This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Article alerts. 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.
Thanks for the report. It appears that this recent edit to the talk page updated the internal timestamp of the DYK category entry - although it shouldn't have. Currently the bot relies on this timestamp only and doesn't evaluate the date given in the actual DYK tag on the talk page (which is August 2 2007 in the present case). I agree that the bot should be more careful at that point. For the time being I'm listing this under "known problems" above. --B. Wolterding (talk) 15:39, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
(copied from below) May be a related problem but this change in today's run gave a DYK entry from 16 Mar 2008 as though it had happened on 9 February 2009. Keith D (talk) 01:30, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
I improved the code at that point - nominator and nomination date, once known for an article, will never be updated by the bot, so they should be insensitive against vandalism. --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:13, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
AfD discussion result error when template is removed
Status
Fixed
Description
Ripcurl was tagged by the {{physics|fluid-dynamics=yes}} banner, then was nominated for deletion. As the article is not in the scope of the physics project, or the fluid dynamics taskforce, the banner was removed. Rather than removing the entry from the alerts, AABot interpreted this as Ripcurl being kept.
Not sure what you refer to? Well, the internal situation in the bot at that place is as follows: The database delivers a list of "all pages with AfD tags that have talkpages in category (wgcat)". The alerts are built from this list. If you remove the project tag, the article just disappears from the list. Which it does as well if an AfD is closed as "keep". Of course there are ways to fix this, but I need to think a bit about a good variant that is good to implement for all workflows (same problem would appear for any other workflow too).
By the way, what is the expected situation in this case: Should the bot just drop the entry from the alerts list? Or should it list a message "project tag removed from ..." or similar? --B. Wolterding (talk) 20:52, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
Well for that specific example, the bot could do a "hard check" to see if Ripcurl still exists. If it doesn't exist, then it's been deleted. If it exists, but it's not marked by {{physics}}, then you'd simply remove the entry from the alerts. A message such as "The project's tag was removed form the article" could be nice, but I don't think it's necessary, and it would possibly trigger a flew of requests to have the bot list what articles have been de-tagged, and what have been tagged. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:28, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
Fixed now. If in an active entry, the article is removed from the project / workgroup, the entry will silently be dropped from the list, and not be displayed as "closed". --B. Wolterding (talk) 01:30, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
The technical background is as follows: The bot looks for the {{ITNtalk}} template on the talk page to read the date of main page appearance. In the case at hand, it doesn't find the tag (because the date is integrated into {{ArticleHistory}} here). Therefore it assumes that the date is that of the category entry - which is often false as we know from the DYK problems.
I can confirm that this behavior will change with the next version of the bot - it would just ignore the article on not finding {{ITNtalk}}. (BTW, the same solution is now implemented for DYK.) I'm not sure whether this is the final solution to the problem yet. --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:12, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
Entries disappear from the alerts list when AfDs are closed
Note that the bug reported below occurs with all deletion-related processes, not just AfD. I have made a change in the code that will hopefully resolve this problem. However, the change is not yet in the live bot at this time. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:21, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
It is now in the live bot; I have seen several examples where it worked, i.e. AfD articles are reported as "deleted" rather than disppearing from the list. Marking this as "verified". --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:31, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
This problem is now fixed in the code. However, please leave the workaround in place until the change is actually rolled out. --B. Wolterding (talk) 13:03, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
The error message produced then the bot is not configured properly is a bit misleading as it says that the project banner needs to be in Category:WikiProject banners but the bot documentation says that it can be in one of three categories. Can the error message be changed as people are trying to add banners back into the WikiProject banners category when there shouldn't be any need to.
Because WP:CHICAGO doesn't have a {{ArticleAlertbotSubscription}} template placed on the page. I think that the Chicago project was one of the participants in the early test phases, and that the manually configured subscription that was set up back then (when the template-based subscription template was not yet in place) is still active today. If you place the subscription template on the page, the manual configuration can be removed from the database (this won't happen automatically though). --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:01, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
As with all other projects, you need to place {{ArticleAlertbotSubscription}} on your project page. This has been done meanwhile, and now your project appears in the category. I will ask Legoktm to remove the old subscription from the test phase, so that you can control all settings via the subscription template. --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:37, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
RfC text mangled up (again, but different this time)
Status
Fixed (under test)
Description
Instead of (original)
* 19 Mar 2009 – Talk:Independent Party of Oregon#Request for comment (IPO): Two editors have recently been editing this article, who have the strong appearance of a conflict of interest. (One edits under the username "SPeralta," which suggests he is one of the party's three officers.) They have sustained an argumentative tone with three longtime WikiProject Oregon editors (including me), and shown little regard for WP policies and guidelines (edit warring, talk page use, etc.) I hope for some comment from the community about how to best proceed.
the alerts page produced (buggy version)
* 19 Mar 2009 – [[Talk:Independent Party of Oregon#Request for comment (IPO) !! reason=Two editors have recently been editing this article, who have the strong appearance of a conflict of interest. (One edits under the username "SPeralta," which suggests he is one of the party's three officers.) They have sustained an argumentative tone with three longtime WikiProject Oregon editors (including me), and shown little regard for WP policies and guidelines (edit warring, talk page use, etc.) I hope for some comment from the community about how to best proceed. !! time=17:45, 9 March 2009 (UTC)|RFC]] (politics) opened for Independent Party of Oregon (talk).
Type
Please specify the type of bug you are reporting. (Redlink, Overlooked page, Duplicate entry, Transclusion, or Other)
The fix is live. However, this will only be effective for RFCs that are added from now on. Let's see whether the bug appears again. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:46, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
This is definitely related to the international characters, but seems a very weird error. Actually, on my local PC, everything works fine for these projects. The bug is probably related to the slightly different character encoding on the tool server. I have attempted a fix in the code; but we need to see what the effect is, next time the code is rolled out. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:04, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
Categories after redirects
Status
Fixed (to be rolled out)
Description
When a prod gets redirected but a category placed it includes the category in the article alert page. In case of the diff now the article alerts page is part of the Category:Towers in Germany
This happens when there is no line break after the redirect specification. Needs to be fixed in the bot. Unfortunately the category will now stay in the article alerts page until the item expires. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:23, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
I believe the linebreak would not categorize the redirect - at least I had problems in the past and seem to remember that it has to be on one line. Most likely why we do not see that many categorized redirects about. In this particular case it was a save from prod where the article would not show notability any time soon but would be a plausible searchterm which would be covered at the target. Agathoclea (talk) 21:41, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
First, I hope I have fixed this now and the next bot run will produce the correct results (current setting is discussions=1 but you can change this). Second, the underlying technical problem is this: Due to the way the bot reads the subscription parameters (namely, via the category sortkey), there is an upper limit for the length of all parameters combined (approx. 70 characters). It appears that this was exceeded here. By "saving" a few characters by deleting whitespace, I was able to fix it. However, in the long run, it may be necessary to modify the way the bot handles its parameters. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:01, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks, that did the trick. A note on the subscription page should help; you could also consider abbreviating the subscriptions in the short term. G.A.Stalk20:12, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Peer review inlining
Status
Fixed
Description
On the peer review entries it appears to inline most of the text of the peer review rather than allow it to be collapsed/hidden with the header banner for the review. This is an old one that I have just spotted, but still appears in the latest report so may be a feature.
This is a bug, not a feature - but not necessarily in the bot; it's rather related to the collapsible section mechanism I think. I quite clueless here, will refer this to the village pump. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:35, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
