me why exactly this page was so tagged? Thanks in advance. — Bellhalla (talk) 04:22, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Here is the party responsible. You can ask him for more details. In figuring out these kinds of situations in the future, remember to use the History tab, not the What Links Here tool. --Cyde Weys 06:16, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Notice

Hello, Cyde. You have new messages at IRP's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Hello, Cyde. You have new messages at IRP's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Cydebot

Cyde,

I don't know what happened with your bot, but it seems to be duplicating content on pages. See this edit. I'm not an admin, but I am going to report it to try to get it blocked for now, just until someone can figure out what it's doing. I'm just letting you know just in case you see this before admins do. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 00:32, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Is it just the one edit or has it done this many times? --Cyde Weys 00:39, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Hrmm, looks like it did it a lot. Very strange; I haven't edited Cydebot in a long while. Maybe something on wiki changed? If so, look for many other pywikipediabots to begin malfunctioning like this. --Cyde Weys 00:41, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I found quite a few. Shall I keep counting? BTW, someone in the AN thread said not to block. Could you clarify when it is and isn't appropriate to block your bot and which tick boxes should be marked or not? For example, does your bot run off the toolserver and hence need extra care taken when blocking? Carcharoth (talk) 00:42, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

There seems to be a similar bug in the AIV helperbots, see the history of WP:AIV. The Undo button is also acting weird, see WP:VPT. It might be a MediaWiki update, not a problem in your code?? Kusma (talk) 00:42, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm guessing the AIV helperbots are also using PyWikipediaBot. I fear that all PyWiki-based bots are going to malfunction until this is worked out. --Cyde Weys 00:44, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

It seems to have stopped now; I'm rolling back all of its article edits (the category edits seem to be fine). Thanks for the warning about other pywikipediabots; I'll try to keep my eyes out! —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 00:44, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Cyde, I don't know if this helps or not, but it looks like the run of edits Cydebot did before this (changing to Category:Switching and terminal railroads in a bunch of railroad articles) didn't malfunction; it was just the Category:Diseases and disorders in the medical articles that it started doing afterwards. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 00:52, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Why, thank you!

The first sentence especially - the legalese of course being just a framing device, but sometimes lapses in logic or nonremitted actions need to be clarified like that (at least by me, in order to be at my least incoherent...) LessHeard vanU (talk) 22:45, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

No problem

Thanks for your note on my talk page. I understand what you were trying to do. It's hard to tell sometimes when lower level pushback on a problem has been sufficient and when it hasn't; I thought not at the time, because he seemed to be hinting he might do it again, but I understand what you were trying to do in handling it less confrontationally.

As you noted on my talk page, it was interesting that he wandered over to my talk page and defended me from RHMED immediately after I warned him. I never doubted his good faith, but that was a great thing for him to do. I was just going to let it lie rather than start any escalation with him, but I think RHMED will get something out of seeing those responses.

Keep up your good work, and thanks for the side channel notes. I think we're all better off the more we do this... Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 19:32, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Category Deletion

Hi! I noticed that your bot deleted the Category:African-American businesspeople from various articles per a previous CFD discussion. My question is if other ethnic businesspeople categories should also be deleted...as I think this would be the only fair thing to do, plus it seems to align with the CFD ruling. Examples are Category:Asian American businesspeople, Category:Vietnamese-American businesspeople, and Category: German-American businesspeople. I wanted further clarrification before I proceeded and/or if the African-American category is the only one. Thank you --Krushdiva (talk) 02:28, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Your proposal sounds good to me. I would run it through WP:CFD first. Make sure to link to the prior discussion. It looks like the rest of the similar categories were overlooked during the first CFD. --Cyde Weys 03:56, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Category upmerge results in multiples

Hi, owner of Cydebot! I was wondering if this had been brought up before or if there's an easy solution. I noticed today that upon the closure of a CFD request that ended in upmerging several desert flora categories to a single category, that some pages that had several of those upmerged categories eventually got multiple redundant category entries: diff. Is there any way for the bot to run a check of the page to see if the category already exists there so instead of replacing the upmerged category again, it would just remove the old one? Or is this problem so rare that it shouldn't matter? Just a passing thought... Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 03:19, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

The same seems to have happened to some (of not all) of the articles which were recategorised from Category:Diseases to Category:Diseases and disorders: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] etc. etc. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 16:46, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Luckily, having an article in the same category multiple times doesn't hurt anything (at least not immediately), but of course, it is messy, and down the road, if the category is adjusted by a human editor, they may only change one instance instead of all of them. PyWikipediaBot actually used to handle categories differently until I changed the behavior.

Originally, it would parse the wiki text of an article and then create a set of all categories that article was in (remember that, in mathematics, sets cannot contain duplicate members). It would then do any CFD operations on the set — so if one category was changed to another category that was already in the set, there could not be duplicate categories in the set. It would then strip all of the category tags out of the article and insert the set, in sorted order, at the bottom of the page.

Unfortunately, there was a big problem with this approach: it absolutely, positively mangled templates. It worked fine on articles, but anything using even a more slightly complicated syntax, especially with includeonlys, onlyincludes, noincludes, etc. — anything more complicated than a list of categories at the bottom, really — would get terribly broken. I could probably dredge up some diffs from two years ago or so to demonstrate. So I modified PyWikipediaBot to do category replacements using, essentially, a text-based find-and-replace rather than dealing with a whole set. This has the advantage of not terribly mangling templates, but with the downside that you noted above.

A possible middle-ground would be to use the old functionality for pages in namespace 0 and to use the new functionality for everything else. What do you think? --Cyde Weys 16:43, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure there aren't two different issues here. Could you have a look at this edit, for example, especially at the table of contents? This isn't about an article in a category multiple times, but about an article containing most of its text twice, and there might be dozens of this sort. Thanks --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 19:19, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that was a different issue. It was caused by an accidental single character insertion (of '=', if you must know) in the MediaWiki source code during a recent update. It not only affected all screen-scraping bots, but also the undo functionality. It was fixed in a matter of hours in the MediaWiki Subversion tree, thus permanently resolving the issue. Unlike that problem, the issue discussed above can reasonably be said to be a bug in bot code. --Cyde Weys 21:01, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the information! Just to get this straight: Will these articles (Comparative Toxicogenomics Database, Cinchonism etc.) be fixed automatically? --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 21:17, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

No. I didn't realize there were any remaining that hadn't been fixed. --Cyde Weys 21:50, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Seasons Greetings

Wishing you the very best for the season. Guettarda (talk) 07:32, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

CfD request

Hello Cyde. Hope you are well. We have a request at CfD to recategorise a non-free logo category. I am wondering if Cydebot could do this. The request is to change Category:Football logos to Category:Football (soccer) logos, which means going through the original cat and changing {{Non-free logo|Football logos}} to {{Non-free logo|Football (soccer) logos}} . I could do this with AWB, but there are over 1000 pages, so perhaps this would not be such a good idea. Best wishes and thanks in advance, Angus McLellan (Talk) 14:57, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Sure, give me a little bit of time and I'll have this done. --Cyde Weys 16:44, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Done. And note that this work necessitated a small patch to PyWikipediaBot, so others should now benefit from this increased functionality as well. In other words, good task! --Cyde Weys 17:59, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Thank you! Angus McLellan (Talk) 10:07, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Urgent message for Cydebot

See User_talk:Cydebot#Article_duplication and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine#Bot_error_in_articles. Any idea how to fix this? --Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 13:03, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Please see here. It was a bug in MediaWiki, not Cydebot necessarily, and it was fixed quickly. If there are any remaining bugged edits, please fix them. The fix is easy — just remove the duplicate sections. --Cyde Weys 14:14, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science

An Arbitration case in which you commented has been opened, and is located here. Please add any evidence you may wish the Arbitrators to consider to the evidence sub-page, Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science/Evidence. Please submit your evidence within one week, if possible. You may also contribute to the case on the workshop sub-page, Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Fringe science/Workshop.

On behalf of the Arbitration Committee, Daniel (talk) 00:57, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

File:CydeWeys Weird.png listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, File:CydeWeys Weird.png, has been listed at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Please see the discussion to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. Skier Dude (talk) 06:52, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Now at RfD...

Howdy, Cyde! I noticed that you have just deleted the cross namespace redirect Why Wikipedia is not so great this morning. I thought you'd might like to know that I've just nominated three of its "cousins" at RfD. Have a nice day... B.Wind (talk) 08:23, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Signpost updated for November 24, 2008 through January 3, 2009

Three issues have been published since the last deliver: November 24, December 1, and January 3.

The Wikipedia Signpost Weekly Delivery

Volume 4, Issue 45	24 November 2008	About the Signpost

From the editor: 200th issue
ArbCom elections: Candidate profiles	News and notes: Fundraiser, milestones
Wikipedia in the news	Dispatches: Featured article writers — the inside view
Features and admins	The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Volume 4, Issue 46	1 December 2008	About the Signpost

ArbCom elections: Elections open	Wikipedia in the news
WikiProject Report: WikiProject Solar System	Features and admins
The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Volume 5, Issue 1	3 January 2009	About the Signpost

From the editor: Getting back on track
ArbCom elections: 10 arbitrators appointed	Virgin Killer page blocked, unblocked in UK
Editing statistics show decline in participation	Wikipedia drug coverage compared to Medscape, found wanting
News and notes: Fundraising success and other developments	Dispatches: Featured list writers
Wikipedia in the news	WikiProject Report: WikiProject Ice Hockey
Features and admins	The Report on Lengthy Litigation

You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Needless and misunderstood ESPN College Football category removal

The category that you just recently had removed only featured the various college football related programs on ESPN, the list of personalities, and notable Bowl games that they broadcast. You're still going by the critiera of individual announcers being listed in the category. TMC1982 (talk) 11:24 p.m., 30 December 2008 (UTC)

You freaking did it again with the Major League Baseball on television categories!!! Did you even get my first message about how I don't like you doing that!? TMC1982 (talk) 1:55 a.m., 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Please see the instructions on Cydebot's talk page. --Cyde Weys 00:36, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

7000?

That's a LOT of changes! Good work on that... there may be a new record looming just around the corner, though, with some of the huge multiple nominations Good olfactory has been working on recently! Grutness...wha? 20:22, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

January 2009

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, we would like to remind you not to attack other editors, as you did on Template:Wikipedia-adnavbox. Please comment on the contributions and not the contributors. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Your edit summary did not show good character. Please refrain from such insults on Wikipedia. Bob the Wikipedian ^{(talk • contribs)} 06:30, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Bwa-ha-ha-ha, thanks for the best laugh I've had all day. Unfortunately, I don't think you even realize how completely you've missed the plot. --Cyde Weys 15:37, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm told I make people laugh...but usually when that happens, I'm trying to do so. Per your suggestion, I did read the link (your userpage). Congrats on your admin status. I do, however, fail to see how this has anything to do with the edit summary you listed "Don't be a f****** d*******." I don't know about you, but I sure wouldn't link that sentence to my own profile with no further explanation. Anyway, since I seem to have missed something, perhaps you might care to explain? Also, I'm sorry if you found the template warning offensive. I did, however, expand to explain my reasoning for the warning. No hard feelings, but I am rather confused as to why you think the link to your profile explains your edit summary. Please do explain. Thank you! Bob the Wikipedian ^{(talk • contribs)} 04:59, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Argh, looks like I messed up. I was trying to pipe the link User:Cyde/Don't be a fucking douchebag in the edit summary, but everything after the slash got mangled somehow. Grrrr. And yes, it has nothing to do with admin status (which, uh, ain't exactly a new thing for me). Anyway, so the reason this explains the edit summary is because it was supposed to be a link to my essay pointing out the follies of ever citing m:DICK, and since what I was removing from the template was advertising for DICK, it makes sense. --Cyde Weys 23:24, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Yet another case of markup-language-induced confusion. That makes much more sense now. Thanks for investigating. Good day. Bob the Wikipedian ^{(talk • contribs)} 15:49, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Category:Songs by Edward Elgar

HI. Cydebot has just deleted this cat which is being discussed now at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 January 9. How did this happen? Can the cat be reinstated? Thanks. --Kleinzach 15:48, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Category:Parents of people on the autistic spectrum

Hi, I'm just trying to figure out how Category:Parents of people on the autistic spectrum came to be deleted -- i.e. how it came to your attention. Once a category has been deleted there doesn't appear to be any easy way to access that info, as all edits pertaining to the category disappear from edit histories. So I don't even know if it was tagged for Speedy Deletion, nor which editor may have tagged it. Or did it come about in some other way entirely? Cgingold (talk) 09:27, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Luckily, there is an easy way to access that info. You just need to type the page name into Special:Log. Here, I've done it for you. Cydebot's deletion message contains links to the discussion that resulted in the deletion of this category, which is what you're probably looking for. --Cyde Weys 23:26, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Oops, I suppose I should have made it clear that I already knew about that, as it's all displayed right there on the "edit page" for the category. That's how I knew that it had been deleted by Cydebot. But the CFD that's linked was from three years ago, so what I still don't know is how it came to your attention to perform the final step in the deletion process. Also, I've noticed recently that there's a bot that leaves messages on the talk pages of category creators when they've been tagged for Speedy Deletion, but that didn't happen in this case. Cgingold (talk) 10:29, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Oh, in that case, this is the information you are looking for. --Cyde Weys 22:27, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

I saw this by accident just now and thought I'd jump in, since it was I (yes, I) who activated the bot. (A user who is somewhat scared to participate in CfD sent me an e-mail and asked why this was re-created and if it could be deleted speedily. They follow the CfDs and saw my nom for "adoptive parents".) Anyway, I figured yes since I couldn't find an intervening discussion since the deletion decision (but I suppose I should have tagged it or notified the creator before doing what I did). But to the underlying problem that I'm a bit confused about at this point, I suppose: I'm not aware of any "time lapse" guideline about when speedy re-deleting for a category would become inappropriate, but perhaps it wasn't the wisest action to take given the age of the discussion. And if you want to re-create it, would it still need to go to WP:DRV after all this time? That's how I read the rules, but I'm aware that this seems a bit weird. I've no real opinion one way or the other on the merits of the category itself, so I'm also fine to restore it if what I did was wildly inappropriate. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 23:20, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

No, I wouldn't say it was wildly inappropriate. Absent any evidence that the status quo has changed since the CFD, the decision should remain in force. And it's probably just as well that we stalk each other's talk pages. Over half of each of our comments seem to be about CFD, and there's a lot of overlap. Actually, if you could respond directly on here to queries about why suchandsuch category was deleted/moved (that you listed on WP:CFDW), we'd at least cut out the middleman :-P Cyde Weys 23:58, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I'll try to do that. I've considered initiating a personalized duplicate of your bot, solely to save you the headaches. I don't want/need one for any other reason, but if it would help you I'd be open to using my own. (Of course, I know nothing about creating them so I'd be relying on you 100% for it's creation.) Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 00:14, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Nah, don't worry about it. I don't mind the occasional headache. You're not the only one updating WP:CFDW, so not every query is for you anyway. And anyway, I do enjoy the programming challenges of maintaining CFDbot. --Cyde Weys 00:24, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

If I can throw in my .02, regarding this category being speedied as a recreation, seeing as three years had passed since the CFD for Category:Parents of children on the autistic spectrum, I probably would have just put this one up for a new CFD. --Kbdank71 14:27, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I think in retrospect I agree with that. I've made the offer to Cgingold to restore it and take that route. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 21:32, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Signpost, January 10, 2009

The Wikipedia Signpost Weekly Delivery

Volume 5, Issue 2	10 January 2009	About the Signpost

News and notes:Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones	Wikipedia in the news
Dispatches: December themed Main Page	Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News	The Report on Lengthy Litigation

You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list.--ragesoss (talk) 20:00, 11 January 2009 (UTC)§hepBot (Disable) 19:03, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Question about bot function

Will Cydebot empty a category placed in the "empty then delete" queue if the category has already been deleted, i.e., it is a red-linked category? (Sometimes editors insist on populating categories that get deleted over and over again, and having the redlinks on the articles just encourages others to create the category again, so I'm wondering if the bot can do the dirty work of removing them from the deleted category.) Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 01:17, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure it will, but there's only way to know for sure. --Cyde Weys 01:20, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I'll try it out with a test category. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 01:23, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Let me know if it works. If it doesn't, the change to get it working shouldn't be that bad. --Cyde Weys 02:36, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, I got tired of waiting for the crontab entry to fire off so I ran it manually. And I'll be damned:

  File "/home/cyde/pywikipedia/trunk/pywikipedia/wikipedia.py", line 807, in _getEditPage
    raise NoPage(self.site(), self.aslink(forceInterwiki = True))
wikipedia.NoPage: (wikipedia:en, u'[[en:Category:Good Olfactory test category]]'

Hold on while I edit the bot to catch that exception and continue with the run. --Cyde Weys 02:39, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

All right, it's fixed. Here's the relevant change. Long story short, I originally answered so positively because I was pretty sure category.py handled the NoPage error, and I was right about that. However, when I wrote cfd.py, I didn't think to handle that exception when I added the relatively new functionality of parsing CFD templates on category pages for the date links. Anyway, that was a great question that you asked, as it resulted in a bugfix! --Cyde Weys 02:48, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Sweet. And I completely understood those two sentences after the link .... Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 02:54, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Loosely translated, they mean "It's useful to have a programmer around." :-P Cyde Weys 02:56, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

m:DICK banner

Okay, sure, until I got to the adnavbox I didn't even realise that the removal had been intentional. Removing it from the template broke it though, so someone needs to replace, as opposed to just removing the image - notice the way the images are named. Got any ideas for what one should be made for? If so, I'll make one to go over it and slap a different link on. Thanks, — neuro^(talk) 01:38, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, there are lots of (good) policies that I'm sure don't have an animated banner advertising them, but ... editing some articles might be a more useful use of time? Though if you do want to make a jokey banner that is in the spirit of Wikipedia, you could do far worse than Wikipedia:No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man, Wikipedia:Beware of the tigers, Wikipedia:Drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass, etc. --Cyde Weys 03:01, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

And how could I forget Wikipedia:No angry mastodons? --Cyde Weys 03:04, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Signpost, January 17, 2009

The Wikipedia Signpost Weekly Delivery

Volume 5, Issue 3	17 January 2009	About the Signpost

News and notes: New board members, changes at ArbCom	Wikipedia in the news
Dispatches: Featured article writers—the 2008 leaders	WikiProject Report: WikiProject Pharmacology
Features and admins	Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report on Lengthy Litigation

You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list.--ragesoss (talk) 21:12, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 23:26, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

My poll

Well, if it was a spelling/capitalization error, a move would be minor. Jonathan321 (talk) 18:20, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. In the history of an article, any sort of page move is a major event compared to the rather insignificant effect that some edits can have. It doesn't matter how much in the page title was changed; even a single character changing (e.g. from upper-case to lower-case) is enough to give the page a whole new URL, thus making the old URL into a redirect. That is a major event no matter how you look at it, and should never be hidden in the page history by a minor filter. --Cyde Weys 00:21, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Your note on Tundrabuggy's talk

Hi Cyde. It would be most helpful if you provided TB with a specific diff or two if you are going to accuse him of being "out of line." And if, as you claim, you've looked over the article's history, please don't hesitate to chime in with your opinions at the article's talkpage. The talkpage could use the input of some experienced editors like yourself. I used to partake in the talkpage discussions, but the swarm of SPA's claiming consensus with ridiculous arguments chased me away. I'm actually surprised at TB's patience and civility in the face of constant barrage of nonsense thrown his way. That is what made your note at his talkpage all the more surprising. Best, --brewcrewer (yada, yada) 22:20, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Hello. Thank you for your note on my talkpage. I do have to say that I don't believe that there was a "rough consensus" to include these photos. Furthermore, I had made my case on the talk page. I will return with the diffs. Tundrabuggy (talk) 23:25, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Cyde, I have put a commentary on my talk page [6] in relation to this. I would appreciate it if you were to comment. Tundrabuggy (talk) 00:58, 20 January 2009 (UTC)