User:Jeff G./MiszaBot

Once there was a bot named MiszaBot, named after and by its creator, Misza13. Its original purpose was "Spamming Esperanza members with the Newsletter."

Some time later, it started archiving pages in various namespaces. Documentation of the archiving it was doing was placed on those pages with various templates, all mentioning it by name.

Some time after that, it spawned the following archiving bots:
 * (Archives Talk: pages)
 * (Archives Wikipedia:, Wikipedia Talk: etc. pages)
 * (Archives User Talk: pages)

No one bothered to change the templates.

One of the tasks it took on was updating new cases on Mediation Cabal/Cases.

At 14:05, 13 October 2011 (UTC), MedcabBot decided that if there were no new cases on that page, there just had to be a blank line between HTML comments "BEGIN NewCases" and "END NewCases". A minute later, MiszaBot decided that such blank line just had to not be there. 29 minutes later, the cycle repeated, and kept repeating every half hour or hour (plus or minus a minute) until MiszaBot's last edit at 17:05. At 19:42:58, Fluffernutter blocked MiszaBot indefinitely with autoblock disabled and comment "appears to be malfunctioning, per http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Mediation_Cabal/Cases&action=history". MedcabBot won the edit war at 19:51.

For some reason, the block was not reversed.

At 00:39, 7 March 2013, I noticed what had happened, updated AWB on my laptop, and started doing something about it (correcting untrue references to it on talk-type pages (not necessarily in talk-type namespaces). Some people wrote to me about that at User talk:Jeff G. and User talk:Jeff G..