User:Cyberbot II/FaQ/DeadlinksBot

About DeadlinksBot
DeadlinksBot is a bot that runs under Cyberbot II. It's sole purpose is to almost completely remove the tediousness and effortful work of addressing WP:LINKROT. Cyberbot II will go out to specified pages and look for pages that are alive, but not yet archived and archive them into the wayback machine. While doing that it analyzes links that are tagged dead, or are found to be dead, and attempts to attach an archived copy of the page to the source, while trying to preserve the various formatting methods used to create citations on Wikipedia. If the bot is unable to find an archive, it will proceed to tag the link as dead if not already done so.

Current functional status
While the bot is approved, it is still undergoing major developments to perfect the system. After all, this bot is running on every article of Wikipedia. Also the foundation has expressed a desire to deploy this bot on 29 other wikis. Currently not functional is the ability to check if a link is dead, and as such untagged links will not be touched and mistakenly archived into the wayback machine. There are also memory issues that still need resolving. When running multiple workers, the system will rapidly run out of memory.

Commonly asked questions

 * 1) What does the edit summary mean?  The bot's edit summary seems to be inconsistent with the edit.
 * The bot does many things with a page while analyzing it. The most visible action is the attempting of adding viable archives to dead sources.  When successfully doing this, it will have considered "rescuing" the source.  In some cases, if something went wrong in the process, it will skip over the link rather than post something that can possibly break it.  The tagging portion is self-explanatory.  That's simply the number it tagged dead.  Due to the mentioned status above, this number will be zero for the time being.  The archiving part is a part that is not visible in any edit.  When archiving, it is taking the links that have no archive and archiving it into the wayback machine to avoid issues with link rot in the future.
 * 1) Why is this bot running when it isn't finished?
 * Because it is fulfilling the primary task of rescuing sources and archiving the ones that aren't archived. The feature in development is not in the scope of approval yet, and will be approved with a separate BRFA.