User talk:Cyde/Archive021

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

 * 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)

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. &mdash;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! &mdash;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. &mdash;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:     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 &mdash; 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. &mdash; anything more complicated than a list of categories at the bottom, really &mdash; 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)

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 to. 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 and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine. 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 &mdash; just remove the duplicate sections. -- Cyde Weys 14:14, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

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, 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, 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 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. 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)

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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. Please comment on the contributions and not the contributors. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. ''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 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 Categories for discussion/Log/2009 January 9. How did this happen? Can the cat be reinstated? Thanks. -- Klein zach  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
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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, &mdash; 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 No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man, Beware of the tigers, 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 No angry mastodons? -- Cyde Weys 03:04, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

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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, -- brew crewer  (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 in relation to this. I would appreciate it if you were to comment.  Tundrabuggy (talk) 00:58, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Hi, yes perhaps you do not remember your comment on my talkpage on January 19, which I will duplicate here: "Tundrabuggy, I've looked over the article history on the article with a specific eye to your edits, and you are a bit out of line. Please discuss matters on the article talk page instead of continually reverting the article, and if a rough consensus has formed, do not go against it. Thank you." That comment was used to as "ammunition" for an article ban. I was disappointed that you did not elaborate on which diff and in which way you thought I was "over the line" or respond to my polite comments for more specific information. I just wanted to let you know that your comment was used to damn me, and since I was not given notice of the ban discussion, I was not able to defend myself. Tundrabuggy (talk) 23:56, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry you could not find it in yourself to respond to any of my queries in regard to your admonishment on my talk page some three weeks ago. I find this kind of behavior really disappointing in a Wikipedia administrator. Sorry. Tundrabuggy (talk) 17:37, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to achieve, but you're not being helpful. It's exactly this kind of petty, after-the-fact sniping that got you in trouble on the article in the first place &mdash; and banned from it too, I might add.  Please reconsider.  -- Cyde Weys  20:42, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Template:User Marriage
In response to the recent deletion, might I request the deletion of Template:User marriage man-man and Template:User marriage woman-woman as well? Thanks, Mr Bell  ( talk ) 00:38, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
 * And the source code as well? Mr Bell  ( talk ) 00:42, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out the existence of the other two to me; I have deleted them. As for the source code to the original one &mdash; no, I'd rather not spread bigotry. I deleted it because it does not have a place on Wikipedia anywhere. -- Cyde Weys 02:16, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

And yes, I did totally misunderstand most of your request. Whoops. I don't mind deleting templates, but I'm not really up for messing with individual user pages anymore. -- Cyde Weys 20:48, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

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Apologies
Cyde, I wanted to apologize for the very and highly dickish thing I said about you back in 2006.. I remember chatting with you once on Slash (and I think at least once on IRC, but I can't remember if I ever actually apologized back then for the stupid and petty squabbling, or that insult, which I'd honestly forgotten I'd made 2 years ago before it was undeleted). I'm honestly and truly sorry. rootology ( C )( T ) 07:43, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

music by state rename bot
Bot changes reversed due to non-uniform formatting. For example - in articles with change made "[STATE] musical artists" to "Musical artists from [STATE]" - formatting does not match other, existing category formatting such as "[CITY] musical artists". While the state category format change has been pushed through, unless/until other category renames are determined - no mass edits should be executed, as it makes a non-uniform appearance in the categories listed within articles, essentially making it messy. Please open discussion for rename of city musical artists as well and await final determination before executing mass edit. Thanks -scr Srobak (talk) 21:01, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm just going to guess that you didn't read the notice on User talk:Cydebot? -- Cyde Weys 21:15, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Re:Protected talk pages
Sorry, I generally do not send bots deletion notices, I didn't notice this one. J Milburn (talk) 21:30, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Suggestions/Question re Cydebot
Dear Mr. Wa... hey, didn't there used to be more to your name?

Anyway, my ability to get distractd aside, can you put a link to the "bot approval" for Cydebot on it's page, please? I'm sure I could find it myself, but it seems like a sensible thing to have there anyway.

Also, was it ever made explicit that it was to edit through protection? I'm conservative on the issue, but I'm aware that there is a school of thought that "housekeeping" edits are fine. I'm embarrased to say that right now I can't even find the guidelines on adminstrator's editting through protection, everything seems to have moved around.

Thanks. (This message can sefely be ignored if it's irritating.)

brenneman 10:39, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, they're really not that hard to find: Bots/Requests for approval/Cydebot 2, Bots/Requests for approval/Cydebot 4. As for editing through protection, I have no idea what the guideline on that says. What I do know is that the intent behind it is to prevent human administrators from gaining an advantage over non-admins in disputed situations when an article has been locked down. This isn't really a relevant concern with bot maintenance edits, and the cons of not doing it &mdash; that a couple pages would get left behind every so often, have some categories turn into redlinks, and then in all likelihood get removed by well-meaning human editors &mdash; are far greater. -- Cyde Weys 14:46, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I've added them to the user-page to forestall anyone else ever asking that question. I'd have thought that was standard practice. As I said, I'm motr concervative on that issue but I'd have thought it would have come up. Thanks again. - brenneman  22:33, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

The Palace Hotel On 1st St and Cook Ave.
Hi,Im new to this so please bear with me. I've seen your name on the discussion list and was wondering if you care to assist me in any way.Please understand that I take no offense if this is not possible.

I am looking for information on the Palace Hotel located in the Historical District in Raton,New Mexico. It is listed as number 23 and is located on the corner of 1st street and Cook ave. Between 1975-77. I was a teenager and live and worked there. I am now researching the building's history and appreciate anything you can provide.

Thank you in advance.

--Susanjxp (talk) 23:22, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Um ... what list? I'm not quite sure what you're referring to, as I know nothing about the hotel that you speak of. Sorry. -- Cyde Weys 01:42, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 08:01, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Cydebot and null edits
Does Cydebot make null edits? --Kbdank71 14:50, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Can you clarify your question? -- Cyde Weys 19:02, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Sure. Category is populated by template.  The template was retargeted to populate a different category, but all of the articles still show up in the original category, until the system catches up with the workload (which if I recall hasn't happened in a very long time), or each article has a null edit made (editing the article and saving it w/out making any changes).  That's what I need Cydebot to do.  --Kbdank71 19:22, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Have you spoken with a dev over whether this is a good idea? My first inclination is to say no. Here's why. The job queue isn't very large at the moment &mdash; just 100K, which gets processed pretty rapidly. I don't see a compelling reason why category-by-template changes need to be rushed ahead of everything else in the job queue. They're put into the job queue instead of being done immediately for a reason &mdash; they're not urgent. Bypassing the job queue by running another couple HTTP requests (in the form of a null edit) for each page transcluded by that template doesn't seem like a good idea, and in the end, will result in a lot more server load than just letting them get processed by the job queue as normal.

So my guess is, if you were to ask a dev whether it's a good idea to customarily have a bot perform a null edit to huge swaths of articles simply to jump the job queue, I'm going to guess that their answer would be no; that's what the queue is for.

Sorry. The idea is something I came up with myself awhile ago, but after thinking about it, I came to these conclusions, and did not implement it. -- Cyde Weys 23:09, 6 March 2009 (UTC)


 * A little while ago, I was waiting for the job queue to complete some of these "template change" updates so that the contents would shift from one category to the other so that I could delete the old category. I waited for about 7 days, and it never happened, so I just null edited everything in the old category to transfer them over. A few weeks later I waited again for 4 or 5 days, and it didn't happen again. I'm not sure if it's normal to have to wait longer than a week for these to happen? If not, I don't think the job queue is doing these properly. Good Ol’factory (talk) 08:05, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

So, is the job queue broken or something? If it were working properly, the situations that you two describe shouldn't be happening. Having a special null editing mode for the bot (to be set only when the category in question is populated by a template) is doable, but it would be preferable to simply fix fix the job queue. This null editing mode would be used only in this specific circumstance &mdash; not for any of the normal CFD operations. -- Cyde Weys 23:59, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm thinking the job queue must be somehow broken, at least for these kinds of things. A current example is this category. The template in question was changed around 00.00 6 March, but still the only contents that have migrated to the new category are those that have been manually null-edited. These things used to take a matter of hours, not days. Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:23, 10 March 2009 (UTC)


 * OK, the above was a bad example, because someone just now processed through all the files (deleted them) and the empty category was able to be deleted. But it's true as far as I can tell that the job queue is not transferring these in situations like this. Good Ol’factory (talk) 06:58, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I had one take over a month to process only a few of the total number of transclusions (after which I manually null-edited all), though it may have been because there was an ifexist parserfunction. --NE2 08:02, 10 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Agree with what has been said so far. I think it would be preferable to let the job queue take care of these, and even if it took a day or two I'd be patient and wait.  But lately, it's been taking much longer (and by "lately", I mean I don't remember the last time the job queue made such changes, and by "much longer", I mean not at all).  Considering this can affect users by causing categories to not work as advertised, we need to have a workaround.  My bot will make null edits, but it's not up all the time, and it's slower than Cydebot.  --Kbdank71 13:54, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

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Template:WPRedir
Template:WPRedir, the project banner of WikiProject Redirect, is currently being considered for deletion at Templates for deletion/Log/2009 March 6; So far, there is unanimous support for deletion. I am here to ask if Cydebot could:


 * Delete all pages which transclude the template, provided that they meet two criteria:
 * The entire page history consists of a single edit; and
 * There is no content on the page besides the template and whitespace.
 * Remove the template from all pages which transclude it which do not meet the two criteria indicated above.

My reason for this request is that there is no point to having hundreds or thousands (5000+ pages currently transclude WPRedir) of empty talk pages of redirects with no useful page history. In fact, the presence of said pages can actually be a distraction for anyone who clicks on the page thinking that there is real content there.

Is this something Cydebot could do and that you would be interested in programming? Thank you, –Black Falcon (Talk) 06:27, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

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Cydebot bug
Cydebot just moved some articles from Category:Swiss of Macedonian descent to Category:Category:Swiss people of Macedonian descent — note the double namespace prefix! --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:52, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * That's not a bug, that's how it was listed at WP:CFD/W. --Kbdank71 14:53, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Having written many bot scripts that deal with categories, I'd say it's a bug if your code doesn't anticipate and correct for that type of error. :)  Although I do note that four or five users commented on this proposal at WP:CFD without any of them noticing the error. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:01, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Banned in Australia
Hi. I was just scanning through Australia's Internet blacklist (about which there has been much recent kerfuffling) and ran across your Weird pictures page (see the 28 July 2008 additions). Apparently linking to your subpage on an Australia-hosted site can bring down an AU$11,000 per diem fine. Just thought you'd find it amusing. Cheers. --Dynaflow  babble  10:32, 19 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I had a bit of a laugh at this actually. You're banned in Australia, as it seems. Matty (talk) 10:42, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Category deletion and moving
Your "Cydebot" has gone around and changed "Category:Neighborhoods in San Francisco" to "Category:Neighborhoods in San Francisco, California". As rationale, in the edit summaries, it has been pointing to Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_March_11. However, upon following the link, no such discussion exists. Such a change would be odd, since San Francisco, California redirects to the article located at San Francisco, as per naming convention. Could you please provide the link for the discussion which justified the change, or else please revert them all back. Thank you.--ABIJXY (talk) 21:11, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

The discussion is here. You just didn't look for it hard enough on that page. Regarding this decision, I did not make it, but I think it's the correct one. The category system needs to have consistent naming site-wide, which as you point out is different than it is for articles, where naming decisions are made on the merits of each individual article. So while San Francisco is unambiguous, many city names are not unambiguous, and do need the state qualifier to disambiguate. Thus, the general site-wide category naming format of "City, State" is established. -- Cyde Weys 18:30, 23 March 2009 (UTC) == Wikipedia Signpost : 23 March 2009 ==


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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 03:51, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Deletion review for Category:Flanders and Swann
An editor has asked for a deletion review of Category:Flanders and Swann. Since you closed the deletion discussion for this page, speedy-deleted it, or otherwise were interested in the page, you might want to participate in the deletion review. —  Tivedshambo   (t/c) 08:31, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

RFC on signature subst'ing
Since you were involved in shaping the current guideline on substing signatures, you may wish to see WT:SIG. – xeno  ( talk ) 04:00, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Category:British Sylhetis
Hi can you use your bot to move the Category:British Sylhetis to Category:British people of Sylheti origin. thanks! DinajGao (talk) 16:28, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 19:53, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

My friend has been banned!
Hi Cyde.

I really need your help. My administrator friend, Hersfold, has been banned from Wikipedia indefinetely because of a harmless April Fools joke. He created a template that looked like a real new messages bar, but the links lead to a subpage with this hilarious looking picture on it. I did this myself once and I was only asked to remove the template. No blocks, no nothin' for that fake messages bar for me. Banning someone because they did this sounds as ridiculous as sending a man to prison because he broke a rule that needs only a 5 minute time-out. Hersfold was my best friend on Wikipedia. Please help him and me by taking the ban away. Carabera (talk) 21:26, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Cyde, I came here to let you know I'd unblocked Hersfold, then saw this note. Anyway, the "ban" template was added by Hersfold himself, apparently as an April Fool's Day joke. (I guess the joke is on Hersfold, given that the account was blocked and the user page locked in the hours following.) Please let me know if there's something I missed. Cheers. --Ckatz chat spy  23:06, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 18:52, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Clyde bot icon replace.
Can you explain the logic behind this edit? where wikipedia icons for FA & GA etc were replaced with a copyright message template. --Nate1481 08:28, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Bot malfunction
FYI, your bot just caused mega breakage at featured topics and a number of other places with edits like these. The mess is already cleaned up and that function appears to be stopped, so I haven't bothered with mustering the angry villagers with pitchforks and torches. :) MER-C 08:53, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Here's the edit that broke things. Note to Happy-melon: It's not a good idea to commandeer templates that were previously widely used for something completely different. Not only will it make many old revisions wrong, it can cause breakage. Like this. -- Cyde Weys 09:21, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

And just in case I didn't make it clear: I have fixed Cydebot, it won't be dealing with icon anymore, so no need to block it. -- Cyde Weys 09:24, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Ooh, Ikes, sorry. But I swear I checked that it wasn't in use before stealing the redirect... Sorry for the borkage, certainly wasn't your fault. Happy‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 09:48, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

And the reason it wasn't in use was because the bot was running every night to make sure it wasn't in use by bypassing the redirect :-P Cyde Weys  09:53, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Argh the things this has done to my watchlist! First, WOSlinker changed all these FT pages to take classicon instead of FA-star, GA-icon, etc. Then, he changed his mind and changed them all from classicon to icon. Then, this bot changed them all to Non-free computer icon! And then it got changed back! Oh man, what a few days :P rst20xx (talk) 12:49, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Yep, same thing happened at T:TDYK, because WOSlinker changed DYK? to use (and then CydeBot replaced all those transcluded  with copyright notices).  But anyway, seems like the issue is resolved now. <b class="Unicode">r ʨ anaɢ</b> talk/contribs 18:11, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Universal Monsters
Why was this category deleted? When trying to create one, it says it was moved to Universal Monsters Universe. There is currently no category for this topic.Smiloid (talk) 09:08, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 16:07, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

CydeBot v. RussBot
Earlier today, CydeBot moved all the articles out of Category:Kings of Leon into Category:Kings of León, per a CFD result. However, the target category contains a category redirect back to the original name, so RussBot moved all the articles back a few hours later. Then CydeBot moved them again on its next run. This will keep happening until someone removes the redirect and copies the category description text from the old category to the new one! --R'n'B (call me Russ) 10:28, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

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PROD period is now 7 days
The waiting period on PRODs was changed to 7 days to be consistent with the new AfD length. You'll probably want to update your Cydebot's code to reflect the change. --ThaddeusB (talk) 17:19, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I made the change. -- Cyde Weys 12:41, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

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Delivered by SoxBot II (talk) at 04:04, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Prod moving to seven days
Hello Cyde. It looks like there is consensus to move the proposed deletion time limit to seven days from five. I think that has implications for Template:Admin dashboard which pulls from User:Cyde/List of old proposed deletions. I don;t know when the change is happening, but the discussion is at Wikipedia_talk:Proposed_deletion. Hiding T 10:42, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. I've updated the bot. -- Cyde Weys 12:41, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Solar System
nominated Solar system for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here.
 * I should have done this MUCH earlier! First time - learning & living! HarryAlffa (talk) 19:38, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Very small glitch in Cydebot
Hi Cyde

Your poor bot gets worked very hard, and despite a steady stream of complaints from people who misunderstand its role, it very rarely goes awry. But I have just noticed something which it could perhaps, from a perfectionist POV, have done slightly better: this edit.

This was a result of a speedy which I nominated, merging Category:Specific source templates to Category:Specific-source templates. Rayment was in both categories, and the bot simply added the hyphen to one of the entries, leaving it with a duplicate entry for Category:Specific-source templates.

No harm done, of course, since the duplicate doesn't get displayed on the article and doesn't affect category listings .... it just looks slightly inelegant when looking at the diff or editing the template the categories.

I dunno what engine Cydebot uses, but just thought I'd point out in case it is something you can tweak and feel its worth bothering with.

OTOH, if you regard this as a for-gawd's-sake-this-is-a-prizeworthy-example-of-pedantry-on-steroids thing, I'll quite understand. :) -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:10, 4 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, unfortunately this isn't something that can easily be resolved. PyWikipediaBot used to strictly manage categories; that is to say, it would pull the categories out of the article, turn them into a set (thus removing duplicates), and placing them in sorted order at the bottom of the article.  This worked fine, except that it absolutely destroyed templates that used any sort of additional categorization.  So I changed added an "in-place" functionality to PyWikipedia, in which categories are changed where they are in the wiki source instead of being moved around, and this behavior eventually became the default.


 * Unfortunately, there's no good way to maintain the inplace functionality while also removing duplicate mentions of a category, as you would somehow have to detect conditional wikisource mark-up in templates and such, and thus somehow know when a duplicate is okay to remove and when it is not. This is a hard problem, and would require more work than having the occasional duplicated category entry warrants.  -- Cyde Weys  02:30, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Fair enough. It doesn't actually do any harm, and if it'd be a difficult thing to resolve, it's best left since it doesn't actually cause any problems.
 * However, a quick thought that it might be possible to do some sort of crude half-way house which would catch instances such as the case I spotted. Ignore anything in templates (because parseing them is a big job), but after the  has been replaced with the , just a quick check for duplicates as follows
 * I don't know python, so this may not be as easy as it looks, but it's just a suggestion. Ignore it is it's not helpful!
 * -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:58, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:58, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that is how I would do it, but it is still problematic, because advanced parser syntax code can appear on any page, not just in templates. For example, there's a lot of wacky stuff in userspace and the Wikipedia namespace. Also, another question presents itself: Which of the duplicate(s) would you be inclined to delete from the wiki source? I would say all but the last one, as categories tend to be listed towards the end of the article, but I can still think of instances where that would mess up as well. -- Cyde Weys 14:24, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, you're right -- there are some rare circumstances where that could screw things up, and the bot does so much work that even a very low error rate would still mean disruption (and un-needed grief for you). I guess it's best to just leave it. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:33, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Another small glitch in Cydebot
Another anomaly I've notice lately: for the categories that are renamed speedily, Cydebot no longer records the editors who edited the old category in the edit summary. The edit summary always says Authors: but then there's nothing that follows. It certainly used to list the users, but it hasn't lately. Not such a big deal, but some non-admin users like to have access to this info for notification purposes if the category comes up for deletion. Good Ol’factory (talk) 03:47, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. My first suspicion is that this is caused by some kind of change to MediaWiki that breaks the (relatively) old version of PyWikipediaBot that I was using. I have updated PyWikipediaBot to the latest version, and hopefully everything will work fine. If this doesn't resolve the issue, I'll keep digging. Let me know if you see the error again. -- Cyde Weys 02:35, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks; will let you know if it happens again next time I do one of these. Good Ol’factory (talk) 02:54, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

(If you do still see the error, I'll have a glitch in PyWikipediaBot to find a fix for. -- Cyde Weys 14:24, 8 June 2009 (UTC) )

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re Giano's userpage
I have reverted your edit to the above page. Firstly, and most importantly, the page is protected and any edit is then required to have consensus before being made. Secondly, Giano was happy to have 'Zilla's image incorporated as he edited the page since it was included and generally WP permits wide latitude regarding the presentation of userspace - providing policy and guidelines are not violated. Thirdly, anyone having difficulty navigating can use the backbutton to return to a page where the links are clearer. I am surprised that an editor of such experience as yourself would get involved in making such edits to a page, protected or not, with the potential of so much disruption for so little reason. LessHeard vanU (talk) 14:28, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Ignoring the condescension in the latter part of your message, I'll jump straight to the issue: I don't care if Giano has Bishzilla on his page. The way it is implemented, however, is broken. It interferes with interface elements and makes navigation difficult. I shouldn't have to resort to my back button to get a non-broken page from which to navigate further. As such an experienced editor yourself, I'm surprised you're unfamiliar with the basic maxim of "Don't break the webpage". As a programmer, my first instinct when I run across something in code that is broken is to fix it. Too bad it's not yours. -- Cyde Weys 15:16, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I obviously am mistaken in my belief that my reputation for technical ineptitude is widespread around WP. Yes, perhaps it is broken but I have noticed similar in a couple of userpages I have chanced upon since editing Giano's - like others redlinks, misspellings, scary photographs, strained humour, and questionable (but permissible) content. These are permitted because it is how the editor chooses to represent themselves to the community ("warts and all").
 * I apologise for the last sentence should you have found it condescending - I was pointing out that Giano and "his" spaces are far too often the fulcrum of excessive rhetoric between editors, and I am very guilty of participating in same, where a little forbearance might be a reasonable practice. Sorry if I was a little insensitive in my verbalising. LessHeard vanU (talk) 21:44, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

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Notification of the upcoming Wikimedia relicensing
In case you are not aware, the Free Software Foundation has added terms to the GFDL 1.3 allowing the relicensing of certain content under the CC-BY-SA 3.0, and the community has approved with 75.8% in favor that this permission be used to dual-license all Wikimedia wikis under both licenses. On June 15, 2009, this change will take effect. This note is to let you know that WikimediaNoLicensing does not affect the relicensing of your contributions in this manner, as you cannot deny the terms of the GFDL. If you have any comments, please join the discusion at Village pump (policy). Anomie⚔ 16:56, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Damnú ort
Go dtachta an diabhal thú —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.147.190.205 (talk) 18:27, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh C'thulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. -- Cyde Weys 18:38, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Iä! Syrthiss (talk) 18:44, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

CFD bot
Posting at Wikipedia_talk:Categories_for_discussion/Working, Jeepday (talk) 09:35, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * If you're around, can you have a look at Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion? (not my title ;>) I'm contemplating the best way to repair it, but I'm sure you'd be faster than I. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 02:21, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I think I fixed this. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk  02:46, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Happy 's Day!
For a userbox you can add to your userbox page, see User:Rlevse/Today/Happy Me Day! and my own userpage for a sample of how to use it.<span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif"> — <b style="color:#060;">Rlevse</b> • Talk  • 01:05, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

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Cydebot jammed?
Is Cydebot jammed? There seems to be a bit of a backlog at WP:CFD/W. Good Ol’factory (talk) 21:57, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Server was down. It's restarted now and processing the backlog. Thanks for the notice. -- Cyde Weys 00:23, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Repopulating a category
Hi Cyde, I was wondering if you could help me with something. Your bot depopulated and deleted Category:Fast Folk artists on June 1 following it's second visit to CFD. The category has since been to DRV and was relisted for a third time at CFD. The most recent debate was closed as keep, but the category has yet to be repopulated. Is that something that you could "put in the hopper" for Cydebot or would that need to be done manually? I think there were 60-70 members prior to deletion. Thanks for your help. -MrFizyx (talk) 22:18, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Done. The easiest way is to just find where the removals were performed in Cydebot's contribution history and then revert the removal of the category. All of the articles are grouped together in the history, so it's not a huge task, usually. Good Ol’factory (talk) 22:52, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks! You managed to do that infinitely faster than I could have. -MrFizyx (talk) 22:57, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

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Multi category bot
Hi Cyde,

Your bot is doing some interesting edits. I'm not sure if you could modify the behaviour to make the obvious edits leaving one 1 distinct category. + m t  07:09, 24 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Another example of problem leaving 2 identical categories. 11:53, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

This and the comment below are a result of a CfD close I made that upmerged a bunch of categories to the same parent, so I take responsibility. I think this sort of situation is rare, but I think it does raise a good point. If category A and category B exist on a page and both are to be upmerged to category C, it seems that Cydebot replaces both A and B with C (as it should). But the downside is that it leaves the page with 2 Cs. If there was any way to suppress the addition of the second C, it would be better. In the long run, if a change is not possible, it's not a huge issue, since adding a category twice to one page will not result in it being in the category "twice". Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:16, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Don't add categories that already exist
Please fix CydeBot to not add categories that already exist on the page. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dumas&diff=298286897&oldid=prev -- Ccady (talk) 15:44, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Civility
Hi, I noticed you have written material on and shown an interest in civility on wikipedia. I have created a poll page to gauge community feelings on how civility is managed in practice currently at Civility/Poll, so input from as many people as possible is welcomed. Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:01, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

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Cydebot
Can you do whatever you did before to get Cydebot working again? It's stopped processing at WP:CFDW again. (I would suggest a "smack", and that's about the limit of my technical abilities with bots.) Thanks. Good Ol’factory (talk) 22:31, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

The bot was stuck on the first one, for whatever reason. It couldn't get the list of articles. And the next dozen or so category changes after it are just ugly. All of the changes are made on a small number of templates, not on a large number of articles. And I'm kind of annoyed that after all this time, people still don't know that the category system is primarily intended for use on articles, and that any sort of maintenance category needs to be prominently labeled as such by prefixing it with Wikipedia. Go yell at the appropriate people :-P Cyde Weys  00:32, 2 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I've been taking care of the messy ones manually—changing templates, people getting mad, etc. Thanks. (We do need to finish up that one it's getting stuck on...) Good Ol’factory (talk) 00:35, 2 July 2009 (UTC)


 * And again (stalled). (I'm starting to think we're doing something wrong.) Good Ol’factory (talk) 04:23, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

I think this one was my fault. After the last issue, I added some debugging statements to hopefully make my logs more useful, but I didn't set the string it was outputting to Unicode. That's apparently a fatal error. -- Cyde Weys 13:49, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems stalled again. Vegaswikian (talk) 07:06, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

John wikswo
Is John wikswo a notable article? I have small doubts but think I'm wrong in this case and that all it needs is a page move to proper capitalization. - Warthog Demon  00:29, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

You missed one
--Rockfang (talk) 17:01, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

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Unflagged bot?
I was preparing to generate a new List of Wikipedians by_number of recent edits and I noticed that Cydebot isn't on List of Wikipedians by number of edits/unflagged bots. This is apparently used to label the bots in the list. Should I place Cydebot there? Thanks! Plastikspork (talk) 19:30, 16 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I believe I answered my own question, it appears since your bot is running as an admin that it is flagged, although it is labeled as a bot none-the-less on List of Wikipedians by number of recent edits. Perhaps there should be a list of flagged bots as well. Not a high priority. Thanks. Plastikspork (talk) 19:43, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Northern Irish - from Northern Ireland
Hi. I want to begin by thanking you for changing (via Cydebot) the 'Northern Irish' categories to a 'from Northern Ireland' it is something that has annoyed me about the UK categories for quite a while, however there are several more 'Northern Irish' categories on Wikipedia and I was wondering if as a result of the discussion can I change, can you change or does there have to be another discussion to change the rest? Here are a few examples: Category:Northern Irish Protestants, Category:Northern Irish Anglicans, Category:Northern Irish Baptists, Category:Northern Irish Evangelicals, Category:Northern Irish Methodists, Category:Northern Irish Elim Pentecostals, Category:Northern Irish Presbyterians, Category:Northern Irish paramilitaries amongst many others. And also when/how can the same be done for other UK categories? Thanks.--Chromenano (talk) 02:03, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Category move by Cydebot
Hi. As discussed at Category talk:Human genes by chromosome, the consensus was that this category should be name Category:Genes by human chromosome. The rationale is that most of the pages that have been so categorized contain information not only about the human genes, but also the corresponding genes in other organisms.

Despite the above consensus, User:Cydebot has moved the old category Category:Genes by chromosome to Category:Human_genes_by_chromosome instead. Can this category be moved to Category:Genes by human chromosome instead? Cheers. Boghog2 (talk) 06:17, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
 * You need to renominate this correctly for a full CfD. The close was based on the discussion there. Vegaswikian (talk) 07:48, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

CfD problem?
Can you look at the queue for CfD/working? Seems that Category:ECRG MEPs serving 2009-2014 may be causing a problem. This is tagged as 'no bots' for now to see if the rest of the queue will process. Feel free to remove that as needed. Vegaswikian (talk) 07:50, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems to also be having a problem with special characters. See all of the NO BOTS tagged requests. Vegaswikian (talk) 06:54, 30 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Please respond to this post on the CfD talk page.  How best to handle this problem is being discussed on the CfD talk page and I'm inviting all of the CfD bot owners to participate in hopes of finding a solution. Vegaswikian (talk) 20:28, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

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Just FYI.....
DC 8 (talk)

--NBahn (talk) 04:53, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

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List of old proposed deletions
Hello,

I noticed that there is a bug with the bot generated list of expired prods. It seems it is regularly listing PRODs that aren't actually expired yet - that is, entries that are somewhere between 6 days 1 hour and 6 days 23 hours. This has occasionally led to admins deleting an article early when using the admin dashboard.

Thank you for you attention to this matter, ThaddeusB (talk) 13:51, 14 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The verbiage on the admin dashboard should probably be tweaked to reflect this . That being said, has anyone complained that a page was deleted before the end of the 7th day? –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 13:53, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Since I normally patrol them in their last 24 hours, it's a tad annoying when one is deleted before it expires. Thankfully, I can easily view it & restore it if I find it notable, so its not a major issue for me personally. --ThaddeusB (talk) 15:55, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, it's not quite a list of expired prods, it's a list of old prods. The exact category name that it's listifying from is <tt> "Proposed deletion as of `date -d '-7 days' -u +'%-d %B %Y'`" </tt>, in case you were curious. Notice that there's no hour logic in there, which would make things a lot more complicated as it would have to retrieve the history of each page in that category and find the first revision where the prod template was added. The reason I'm listing prods at 7 days and not 8 days is because I have to list them before they are gone, otherwise they will no longer be in the category.

Long story short, it's not worth the hassle to update the bot to list prods as they expire, but I may need to do some thinking as to what the purpose of this page should be. Because it shouldn't be used by admins looking for prods to close. -- Cyde Weys 18:32, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Your maintenance pages and indexing
Yo Cyde, I was googling an article up for A7 speedy earlier, and one of the highest Google hits for the topic was User:Cyde/List of candidates for speedy deletion/Subpage. This reflects somewhat negatively on the organisation in question – I wonder if there's a reason from our perspective to index such transient deletion catalogues? Thanks for your time, Skomorokh  14:16, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

I guess I could set the page to no-index (sorry, I forget exactly how that works; do you know?), but as you point out, the page is transient. Most entries on there last a lot less than a single day. So is this really a big deal? -- Cyde Weys 18:16, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Not a huge deal, but would you mind if I slapped NOINDEX on it? Cheers, Skomorokh  18:24, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, you could, but it would just get overwritten in the next update (Cydebot destructively updates that page). That's why it's a change I would have to make. Let me go figure out how simple that change is ... Cyde Weys 18:33, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see. Thanks for taking it into consideration, Skomorokh  18:41, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

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CydeBot and RussBot warring again
Apparently Category:Super NES games was moved to Category:Super Nintendo Entertainment System games by a CfD discussion, and your bot then started moving the articles. However, the latter title was a category redirect to the former title, and when my bot saw articles appearing in a redirected category, it started moving them to the target of the redirect; see, for example, this history. Your bot then continued moving articles out of the former category into the latter one; see this history. This can all be avoided if you would just check the old and new categories for redirects before starting your bot runs. Thanks in advance. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 12:26, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Regarding Culture of the Federated States of Micronesia CFD
Great picture, of the amazing Scottish machine that moves boats from canal to canal, on your user page. I learned about that from a PowerPoint someone sent me...it's very clever. As a note about the Category:Culture of the Federates States of Micronesia which your bot recently edited on Alingano Maisu in favor of "Category:Federated States of Micronesia culture" I just want to make sure that you are aware there are a number of Oceania pages titled with this ' "Topic X" of "Subject Y" ' topology...as page names, not as categories. There is a navigational template, Oceania topic, which permits easy traverse of pages within Oceania, but it depends on the "X" of "Y" name structure. I just wanted to point this out to you in the event you were not otherwise aware of this. Happy editing. –Newportm (talk • contribs) 05:06, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

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Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 15:54, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Please make Cydebot revert its category:Filmmakers edits.
The bot is placing people in a category called "Filmmaking occupations":. People cannot be "Filmmaking occupations". Please get the bot to revert its edits for this category, and let editors change "Filmmakers" categories in biography articles, to subcategories of Category:Filmmaking occupations. -- Jeandré (talk), 2009-09-06t16:42z
 * See here. Good Ol’factory (talk) 05:06, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

American's Victims of Politcal repression
Why was Paul Robeson removed? If he was not a victim then who was? Catherine Huebscher (talk) at 11:54, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Ooops! The whole category is gone!Catherine Huebscher (talk) at 11:54, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
 * See here. Good Ol’factory (talk) 05:10, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Ping for Cydebot
You asked us to ping you if Cydebot ever decides that it doesn't want to process some particular categories. See the LGBT ones listed here. I can't find anything obviously wrong with the listing, and all other categories are being processed smoothly. Thanks. Good Ol’factory (talk) 05:04, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Ha—never mind. "Category" was just mis-spelled on the listing. No problems. Good Ol’factory (talk) 21:41, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Easiest bug fix ever :-P  Cyde Weys  23:46, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
 * It seems to not be picking up the queues at WP:CFDW for the past few hours. Probably needs a restart? Good Ol’factory (talk) 07:52, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Ping (activating new message deelee). I'm off to bed, but I thought I'd notify you that there's still nothing happening at WP:CFDW. (You are probably away.) Good Ol’factory (talk) 12:54, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll confirm that. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:07, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
 * While my bot is not technically approved for category work, given the backlog building up at WP:CFD/W and the extremely uncontroversial nature of the task, I'm going to IAR and start clearing the backlog. Erik9 (talk) 03:35, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I've contacted Kbdank71 by email and he has agreed to get his bot working on these, but he has to activate if from his work, so it won't start until he arrives at work on Monday morning (a few more hours from now). Good Ol’factory (talk) 03:42, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Okay, so this is basically the bug that I was getting. The fix was to set "use_api = True" in my user-config.py file, in case anyone else running PyWikipediaBot runs into this error. Note that that is incredibly likely, as the error was caused while parsing the site-wide server messages ... so I suspect anyone still trying to run PyWikipediaBot on en-wiki to do anything while not using the API option will get this error message. Blame some kind of code change in MediaWiki (or an extension, configuration, or plain old site-wide edit), or blame the limited development that the old non-API code-path in PyWikipediaBot has been getting lately. -- Cyde Weys 02:03, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * So far so good with these, except—for the speedy renames, the bot is copying the Template:cfr-speedy into the newly created category. Thanks for your work. Good Ol’factory (talk) 02:21, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Here's the bug fix for this. I can sort of see the merits behind his rename of the comments, but I can also sort of see the merits for using the same comments for all CFD templates.  Basically, we need to have a discussion about this (if one is even merited), come up with a standardized way of demarcating the CFD templates, and then let me know so that I can adjust the bot's code accordingly.  -- Cyde Weys  02:30, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * If said discussion is held, please let me know. I too see the merits of labelling each template to let people know what template is being used, and also using the same string for all of them for ease of programming the bots.  --Kbdank71 02:49, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Well the easiest solution if that is your goal is to just nest the template-specific message inside the "BEGIN CFD,...END CFD" message. Something like <tt> [template text] </tt> &mdash; that won't require any modification of the bot.  But regardless, whatever is decided, just let me know of it first so I have a chance to adjust the bot (if necessary) before the new stuff goes into use, that way we won't miss anything again.  -- Cyde Weys  03:45, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
 * That was my thought as well (keep the BEGIN CFD TEMPLATE, followed by the actual template name). Perhaps we should place a note on the talk pages of the templates in question to notify you and me prior to making changes to verify that the change won't affect our bots.  --Kbdank71 13:46, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Screw it, I had to modify the bot to accept both formats because a lot of the uses in the current CFDW backlog used the substituted version by Debresser. So even if my most recent diff is reverted, things should still work. -- Cyde Weys 02:40, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Yup, that seems to have done it. Thanks, Good Ol’factory (talk) 02:46, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Template comments
Although I have obviously no real "problem" with your edit to Template:Cfr-speedy, I'd like to ask you to update your bot. More than 200 maintenance templates have the remarks the way they were (with or without a space). Debresser (talk) 11:07, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Warning: The same problem is likely to happen with Template:Cfm, Template:Cfd, and Template:Cfr. Please check if the changes to the template remarks are fine with your bot or not. Or change the bot, of course. :) Debresser (talk) 22:36, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

User:Kbdank71 already fixed that. Debresser (talk) 00:22, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

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Kelsang Gyatso Category Edit
Hi Cyde, Cydebot has made an change to the categories on this article 'NKT Lamas > New Kadampa Tradition Lamas' but in NKT there are no lamas - this is a Tibetan word for Teacher or Spiritual Guide and it applies to Tibetan Buddhism but not the NKT. Would you therefore please change the category to 'New Kadampa Tradition Teachers' ? Thank you! --Truthsayer62 (talk) 09:26, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I think this would require a WP:CFD nomination of the category in question. Good Ol’factory (talk) 09:37, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

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