User talk:Dispenser/Dab solver/Archive 1

link to wrong wiki
After checking clean page on et:wikipedia tools:~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py?page=et:Eesti, the tool says that No disambiguation links on Eesti (Eesti). --WikedKentaur (talk) 08:22, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I've fixed this occurrence, but there's one more I'd like to fix in a more eloquent manner. — Dispenser 17:48, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Ee Sabdam Innathe Sabdam
WildBot claims there are six dab links on Ee Sabdam Innathe Sabdam, ~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py/Ee_Sabdam_Innathe_Sabdam says it's clean. Josh Parris 05:32, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Replication lag is about 6 hours, I'll see if I can put a notification. — Dispenser 08:44, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps you should be hitting s1-fast instead? Josh Parris 12:39, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Using s1-fast requires a more complicated connection setup instead of simply connecting to enwiki-p.db.toolserver.org and currently only enwiki (s1) has one. I have instead added a check to make sure the page revision and the latest one in the database are the same.  — Dispenser 03:21, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Are the *.fastdb.toolserver.org domains applicable now? Josh Parris 10:04, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I was going to wait until more fast servers became available. Currently, cassia (designated for S2) is not working and hyacinth (designated for S3) still needs to be setup.  — Dispenser 21:01, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Book:Quantum Algebra and Quantum Computers
Fail. Not due to replag. BTW: don't go fixing any of the links, I'm using this book: for testing. Josh Parris 10:04, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Fixed. I've added support for custom namespaces and added the books namespace to webpywikipedia this morning.  — Dispenser 21:01, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

More dablinks feedback
Dablinks gave me: WARNING : The following tags have been removed in the HTML 5 specifcation:  (9x), (4x) First, there's a typo: "specifcation" should be "specification". Second, is actually in the HTML5 spec, though its semantics  have changed since HTML 4.01, when it was a presentational tag.

Also, can you put a link to the Preferences in the tool itself? I keep forgetting where they are.

CRGreathouse (t | c)  15:19, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

User:Redrose64 writes of problems with wikitable formatting:
 * Hi, with   you introduced some errors in the table shown under the "Description"  heading. First, you added a semicolon after all the   which meant that the  attribute's value was unrecognised and therefore ignored. Second, you  added   into the style list for  three of the four rows, but didn't remove it from all the cells - those cells  where it wasn't removed therefore became 900%. I have now fixed, see .  -- Red rose64 (talk) 16:22, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

CRGreathouse (t | c)  21:53, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Updated HTML fixing code: erroneous &lt;small&gt; deprecation message removed, updated tags and attributes lists, added code to nuke malformed attribute instead of attempting to fix them (align="center";), and fixed moving multiple styles from TD to TR.
 * The Preferences  page is linked in light blue bar at the top of every page,  "hidden in plain sight"?  — Dispenser 05:36, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Recent African origin of modern humans
monogenism redirects to a disambiguation page, yet isn't listed as something requiring disambiguation. Josh Parris 08:37, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Its circular linking, Recent African origin of modern humans links to Monogenesis which links back to original page (non-redirect), you can see the full results in non-web interfaces. It is filtering out in the web interface since it is almost always a hatnote, assuming that the disambiguation is formatted correctly.  — Dispenser 17:42, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Wow, that's... clever. I'm going to leave my code stupid I think. Josh Parris 12:48, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Spelling

 * Your too quick! The server hasn't responsed yet
 * You're too quick! The server hasn't responded yet
 * Josh Parris 12:48, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Sicilian people not found in Sicily
 it is not uncommon for people to describe themselves as Sicilian, before the more national description  isn't turning up when http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sicily&oldid=350239727 is run through dab_solver - because it's recursive. Is there any way that WildBot and dab_solver can indicate that while that's a dab link, it shouldn't go on this page? Could it be that from Sicily, a link to Sicilian people means List of Sicilians? Josh Parris 03:28, 17 March 2010 (UTC)


 * This is an issue with the circular link detection method. If the target section was available in the database we could process that, but currently it requires too much overhead.  I would suggest creating a redirect (and tagged appropriately) to the section and link it instead from the dab page.  These redirects are typically better to link to as they're easier to update when the section name changes.  This is part of the reason behind the creation of the rdcheck tool and other unreleased tools.  — Dispenser 05:10, 19 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Next time this crops up I'll note it in the FAQ Josh Parris 09:39, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Phantom (Russian song)
The hyperlink to the tool from this page isn't working - the parenthesis fail. Josh Parris 09:39, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Works for me, might have something to do with the database lag? — Dispenser 21:34, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I get a url of http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py?page=Phantom__Russian_song#4353123087806513144 and a XSS alert. Josh Parris 11:08, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

dabsolver for NRHP lists
Hey, the dabsolver tool has been working great for me. Knowing it was available encouraged me to proceed with a ton of new dab page creation for WikiProject NRHP, in which i created multiple hundreds new dab pages that would eventually have been sorely needed, but which could be easily anticipated. And now, going through the NRHP list articles (statewide lists of which are indexed at List of RHPs), is very easy, to revise. This is avoiding lots of future contention as new articles won't be created at ambiguous names.

To let you know of one possible glitch, though: when i apply it to the NRHP list for Iowa, and click on the first highlighted ambiguous link (for Waverly House), i get stuck. I can't scroll down or left and right, to be able to pick a suitable entry. I notice the Waverly dab page itself is one that i have left a bit messy (including blocked out ASCII text between ... brackets, so perhaps that is the problem. But, I think there are valid choices which might be made available above the PRE block.  If it is just the PRE block messing things up, that is an unusual circumstance in dab pages, only applying to the 200 i have left messy like that and are included in a cleanup category that i will empty during the next couple weeks.  But also I wonder if there is something about header stuff in the Iowa NRHP list article.

Thanks again for the wonderful tool! I am recommending its use, with Firefox browser, to many others. --doncram (talk) 16:15, 31 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Its a problem with nested scrollbars. What had happened &lt;pre&gt; content was so wide it forced the vertical scroll bar far right off screen.  If you scrolled to see it you could not see the contents that you were scrolling.  I've hacked in a max-width so its not so far off to the right.  The proper solution is to rewrite the positioner so it makes smarter decisions about placement and the view-port constraints.  — Dispenser 22:34, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

HTC Evo 4G
I'm not entirely sure what the editor is talking about at User talk:Josh Parris, but I think it's about how dab_solver behaved before the dabs were solved. Josh Parris 04:09, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion
Hi! This is a great tool! However, I feel that there is room for improvement and therefore I have some suggestions to make. I see that the save page is currently disabled, probably to force people to preview their changes before saving them. I think that it does more harm than good, as it wastes valuable time for disambiguators.

I'd also like if there's was a way for the tool to check my personal settings to see if I'm already watching the page and not set it to true automatically. It would also be nice to have a way to select the (disambiguation) page itself when that is appropriate.

By the way, is there any tool to fix broken section links that are also tagged by WildBot? --JokerXtreme (talk) 13:00, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
 * The Toolserver rules (8) specify that tools cannot ask login information. Because of a MediaWiki security feature, if the save button was enabled it wouldn't work for logged in users, instead landing you on a preview page with an error message.  Similarly, being able to look up a user's personal settings is restricted.  There is a workaround in Preferences where you can turn off the default behavior of watching pages and provide an edit token to enable the save button.
 * Now for fixing section links, I believe the right approach is to link to redirects which redirect to the correct sections. With this method we have redirects for users to find information, fixing a single redirect is easier than fixing many articles, and makes it easier to expand a section into an article.  So far I have only created rdcheck (try it on BioShock) and have plans of automatically retargeting sections links to redirects in the commonfixes library.  — Dispenser 22:47, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
 * This would do, thanks :) I assume there are security issues that restrict us from just using SUL for toolserver. Automatically retargeting sections links to redirects? How would it know where specifically it should retarget to? Or it would work kind of like dab solver? --JokerXtreme (talk) 08:11, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
 * There are some tidbits on Global session threat assessment, but basically its so no nobody has to worry about phishing. And things like TUSC and ACC tell users to use a different password.  On retargetting it would retarget them while they were still working.  A more advanced method would be to crawl through the history and see what the new section name is (its somewhat error prone).  — Dispenser 21:02, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Sounds good :) (also sounds a bit challenging) By the way, how about adding a link in the dab solver to the (disambiguation) page itself, as a possible option to select, instead of having to manually add it. --JokerXtreme (talk) 11:23, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
 * You aren't suppose to link to disambiguation pages. It causes problems with automated detection and does not make sense from a link structural point of view.  Terms and definitions should be copied to Wiktionary.  The disambiguation page could feature a message box "Definitions from Wiktionary ..." (similar in style to wi).  If the Wiktionary community believes that Four-character idiom shouldn’t belong there, then we’ll have to create a glossary namespace and fork Wiktionary.  (There are actually links to our four-character idiom disambiguation page on Wiktionary, so things should likely always be linked to Wiktionary.)
 * Back to point of saving time, I'm experimenting with ~dispenser/resources/Enkidu.html which background loads the pages, so you can just hit next to get the next ready page. It's very early, I might just let it die or redesign it to use different mechanisms.  I'm be very interested in feedback. — Dispenser 19:37, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Dab solver issue
See User talk:Josh Parris. - UtherSRG (talk) 23:03, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Dab solver error
I got [/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/tracebacks/tmpHVzwjL.html this error]. - UtherSRG (talk) 08:12, 9 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Those are automatically emailed to me ;) Don't know what admins were doing when they got ride of the MySQLdb library, but it's back now. — Dispenser 02:51, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

dab solver suggestion
First off, I love your tool! :)

- UtherSRG (talk) 15:15, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) Add the possibility to dab with the definition on Wiktionary. I think this is a better solution than dabbing to the disambig page.
 * 2) Damn... a workmate distracted me and now I can't remember the other suggestion I had...


 * If the disambiguation page has a interwiki box (like wiktionary) then you can click on the terms and it use the interwiki link. Unfortunately, if the template wasn't given parameters it will fallback to  .  — Dispenser 22:34, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

It would be nice if the wiktionary page could be popped up like the dab... but that's just a wish-suggestion.

New suggestion: Some dn improvements could be made when a user selects term2 from the popup of term... - UtherSRG (talk) 12:08, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) When term is post-tagged with dn, have dab solver not put the dn inside the newly dabbed link. eg. term -> term instead of term
 * 2) When a term is tagged with, have dab solver replace the tag. eg. -> term instead of
 * At some point in the near future I'd like to re-add the mini-browser without it occluding important text. There also the idea of being able to navigate from one disambiguation page to another (e.g. Horgan → John Horgan → John Horgan (academic)) and searching for pages.  To address your points, 1. I have added a regex (language specific) to remove {&#123;dn}} (and redirects) from titles and 2. this particular form is now converted.  — Dispenser 00:44, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Rocking! :D - UtherSRG (talk) 17:07, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Got more ideas: Still loving the tool! - UtherSRG (talk) 17:07, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) Have Dabsolver read the user's Wiki preference for minor edits.
 * 2) Have Dabsolver read the user's watchlist and set the "watch this" button based on the page being or not being in the watchlist.
 * I've added a FAQ to the top since this has come up several times. Basically, user preferences and watchlists are not publicly visible with the exception of gender.  — Dispenser 15:16, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

And more: When tabbing from one dab to the next, currently that next is on the last line of the window. Positioning the dab a few lines above the bottom of the window will give a significant increase in context visability without the user have to do the move emself. - UtherSRG (talk) 07:48, 16 May 2010 (UTC)


 * File a bug with your browser vendor for not doing this. I could see a few other scenarios where this behavior would be useful.  — Dispenser 15:16, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Colin S. Smith (pastor)
While it was there, the link on Talk:Colin S. Smith (pastor) took me to http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py?page=Colin_S._Smith__pastor#45260134550569875442 -- which didn't work.  Page Colin S. Smith pastor not found  it read. Josh Parris 08:44, 16 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I think there's something wrong with your browser (extensions/addons/spyware?). It seems to replace  with spaces and adds those weird numbers to the end.  The link worked fine for me yesterday.  — Dispenser 13:52, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Section Talk:Phantom (Russian song) above seems to be the same issue. — Dispenser 15:20, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Dab solver running text
When using the Dab solver, I notice that the text runs out horizontally to the right, usually in only one or two lines per article. In other words there is no apparent limit as to how far the text runs to the right. Just thought you might like to know. This is a very useful tool, and I hope we can keep using it here at Wikipedia. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 06:41, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Could you give an example and your browser with version and where are you seeing the problem the fake text area, the disambiguation menu, or the article minibrowser. I know there's a problem in firefox where it doesn't correctly calculate the width of the inline-block for the text field, but other than that it should wrap correctly.  — Dispenser 19:46, 25 May 2010 (UTC)


 * This occurs when I I am trying to disambiguate a page, and I guess it is happening related to the disambiguation menu. When I put the article name in the search box entitled "./dab_solver.py -page:" and click on the doo dad to the right, it opens the article with words in red that need to be disambiguated. And to continue...


 * Right now I have Refractive index opened in the Dab solver. The first line of text (after the text for the image) begins with the first sentence in the section entitled Anisotropy. In the Dab solver the lines runs horizontally, for three sentences, which is an entire paragraph. Here is the entire single line which runs horizontally:
 * "The refractive index of certain media may be different depending on the polarization and direction of propagation of the light through the medium. This is known as birefringence or anisotropy and is described by the field of crystal optics. In the most general case, the dielectric constant is a rank-2 tensor (a 3 by 3 matrix), which cannot simply be described by refractive indices except for polarizations along principal axes."


 * I don't know what the word count is, but you can see the problem. Then there are three other seperate lines in the Dab solver that run horizontally. I will just give you the second one here:
 * "In magneto-optic (gyro-magnetic) and optically active materials, the principal axes are complex (corresponding to elliptical polarizations), and the dielectric tensor is complex-Hermitian (for lossless media); such materials break time-reversal symmetry and are used e.g. to construct Faraday isolators."


 * I just noticed that the line break to the right is determined by the end of a paragraph, rather than an 80 character limit (or whatever it is supposed to be).
 * My browser is Internet Explorer 7. Please allow me to point out that this is only a recent problem. I haven't had any problems for the first few months that I used this. Well, please let me know what you think. Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 02:16, 26 May 2010 (UTC)


 * IE7, I only did testing on Firefox, Chrome, and IE8. It looks like I dropped the proprietary   bit sometime during the upgrade to IE8.  Anyway, I re-added it a few other bits to make it a bit more usable in IE7.  I'd recommend upgrading to another browser, but if you can't switch just install Google Chrome Frame.  — Dispenser 05:00, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Delink
Sometimes the right disambiguation is to delink; this isn't presented as an option. Josh Parris 15:28, 28 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I haven't found an appropriate place to put the extra controls in and that the existing method of simply editing the link manually works well enough. I have added a tip to the footer tips list pointing it out though.  However, do you have suggestions where to place the following controls: Create a redirects wizard, Wiktionary link, Tag {&#123;dn}}, Undo, and Unlink?  — Dispenser 21:45, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Dab solver bug
Dab solver is great - really useful. I have, however, found a fault. When dabbing links to Devonport to Devonport, Devon it generates a link to Devonport instead of Devonport. DuncanHill (talk) 14:38, 4 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Good catch. After reviewed the pipe trick rules and some experimentation I have added a regex for the city, state and corrected the other regexes to avoid simplifying links with a  or   in them.   — Dispenser 19:28, 4 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Good stuff - many thanks. DuncanHill (talk) 19:37, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

2010 Stanley Cup Finals
Hi again, I was trying to dab 2010 Stanley Cup Finals, but the dabsolver got stuck opening the page. I tried several times over a couple of days, and the computer was rebooted a couple of times during this. I have since fixed the dablinks manually (fortunately there were only three), but thought you might like to know in case there is something stopping dabsolver on the page. I'm using Chrome on WinXP. DuncanHill (talk) 11:56, 7 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I've found one problem with a variable not defined causing the menu cursor (blue row highlight) not to appear until a link was selected. I've also fixed a long standing problem in Chrome & Internet Explorer where the menu position code would double count the main window scroll offset.  Otherwise, the tool worked normally on that page.  Are either of these problems the one you encountered?  — Dispenser 19:46, 10 June 2010 (UTC)


 * It just seemed to "stick" - the text would appear with dablinks highlighted, but I couldn't click on them, and there was no preview button or edit summary field appearing below the window. DuncanHill (talk) 21:04, 10 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I was not able to reproduce it when using versions 4.1 or 5.0 of Google Chrome. I suspect that corruption or truncation may have caused it, which also explains why the script didn't initialization since it is right after submit form.  It may have been cleared up by ctrl-refreshing the page.  — Dispenser 13:16, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Dab Solver
Wow, Dab Solver rocks! Very slick GUI. Absolutely fantastic work. -- Ja Ga  talk 22:57, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

OperationalError 1226
This morning I've been getting a lot of "OperationalError(1226, "User 'dispenser' has exceeded the 'max_user_connections' resource (current value: 15)")" errors on dabsolver. I have no idea what it means, just that it stops dabsolver working. DuncanHill (talk) 08:39, 17 June 2010 (UTC)


 * There are limits in place on the database servers to prevent the starvation of resources. These include a maximum of concurrent connections (your error), limited number of connections per second, and a connection cannot be kept open for more a minute.  In the current implementation, a program to generate the "relatedness" that’s seen in the menus is called once per link (image load).  The implementation currently ties up too many connections as the web servers optimize for quick delivery.  I am going to try testing some ideas to use less resources.  — Dispenser 18:01, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Juju (disambiguation)
Your tool works very well, but I ran across something strange today. When I enter Juju (Siouxsie and the Banshees album), I get "WARNING: Juju (disambiguation) not found", even though that's a valid article. GoingBatty (talk) 02:42, 12 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Two problems: 1. The disambiguation page doesn't (directly) link to Juju (Siouxsie and the Banshees album) breaking the circular linking convention, and 2. The page should not have a hatnote as it (or one of its redirects) is not a primary topic. The hatnote template   adds " (disambiguation)" to the link and the tool looks for that string, which is why the warning was thrown.  — Dispenser 13:26, 12 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I fixed the link on the disambiguation page so it directly links to Juju (Siouxsie and the Banshees album), and that fixed the problem. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 23:05, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Curious edits with Dab solver
Please assist I don't understand why on this edit Dab solver de-capitalized the first letter of template names and removed links and styling from the  field. How is this better? Please respond on my talk. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:56, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Dab solver
Very nice tool. I fixed two bad DABs on Disk storage and I'm going to go through other articles I suspect may have incorrect DAB links. Great job. — Becksguy (talk) 06:28, 25 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree. I am finding it very useful. I quickly fixed some articles with it. Thanks! Regards, — mattisse  (Talk) 19:24, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Love the tool, makes checking and fixing links so easy. A big thanks from me :) Bjmullan (talk) 09:30, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

I am sure I wrote it somewhere before, and I will write it again. This is an excellent tool. As stated above, it makes checking and fixing links very easy. Please keep up the good work. Steve Quinn (talk) 04:03, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Southeast Region (Little League World Series)
Something in the page Southeast Region (Little League World Series) is making dabsolver stick on "loading". Chrome on WinXP. DuncanHill (talk) 15:12, 1 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Unable to reproduce Chrome/5.0.375.127 (same as your's), try hard refreshing with Ctrl-Shift-R. — Dispenser 16:41, 1 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Still sticking for me, so dabbed manually. DuncanHill (talk) 16:56, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Enkidu
I'm having a problem when trying to use Enkidu to load pages into Dab Solver with Internet Explorer 7. I can use Options to enter my user name and can use List manager to load my list of pages. However, when I click the Next button, I get the following Javascript error:

Line: 69 Char: 2 Error: Object doesn't support this property or method Code: 0 URL: http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/resources/Enkidu.html

I tried clicking on the Help link, but only get a blank page. Any assistance you could provide would be appreciated.

Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 19:55, 25 July 2010 (UTC)


 * It seems that IE is missing an important function  for lists.  Without this the script can't tell which iframe belongs to which page in the list.  The script will, however, work in Firefox and Chrome.  I'll include IE in the testing platform, if I ever get around to rewriting it.  — Dispenser 04:17, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Two dabsolver requests
This is nitpicky but... Cheers! bd2412 T 15:12, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) When I come across a link that requires more specialized knowledge than I possess to disambiguate, I mark it with  . Can dabsolver give me a one-click way to add this tag to links requiring more specialized attention? On pages with lots of them, it would actually save a lot of typing time.
 * 2) Per WP:INTDABLINK, an intentional link to a disambig page is supposed to be routed through a "foo (disambiguation)" redirect. See the high schools section in AHS for an example. This prevents the pages from showing up in the lists of pages requiring repair. Can dabsolver be set up with one-click options to create piped and unpiped intentional links?


 * While I've implemented the basics of your requests, there are some issues:
 * How should  be handled inside templates?  Has anyone else figured this out?
 * Should the program check if "foo (disambiguation)" already exists? Doing so will increase the start up complexity.  How should we handle "foo (bar) (disambiguation)"? if we shorten it how do we tell intentional links apart?
 * The tool needs a redesign of the layout and skin. However, the uptake hasn't been anything that I hoped and I'm not sure if I'll continue making tools for editors.  — Dispenser 03:11, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Hi Dispenser - I hope you'll continue improving your existing tools, as they work very well. Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 03:31, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, indeed! Regarding your questions, if a disambig term occurs in a template, I usually try to fix the template. The program should not need to check whether "foo (disambiguation)" already exists, since we had a bot make a "foo (disambiguation)" redirect to every disambig page with links, and it will occasionally be adding new ones as they come about. bd2412  T 16:12, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Dab solver working again
Hi, Dab solver is working again, see this thread on the village pump. DuncanHill (talk) 11:43, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Minor typo
You have "Intertionally link to this disambiguation page" instead of "intentionally", when selecting a page title from the pop-up disambiguation list. --McGeddon (talk) 12:16, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
 * — Dispenser 14:59, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Feature request - sortname
Hi. If you run dab solver on 2009 Florida Marlins season, you see several "not found" dab links. Those are in sortname templates. Ideally, you could change to. Any chance? Thank you. Wknight94 talk 02:30, 26 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Well you could run the following regular expressions using WikEd or Vector's find and replace. Replace  with , save, run Dab solver, then simplify the template by replacing   with.
 * Except its cumbersome. So over a three hour journey I eventually figured out we were doing a wacky thing regarding dn.  Realizing I could combine the two and find some nasty bugs related to templates along the way.  — Dispenser 21:02, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
 * So it looks like it works now. Thank you!  Wknight94 talk 23:21, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Same issue - 1994–95 Washington Capitals season doesn't work for Jeff Nelson. Maybe because of the capital S in Sortname?  Wknight94 talk 20:25, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, I've also added the redirects with the space in it. — Dispenser 21:36, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Intentional link to dabpage oddity
Hi, in I clicked on the "intentionally link to disambiguation page" in dabsolver, and got a rather odd result, as you can see. DuncanHill (talk) 18:02, 23 November 2010 (UTC)


 * bd2412 gave me the impression that a bot would redirect "foo (disambiguation) (disambiguation)" in above.  And isn't there a rule about not including " (disambiguation)" in the title?  Anyway, that code is already tagged with a FIXME, I'll get to it later.  — Dispenser 22:18, 23 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The bot creates "foo (disambiguation)" to redirect to "foo", where "foo" is a disambiguation page. I don't think it creates "foo (disambiguation) (disambiguation)" because no-one would ever expect such a link to be introduced. Intentional links to dab pages go to "foo (disambiguation)" to make it possible to spot them in the "what links here". DuncanHill (talk) 00:20, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I am skeptical that people thought far enough to cover that special case: . (Even if I did without blurting it out) — Dispenser 04:36, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Pagelink
Hey, I was thinking, it would be nice to have a link on the Dab Solver GUI to take you to the page in EN wiki. From time to time Dab Solver doesn't find the disambig link, and if I could click from there to go directly to the corresponding wiki page it would make things a little easier. Thanks again for the great tool. -- Ja Ga  talk 17:56, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
 * +1. R'n'B (call me Russ) 23:16, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It is intentional as to discourage using the tool as a substitute for Dablinks. You can get around this by selecting the article title in the input box (triple-click) and dragging it to the search box in Firefox (set to Wikipedia search).
 * While on the subject, Dablinks has tabs for generators to check groups of pages. "Backlinks" can check inbound links to a disambiguation page and provide a nice Dab solver link to middle click.  However, If you're writing about the circular link detection, I am looking to resolve it with a rewrite of Enkidu.  — Dispenser 22:29, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Feature request: repeat disambigs
Sometimes the same dab page is linked more than once on a page. The script now requires the editor to fix each of these links individually, which is a good default, because you never know how a link is going to be used. However, sometimes, like, it becomes obvious that all the links to, say, MFC, will need an identical change. It would be nice to have an option in the popup box that lets you change all identical links at once. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 23:20, 3 December 2010 (UTC)


 * It is somewhat complicated to implement and likely to be abused by inexperienced users (the target audience). The find and replace dialog (in vector or wikEd) should serve the needs of mass link replacement.  However, these are probably issues of overlinking then anything else.  That's why I wrote it out of the original specification.  — Dispenser 23:06, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I may consider adding a recently or popularly used section near the top somewhere. — Dispenser 20:07, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Authorlink in cite templates
Hi, was just dabbing Pig-faced women, and noticed that dabsolver didn't recognise the authorlinks in cite templates used in the "Notes and references" section. Is this a known bug? DuncanHill (talk) 16:07, 4 February 2011 (UTC)


 * It also doesn't know which parameters produce links. Here's the high level description:
 * Get ambiguous links from Dablinks. Find bracket links matching the ambiguous link. If none found, Find template parameters matching the ambiguous link.  If none found, check transcluding templates outbound links for the ambiguous.  If none found, throw up error message.
 * The assumption that ambiguous links only appears in one level avoids disambiguating non-link template parameters. It would have worked the second time around.  — Dispenser 19:37, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
 * OK thanks. DuncanHill (talk) 22:27, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Accessed ---> Retrieved
Please stop this bot from changing accessed to Retrieved. Accessed is allowed under WP:CITE. -- Ssilvers (talk) 17:19, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I was the pawn in this - with this edit. Ssilvers says that WikiProject Gilbert and Sullivan has a practice of using "accessed" instead of "retrieved", though I can't find any documentation of that. Was there a reason for including this change in the "minor fixes"? StAnselm (talk) 01:53, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Bugs!
I've noticed that sometimes Dab Solver will try to replace my corrections with: <> or <>, etc...

Also, I've tried numerous times to use the "Edit Token" feature, and every time it return my code as "+\" Maybe you need to update your script with API Help --- query: pages: -     ns: 0 title: Copy the lines below missing: starttimestamp: |- 2011-02-20T23:33:54Z edittoken: +\

Also, since the edit token isn't working, it is really annoying how the "Show preview/Changes" button open in the same tab, it would be helpful if I could still have open the Dab Solver interface, while I save my changes... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cit helper (talk • contribs) 23:36, 20 February 2011 (UTC)


 * It is helpful to list your browser, Firefox/4.0b12pre, so I don't have to deduce it. Beta releases generally will have weird bug, such as Firefox/4.0b11pre somehow losing  .  As for your issues:
 * You were warned that the edit was corrupted by code that specifically checked for it.
 * Your cookie isn't being sent to the wmf server either because Firefox blocked third-party cookie (again haven't tested) or the secure-rewrite option was change (wrong server). I've added an icon to reduce confusion.
 * There no point to this. Install a bookmarklet instead if you want to move around easily.
 * — Dispenser 02:18, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Template replacement errors
It appears that dab solver has been replacing WebCite with cite web. Please check this for yourself and make any needed corrections. Thank you in advance. – Allen4names 14:38, 6 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Fixed I was being to generous with the regular expression for matching web cite (a redirect of cite web). — Dispenser 15:33, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

name= doesn't always refer to the link
On List_of_Colorado_fourteeners, Dab solver wanted me to disambiguate the name= parameters for some of the templates, but those are the display names; the actual links are in the first parameter of cmt. Logan Talk Contributions 14:44, 9 September 2011 (UTC)


 * There are several problems in play here. The first being dab solver highlights all template parameters matching the disambiguation link, letting the user figure which ones are the correct ones to change.  Often only one appears, making it trivial.  On that page, however, there were multiple false highlights before the correct ones at the end.  Second, determining which parameter affects output is impossible without page parsing.  We have some custom regexes to handle the more common templates, but cmt’s 25 transclusion hardly justify the effort.  — Dispenser 19:25, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Spaces in titles
It appears Dabsolver is having a problem with articles with spaces in their titles. See List of Finnish municipalities by population for an example: it returns a blank text, but warns that it did not find a link to Lavia or Tammela. In contrast, pages without spaces in their titles, like Satakunta, work fine. I tried replacing the underscores in the URL or the form with plus signs and %20, but that did not help. Ucucha 02:38, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * It's not a problem with the article titles, as others such as Shareef Abdur-Rahim works just fine. GoingBatty (talk) 16:46, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, you're right. Might it be the length of the title? Ucucha 16:51, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Nope, as I frequently use it on List of artists who have covered The Beatles - my guess is Dispenser is going to say it's some sort of circular logic issue (see similar issues above).  Good luck!  GoingBatty (talk) 17:10, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Looking at the source code reveals the answer. The page is entirely comprised of calls to Template:Infobox Finnish municipality/population count sequence reverse, as if it were some sort of database.  The devs say not to do this.  This is where the template detection code as there are no visible links on the template page.  — Dispenser 20:07, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

German dab solver
Hi. Since a few days there is an error that appears when disambiguating that says: API error: missingtitle The page you specified doesn't exist. The other problem is that it does not work properly, mean that the application does not show the best choice (red, orange or green). Is there a recent problem with it globally, or is it just the german version ? --Gary Dee (talk) 13:55, 17 February 2011 (UTC)


 * I can't remember what problem this was, but its been fixed in the mean time. The only differences other than translations are the English Wikipedia version has integration with Dab Challenge and a regular expression manual of style checker.  I've fixed a slew of problem with the ranking program.  The program isn't sophisticated as it just counts the number of pages linking to both the referring and target pages.  I still need to get in contact with the ruwiki's Connectivity Project, since a graph database is much faster at doing cluster analysis.  Text analysis would be great if we found someone to do it and got the run-time down to a few seconds for the average page.  — Dispenser 20:57, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Suggestion for transclusions
When using Dab solver on some articles, there are transclusions notes at the bottom of the page. Could you please change this so that the second link would go to http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py?page= PAGENAME instead, to make it easier to fix the disambiguations?

For example: When using Dab solver on June 2010, it states "Disambiguation  [[Iranians ]] is transcluded from  [[Portal:Current events/2010 June 26 ]] " (plus 7 more). It would be great if the second link would go to http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py?page=Portal%3ACurrent_events%2F2010_June_26 instead.

Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 17:07, 28 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Added, but it doesn't work with translations. Plus, as I will explain in the next section below that the transclusion system isn't robust.  You could have also copy & paste the URL or the bracketed linked text into the page field.  — Dispenser 09:26, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
 * So link detection works something like this: try matching the dab to all bracketed links, if nothing matched try with all template parameters, if nothing matched query for the link on transcluding templates only return the first result, if nothing matched display notice. The problems: a template transcluded deep enough that the top two fix links will point to one-another, (as below) is the link are hidden with &lt;includeonly&gt; skipping detection, or a template parameter is mistakenly matched when it from a template.  So with these fault I consider it more of a bonus feature.  (I've worked around the last by always doing the translcusion check if there were no matching bracketed link). — Dispenser 22:21, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Changing access dates to "retrieved"
Hi Dispenser, I just used your dab solver for the first time, and it's very helpful. I just wanted to let you know that it made other changes at the same time, changing access dates to "retrieved" and changing the punctuation. Is there a way to make sure it doesn't do this when fixing dabs? SlimVirgin talk| contribs 13:08, 12 June 2010 (UTC)


 * It is my understanding there is consensus to use "retrieved" instead of "accessed" as the former is clearer and is widely used. I'm not sure about the punctuation part, it is a simplification to avoid the issue of casing and to keep a consistent format.  Additionally, I have added an option in preferences to default commonfixes to on or off.  — Dispenser 20:24, 12 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I think it is an exaggeration to describe this thread as a consensus, which seems to be the claim that appears at User talk:Dispenser/Reflinks While changing "accessed" to "retrieved" might be tolerable in a citation that is malformed anyway, and will require further edits, it is not acceptable for a citation in an edit that is in the same format as all, or most, of the other citation in the article. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:31, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Can't sign in using credentials in new format
Thanks for your efforts in producing this wonderful tool. I can still make useful edits using Dab solver but I can no longer get (sign in) to work. The output from "Get my credentials" seems to have changed today, to a more verbose format which "Use credentials" does not accept. I realise that the security check may be a peripheral issue that just gets in your way of your real mission, but I'd appreciate any help. Thanks again, Certes (talk) 15:01, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Just realised this is probably due to today's WikiMedia 1.18 upgrade. Still a problem, but not your problem - sorry! Certes (talk) 17:29, 5 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Fixed They switch the YAML mode to JSON which is technically a subset in 86302. It looks scarier, but that's just something we'll have to live with.  — Dispenser 05:05, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the quick response. "Sign in" is now working perfectly. There is one new problem: clicking "Save page" takes me to the Wikipedia edit page with an error message: ''Your edit has been rejected because your client mangled the punctuation characters in the edit token. The edit has been rejected to prevent corruption of the page text. This sometimes happens when you are using a buggy web-based anonymous proxy service.'' It's not a serious problem, I just click "Save page" again at the bottom of the edit page and it works, but if it's easy to fix then that would make editing easier. Certes (talk) 13:50, 6 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Fixed, tested both methods of saving. — Dispenser 15:24, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Looks good to me too; thanks again. For the benefit of anyone else still having problems, I also needed to sign out of Dab solver by deleting my wpEditSession cookie from toolserver.org then sign in again before it worked properly. Certes (talk) 17:29, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I should mention (at least somewhere) that I changed the cookie path so only my tools can read them. This was done for privacy and to avoid issues with other Tools hosted on the Toolserver (such as CatScan 2 including cookies in the permalink URL).  Your cookies can be viewed in Preferences where you can also wipe them (including Google Analytics's utma/utmb/utmz tracking cookies).  Firefox note: popunder, popundr, and setover18 cookies are set by NoScript's Surrogate Scripts. — Dispenser 06:59, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Two changes/questions
Can the 'Fix' column be moved to the beginning or between the page name and the dab titles. This would make it easier to select without have to move the cursor across the entire row of data an maybe wind up on a different line? Why does this default to watch the page? If you forget, it makes a mess of your watch list with no easy way to cleanup it up. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:53, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * The layout was models after JaGa's lists. I would not think there'd be an issue with the guild line everywhere, but I've added row highlighting.
 * If you've setup a watchlist token, simply sign in again (upper right) with "Import watchlist and settings" checked. You can confirm in the Tool Preferences.  Anyway, I don't know how to make this process less fallible since it requires setting up the user's account, do I uncheck the box by default and add in error messages that the token wasn't present?  Change the wording?  — Dispenser 06:48, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The row highlighting helps. Thanks.
 * Not sure how much playing with the system I want to do. As a general user giving the tool a test drive, I was surprised about the effect on my watchlist.  This could scare away many users.  Setting the watch page check as the default is a big surprise.  I think the default should be off and just let the user check it if they wish.  As to adding an error message, I don't know how to answer this.  For the general user, there is no error if your token wasn't present.  So saying that there is an error is a tad misleading.  I think I know where you are coming from a programmers view.  So, no great insight from me on what to do there.
 * Also I find having to do the preview annoying. However, it does reduce the number of edits since I can sometimes cleanup formatting while the whole page is displayed. Vegaswikian (talk) 07:38, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Silently unwatching pages is worse, especially with users fixing their favorite pages and then wonder why they're gone from their watchlist. I've gone ahead and added the error message in, its more descriptive mentioning that pages will be added/removed from the watchlist, but unobtrusive unlike the popup before.
 * You have to sign in every few hour because MediaWiki generates a new edittoken. Nothing I can do about that, but its relatively easy.  I've placed note about this in more places.  Unfortunately, the more that is write then less is read. — Dispenser 23:04, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah, I think I see the problem and it is a no win situation. Thanks. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:35, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Icon legend
Is there a legend for all the dab solver icons? —danhash (talk) 20:15, 1 November 2011 (UTC)


 * A legend for which icons? Most icons have a label to the right or below, close/refresh buttons which have tooltips instead.  The only odd ball is the relevancy scores which should be initiative in itself with bars filling, the disambiguation splitting arrows icon, set-index pass through arrows, or the looped link.  — Dispenser 07:22, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The looped link is the main one I had a question about. It was difficult to figure out dab solver getting started with it, and I think it'd be good to document all the icons. —danhash (talk) 14:54, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Maybe I'm different, but I see little help in producing itemized lists that are frighteningly common around here with walls of text abound. It's open source and I try to document that as much as possible.  It doesn't make sense writing documentation at my glacier speed when I could improve the interface, create a better work flow, or fix bugs.  It also can get out of date quickly and isn't as helpful as inline help.
 * As for the indicators: They're very basic indicators, functioning more as a priority list than any real analysis. The bars indicate number of pages linking to the source (the page being solved) and the target (the link in the list), 1 bar (maroon) for 1 page, 2 bars (amber) for 2 to 8 pages, 3 bars (green) for 8 to 27 pages, and 4 bars (blue) for anything more.  Now there's a special case (since the source and target aren't included as possible pages) with the target page linking to the source page, which if completed would be a linking loop.  — Dispenser 20:31, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply—that helps a lot :) —danhash (talk) 22:09, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Session problem reported
Hey, I got a "loss of session data" question over at the DPL bot talk page. I'm pretty sure I gave him the right answer, but you may want to check it out as well. Cheers, -- Ja Ga  talk 13:38, 18 December 2011 (UTC)


 * He wasn't signed into Dab solver. As an experiment, I change the behavior of the save button as I kept hearing "I am not able to save" and similar with the button disabled.  The new behavior is to use an anonymous edittoken  if you're signed out and disable save if your signed in without an edittoken.  Now I'm hearing "lost session data" and tempted to blame the wording in the MediaWiki error.  However, fr and ja disable the save button and label it as "Save (after preview)", but zh (Chinese) removes it completely.  I'll probably look into that direction, any thoughts?  — Dispenser 04:08, 19 December 2011 (UTC)
 * You're way over my head, I'm afraid. Hey, I got some Dab Solver questions over at the DPL bot talkpage, if you could check it out I think the editor would appreciate it. Thanks, -- Ja Ga  talk 23:05, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Dabsolver's non-disambig edits
I recently got involved in a mini-edit war about the non disambiguation edits made by dabsolver. In short, these don't appear on the edit summary and another editor had no idea why the edits were made (I don't really know either, but they didn't seem to matter to me), so the other editor reverted my dabsolver edit.

The following was posted at User talk:Franamax by

"My initial qualm was about resolving a dab to a redlink, which I would question but willing to discuss (maybe a sentence on the dab page or redlink there would be better). Beyond that, I believe I'm OK to revert as "unexplained changes" and let you justify what you're trying to do, here or on article talk. I checked the dabsolver link you gave in your edit summary and nothing I saw there described any (in WP:AWB terms) "genfixes" as part of the task, nor that those changes have community approval. Since you didn't explicitly describe the purpose of those changes, and they formed the more substantive portion of the alterations, my conclusion is that you used a deceptive (rather than inaccurate) edit summary. Please be much more clear on what exactly you feel your technical edits are improving, or link to a task which has prior community approval. What exactly is your task doing, is it described somewhere? I'd rather not scour back through your past edits trying to figure it all out. Franamax (talk) 07:33, 5 January 2012 (UTC)"

Could you revise your program to include these in the edit summary? D O N D E groovily  Talk to me  15:33, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Points/Standing
How come my edits don't seem to affect my points or standing on the Dab Solver page?

Allen (talk) 02:50, 9 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Because the links you corrected aren't apart of this month's Dab Challenge. "X points on this page" tells how many points are to be had along with the running totals for the day and month.  Follow the links from  Dab solver's front page all of which should have points, instead of hunting with Dablinks.  — Dispenser 04:15, 9 January 2012 (UTC)
 * That link looks right but didn't work for me: try here and pick new or random. Enhancement suggestion: could new be limited to article space pages? Certes (talk) 10:49, 9 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Fix the link. You'll find those tool to be faster than Dablinks.  There's actually a   URL option, but I haven't come up with a non-hackist way of integrating into the interface.  — Dispenser 14:43, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Major bug
See this:.-- Ankit Maity Talk Contribs 06:36, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Dab solver failure
On my first attempt to use this tool, the message "Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still does not work, try logging out and logging back in." was issued repeatedly, every time I tried to save my edit. I did log out and back in but it changed nothing. — O'Dea (talk) 13:34, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I think you didn't sign in. You will see a button on the top right telling you to do so.-- Ankit Maity Talk Contribs 09:06, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

session data problem,
Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again — Preceding unsigned comment added by 7ofclubs (talk • contribs) 20:41, 7 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Click "Save page" again or sign into Dab solver. — Dispenser 06:20, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Watchlist tool on wikis in other languages than en
Hello!

Congratulations again for the wonderful tool that is dabsolver. I have no trouble seeing the pages from my watchlist with dab links on this page, but I cannot make it work on other languages than en. I tried to add &dbname=frwiki to the URL but got an error message:

 : (1146, "Table 'u_jason_p.all_dab_links_basic' doesn't exist", None) 

Is there something I am doing wrong? Place Clichy (talk) 17:00, 5 March 2012 (UTC)


 * That tool uses User:JaGa's Dab Challenge database and is meant for finding contest points on your watchlist. It would be time consuming for him to port the system to a different wiki since things are hard coded in the script.  Luckily for you, Dablinks already has a watchlist page generator.  Add   (link) to the URL while signed in.  (The interface was removed as it was more cumbersome then the newer Sign in mechanism.)  — Dispenser 21:17, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Dab solver degrades after clicking on (?) symbol
For example, tools:~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py?page=simple:Melodic_death_metal; mouse over the (?) symbol that brings up the full article for the disambiguating term, click on it, click on back and now the highlighting stops following the mouse. Clicking on hyperlinked terms still works, but not the entire line. Josh Parris 11:37, 27 March 2012 (UTC)'


 * Fixed The disambiguation category wasn't in the regex list. This'll be properly fixed whenever the unified translation is implemented.  — Dispenser 05:01, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Disambiguation pages containing a +
Hi Dispenser. First, thanks for Dab solver and especially for the handy recent changes you made. (The sort option may need some spacing on indented lists, maybe) Unfortunately I ran into a problem today on disambiguating links in CanalSat. It seems like Dab solver doesn't handle dab pages containing a plus (+). Can you look into this? (test here)

Another question/suggestion: can you warn for Template:Incoming links on dabs, so we can remove them when we're done? Thanks LittleWink (talk) 21:45, 8 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Fixed It may have broken IE6 support, but that's only 340 of the 44,258 requests in the past 30 days. So   goes out and   comes in.
 * The sort option is an experiment, so far I haven't seen a compelling reason in having it. What is meant by spacing: kerning, left-margin, or something else?  It currently has issues too, like screwing up nested lists, "randomizes" keyboard ordering, sorting by relatedness, last name, DEFAULTSORTKEY, qualifier, and death are missing, reverse sort is missing, only show with a hard threshold of 7+ list items, and icons for each sort type instead of single text link.
 * I'd like to avoid language dependent code, but I'll see what I can do for the incoming links template. — Dispenser 05:50, 9 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the fix. Personally, I find the chronological sort option handy on hndis pages (for pages like these]). And I meant left-margin for the sort option, sometimes the link text is at the and of a normal sentence. Greetings LittleWink (talk) 09:26, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

"the last update completed 898 minutes ago"
Hi Dispenser! I'm happily using Dab Solver's Topic points page to disambiguate articles, but I noticed it says "The list is updated hourly; the last update completed 898 minutes ago." Is that something you can fix? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 02:19, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Much better now, but not completely solved: "The list is updated hourly; the last update completed 79 minutes ago." GoingBatty (talk) 18:23, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm guessing those messages are based on my scripts, which are supposed to update hourly, but aren't because of some ongoing Toolserver maintenance. I'm kicking off updates at random intervals while I wait for them to complete their work. -- Ja Ga  talk 19:14, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info. I now see "The list is updated hourly; the last update completed 5 minutes ago."  GoingBatty (talk) 19:25, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * This appears to be broken again. Just thought I'd let you know. It appears to have been several days since an update --Mblumber (talk) 20:54, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
 * As User:JaGa's pointed out, it based on his scripts. It is possible to remove already fixed links, but every time I implemented it the tool run time went from 3 seconds to 30 seconds.  Outside <10 seconds usability envelope and further away from the 0.1 second goal.  — Dispenser 22:07, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Supporting other language Wikipedias
What is the level of effort involved in deploying the solver for other language Wikipedias? Beyond translating the interface, which is easy and doable, is there a significant amount of work required to start dabbing on other wikis? In particular, how hard would it be to make the solver work well on right-to-left Wikipedias (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, etc.)? Ijon (talk) 00:30, 25 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Dab solver is usable out of the box for any wikis with a correct MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage. With a basic translation, I'll (attempt to) write CSS rules to hide non-useful elements such as disambiguation and navboxes.  With more involvement, I'll assist in translating optional components such as Style checker (see ) and automatic lifespan/year insertion.  With regards to RtL, I am willing to invest some time, but from experience I will not support "flipping" the css.
 * But, that's not really why you're here is it? You want User:JaGa's DAB Challenge and its databases.  This is what powers the bar at the top of the tool and the watchlist_points.py/topic_points.py tools.  See  why that isn't so easy.  — Dispenser 17:52, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, "the level of effort involved in deploying the solver" in my original question was meant to include all the solver's infrastructure, including extracting the backlog from the database. I guess I'll look into User:JaGa's work first, then.  Thanks. Ijon (talk) 17:58, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Dabsovler having a bad-day?
http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py?page=Camelford

broke for me -

Suggestions? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 16:43, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Redirect4
I believe that Redirect4 generates links to disambiguation pages. So listing links found in uses of the template is probably incorrect since the template itself will, as I understand it, always add (disambiguation). Vegaswikian (talk) 21:51, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Bizarre behaviour, square brackets replaced with hashtags
Per heading, please see this diff. DuncanHill (talk) 19:46, 29 July 2012 (UTC)


 * It's a know problem of Internet Explorer's XSS Filter, see MediaWiki bug 32013. Other than making an edit filter, there isn't much more I can do.  Users are required to sign in and skip previewing or diff to avoid trigger the XSS Filter.  — Dispenser 01:28, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Kindle Fire edits incorrectly tagged as Safari
Hi Dispenser! When I use Dab solver on my Kindle Fire, why does Recent changes tag my edits with a Summary of "Safari"? The Kindle Fire uses the Amazon Silk browser. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 06:07, 15 July 2012 (UTC)


 * The WebKit guys decide the user agent should identify itself as Netscape, Firefox, Safari, and a KHTML browser. The Kindle Fire User Agent is still more complicated.  For me, the most important part is how you interactive with it, so I've added an Android identifier.  — Dispenser 20:38, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Login confusion
I get a lot of people over at DPL bot's talk that are confused about the login and saving. I wonder if it would be feasible/desirable to have DPL bot offer a simplified version of Dab solver with the login and save features removed altogether, so as to avoid confusion from people unfamiliar with the tool (and unwilling to take the time to figure it out). -- Ja Ga  talk 03:45, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Suggestions for clarification
I have some suggestions based on a conversation on my talk page. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 02:56, 20 September 2012 (UTC)
 * 1) Use disambiguation needed instead of dn, to make it more clear what the template is for
 * 2) Have the edit summary say "Disambiguation help needed" instead of just "Help Needed", to make it more clear exactly what help is needed
 * 3) Add the link to dabsolver on every edit summary, so people can learn more about your wonderful tool.

Whoa
I'd never heard of Dab solver until today. It is, frankly, amazing. Thanks for making it! -- Hex [t/c] 13:43, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Ukrainian wiki
Hi! Is it possible to use this great tool for Ukrainian Wikipedia? I didn't manage to find such option in preferences. --DixonD (talk) 07:18, 23 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Just copy the page's URL and paste into the page title box. The software will automagically convert into the interwiki form.  Unfortunately, many tools use DPL bot's enwiki-only pregenerated lists.  So you'll have to settle with the slower Dablinks tool.  — Dispenser 20:37, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Page should be removed from DABsolver
Hi,

I was using DAB solver (awesome work by the way) for the 'computers' catergory and it gave me this page, (Macintosh Central European encoding).

I'm not sure what it's for, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be changing things on it. --Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 12:23, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi Jamesmcmahon0! You can't "remove" a page from DABsolver, but you can choose not to edit a page with it.  GoingBatty (talk) 14:57, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Minor edit by default
The edits I make in Dab Solver are the very definition of "minor". Can the tool turn this flag on by default? Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:44, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Not sure if disambiguating links are "the very definition of minor" as defined in Help:Minor edit. For the answer to your question, see the box at the top of this page.  GoingBatty (talk) 20:39, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Bugs & suggestions for Dab solver
Hi Dispenser! Some bugs/comments on the Dab solver main page: Thanks for your continued work to maintain this great tool! GoingBatty (talk) 15:36, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
 * In the US States section, "Georgia" is misspelled.
 * The images for Songs and Agriculture are not displayed properly.
 * I enjoy using Dab solver on my Kindle Fire, but I don't see the vertical scrollbar in the gray box, so I can only get to the Featured WikiProjects and the first row of the Nationality WikiProjects.
 * Please consider featuring new WikiProjects, as the eight that have been featured for several months don't have as many pages to diambiguate as other projects.
 * Also with the Kindle Fire, when I click on the WikiProjects link to go to the Topic points page, I don't always see the drop down arrow to choose a WikiProject.

Counter freezes or stops periodically
The daily counter either doesn't refresh properly, or just quits counting when I do edits. Thanks for the good work, by the way. GenQuest "Talk to Me" 01:05, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks
I just wanted to tell you that I think Dab solver is Great! RJFJR (talk) 14:25, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Kudos
Dab solver is so cool. I loved the way you handled authentication -- very clever. Thanks for this tool. --Ori.livneh (talk) 10:02, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Reading the article
Is there a way to open the article we're editing right from the Dab solver interface? I couldn't find any. The "Read" link in the popup opens the disambiguation page instead; and the preview button in the edit page doesn't work, as it closes the Dab solver. Can you please add a direct link for the article so that it can be read in context? Diego (talk) 12:42, 22 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Middle-click (or Ctrl+Click) the "Cancel" link next to "Show changes". Yes, its confusing.  No, it wont be changed until MediaWiki changes it. — Dispenser 04:55, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I ran into the same thing. Since the name of the article is known, how hard can it be to add a proper link to it somewhere on the page... --82.170.113.123 (talk) 10:37, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Confusing situation
Dablinks finds a dablink to depression on the amphetamine page. See this link Dabsolver finds nothing. See this link Anyone able to tell me why this is happening? Seppi333 (talk) 02:49, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Looks like the link was already disambiguated on August 10 in . GoingBatty (talk) 00:17, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Accumulation of false positives over time
Hi.

I've been using Dabsolver's Watchlist points for while (I am assuming Watchlist points is part of Dabsolver; I hope I am correct) and it is accumulating false positives which do not go away. For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has been there for a quite a long time now. When I open it, a message says:
 * There are no disambiguation links on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
 * WARNING: MW2 not found

How can I get rid of such things?

Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 01:40, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears the disambiguation was fixed in October 2012 in, so I don't understand why it still shows up as needing to be fixed. GoingBatty (talk) 00:22, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, other such residues clearly show that. But I am more concerned about the pollution itself than the cause of the pollution. I assume you should be more concerned, since you fixed like a million of dabs last month, didn't you? Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 06:32, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I am also concerned about the pollution, since I do use Dabsolver frequently. GoingBatty (talk) 00:08, 11 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I think this will improve when we move over to Tool Labs. There seems to be corrupted data on Toolserver and I doubt it will ever get fixed, since everyone is leaving within a year anyways. -- Ja Ga  talk 22:27, 11 October 2013 (UTC)
 * - Thanks for your reply. Could you please help me to understand more about the corrupted data?  Each time an article is edited, wouldn't the new copy of the article replace the corrupted Toolserver version?  If not, is there a way to request that certain articles be deleted and recopied?  Or am I missing the crux of the issue?  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 14:40, 12 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Editing the article normally does force the server to update its pagelinks, but for whatever reason, it isn't happening in some cases. Take Versatile, for instance. Here's what Toolserver thinks links to this dab, and here's what really links to the dab. I can't force an update, but when I look on the Tool Labs database, I see the data is good:


 * The exact same query on the Toolserver database yields 20 rows. So when I move my code over to the new database I know there will be some improvement in the data quality. This is a big task, though, and I'm not sure when I will be able to do it - hopefully this year. -- Ja Ga  talk 18:04, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Dabsolver not recognising Geodis?
DPL bot told me I'd linked to the Sanday dab page from this version of Scar, Orkney. Dab solver said there were no dab links. (I've now fixed the link). I wonder whether Dab solver doesn't recognise a geodis page as a disambiguation page? Pam D  18:23, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

False negative
Hi, Dabsolver says that there are no dab links on Podoconiosis, but in fact, there are four, albeit three are the same one. They are piped from the dab page (Elephantiasis) to "tropical lymphedema." I left the page alone so you could check it if needed. If this is something known, and I just missed it in the docs, please ignore my note, and I'm sorry to bother you. - Gorthian (talk) 03:30, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Incorrect addition of references
Hi,

it seems that Dab solver sometimes adds tag when it shouldn't on frwiki (examples: 1610, 13e corps d'armée (France)) because there's already a Références template. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 10:12, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Fixed (Mostly) Scripts will now call noreferences.py with the correct language instead of the default .  — Dispenser 22:20, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Toolserver shutdown
Is there a replacement for dabsolver, now that toolserver is shut down?-- &iquest;3fam  ily6  contribs 13:53, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
 * It works in thoery, but trying to browse by WikiProject returns a bunch of error messages (at least for WP:VG). ☺ ·  Salvidrim!   ·  &#9993;  23:14, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, the DPL project data is not open anymore. So even if my updates scripts were running you wouldn't find anything.  — Dispenser 17:07, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Edit summary link
Hi Dispenser. Thanks for Dab solver - it's great. One minor point I noticed - in the edit summary it generates, "Dab solver" is still linked to the tool's old location (toolserver.org/~dispenser/view/Dab_solver) rather than its new location (http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py). Regards. DH85868993 (talk) 22:32, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Not detecting references section in cawiki
DabLinks is adding a reference section in articles in cawiki which already have a references section. I think DabLinks is missing reference sections that use

==Referències==

instead of
 * It's been hacked in, the above query finds 1,517 pages with dangling tags. — Dispenser 06:24, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

shortcut link to Dab solver tool, and complication
Hi Dispenser -- I just tried to help myself and other occasional users of your great Dab solver tool by setting up a shortcut/pointer at wp:Dab solver tool. It immediately helps me to more easily find my way to applying the tool, and I think it will help other users too. I wonder if you'd review it and edit it however you like, if you approve of it.

One possible unintended consequence, though, is that it may confuse users familiar with the wp:dab solver shortcut link (which redirects to here, User talk:Dispenser/Dab solver). When they type in the search box at top of a Wikipedia page, I'm not sure exactly what they'll get. Right now, for me, when I type "wp:dab so" it auto-completes to "wp:dab solver tool", but maybe that is context-sensitive/customized for me as I have just been editing there and repeatedly going there. When I fully complete out typing "wp:dab solver", however, it offers both options for me to choose from, "wp:dab solver" and "wp:dab solver tool",. I'm not sure how the options will be presented for other users.

Actually to best serve users, I think maybe "wp:dab solver" should be replaced by the new shortcut/pointer, and another shortcut/pointer "wp:dab solver help" (or "wp:dab solver talk") should be created to point to here (and should be mentioned at "wp:dab solver". Would my making those further changes meet with your approval?  I'll watch here and/or would see if you make edits directly yourself at wp:dab solver or wp:dab solver tool.

I have recently set up several pointers to other tools; please see Category:Pointers to WMF tools.

By the way, I'm a great fan of you and your Dab solver tool. It has been a huge contribution. Also I met you once at an NYC wikipedia event at NYU several years ago, when you were seeking trials and feedback of the tool in use but still being revised then. Shortly after that I used the Dab solver extensively to clean up a big network of pages associated with a wikiproject that I was active in, at the time, and was very grateful. Thanks and cheers, -- do ncr  am  15:47, 7 March 2015 (UTC)


 * There is suppose to be a documentation page (to follow the WP:/WT: convention), but after the disaster of Checklinks documentation I avoided writing it. I've moved your page to the content page here.  There were no redirect links that needed to be corrected.  Thanks. — Dispenser 00:35, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Dab solver not showing suggestions
Hi Dispenser. I've been trying to use Dab solver today, but it doesn't seem to be producing the usual list of suggestions when I click on one of the redlinks. I don't know if anyone else has brought this to your attention, so apologies if it's something you already know about. This is Paul (talk) 13:39, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I've noticed this too for the past day or two. I get a Javascript error in the error console when I click on the redlinks that says "TypeError: obj.parse.redirects is undefined". Natg 19 (talk) 16:52, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Yep. It just shows a little black line where the box should be. (pinging ).  Konveyor   Belt   18:32, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Fixed The  API dropped the conditional   in favor of always having  .  It broke my workaround code for getting the article title and may break code for others who handle redirects.  — Dispenser 19:48, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Just tried again, but still not working for me. The redlink box is editable though, so I guess things are heading in the right direction. This is Paul (talk) 00:14, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
 * You need to clear your cache to get the new code, try pressing CTRL+SHIFT+R. — Dispenser 00:34, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Got it, thanks. This is Paul (talk) 11:18, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Get credentials not working
The "get credentials" button goes to which shows an error page, rather than going to |preferencestoken&requestid=COPY%20THE%20LINES%20BELOW%20(Ctrl%2BA%20then%20Ctrl%2BC) as it should. Putting the credentials in still works if you go to the second page manually, and copy and paste, but the button does not lead to the right target.  Konveyor   Belt   20:05, 3 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Fixed Didn't notice the semicolon while I was moving the lines around so the copy message appears in the address bar. — Dispenser 21:08, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Typo on main page
Hi Dispenser,

FYI, there's a typo on the main Dab solver page (http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/view/Dab_solver): It should say "Featured Articles", but it says "Featured Artciles".

Thanks, Natg 19 (talk) 16:06, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

DabSolver changes
Whatever you've just done, about connecting tools or databases or whatever, is having great effect! Wow, in wp:DabSolver I can find and fix disambiguation pages on my watchlist (well i see it may be just the last 500 watchlist items added, but awesome nonetheless). And it's fun to see my Monthly Disambiguation Challenge current score and that I am "closing in on" the competitor ahead of me. Wow!

By the way, I have been wanting to ask about some enhancements, one being about possibility of DabSolver being generalized to fix incoming links to wp:Set Index Articles. (The number of SIAs is approx 1/4 the number of disambiguation pages, and is growing as many disambiguation pages are properly converted over to be SIAs. I see that switching between template:SIA and template:disambiguation on a page, DabSolver enables fixes or does not, so I am hoping it would be easy to allow DabSolver to work on them, and to give option of tagging with siadn rather than dn, and some more.  I have been thinking/drafting about this, informed by and participating in some discussion at wt:DPL.)

Thanks so much for the enhancements coming on-line! I will go back to exploring them. -- do ncr  am  15:00, 18 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Just to let you know if you don't already, the watchlist's "points" column is counting pages not in this month's Dab Challenge, for example "Action research" which is on my Watchlist and which I think was in a previous month's Dab Challenge.


 * When I check my watchlist now, I see it mentions 10,000 pages from my Watchlist now rather than 500 and it identifies a lot of pages to fix now, thanks for that. I think my whole Watchlist is around 20,000 now, but this is great.


 * I see you've been changing things, including causing a longish delay like 10 seconds earlier today for a while, but it is working great for me now! thanks, -- do  ncr  am  03:01, 20 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Exemplar is listed on the bonus list (#2277) for the Dab Challenge. But isn't showing up in some places. User:JaGa & User:R'n'B the   table seems short with 1253 rows.
 * Watchlit functions require API calls which are limited to 500 articles per call. Since it cuts into load times I had limited it to 20 calls on the listing page (20*500=10,000), but have increased it to 50 (50*500=25,000 articles).  In Dab solver it is limited to 1 call for performance.
 * Performance is the reasons why SIAs aren't enabled. You can force disambiguating with   in the URL.  Also, you'll find Dabfix useful for cleaning up disambiguation pages now that it's running again.  — Dispenser 16:44, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks! -- do ncr  am  01:38, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

DabSolver glitch
DabSolver puts in "<>" for me now, in edits like this one when I have selected an entry. I am editing logged into DabSolver, and i selected a redlink "below", not listed on the dab page. But it happened also on another edit where I selected a dab-page listed item. -- do ncr  am  01:38, 23 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Yikes! Fixed that I forgot   would be set instead of  .  I also fixed all affected edits.  — Dispenser 03:24, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Is this a bug?
I have been reverted and criticized for this edit which Dab solver did automatically. Is this a bug, or was Dab solver doing what it's supposed to do? StAnselm (talk) 18:23, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
 * and  were deprecated in HTML 4 (1998) and were removed in HTML 5.  These fixes can be disabled by unchecking "Apply common fixes".  — Dispenser 19:33, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Re-weighting relateness
Dab solver has a hints system which counts articles linking the disambiguating page and the target. Simplistic, but works surprisingly well. The break points used a cubic function (I liked differentiable functions). Beside the spot check, I never properly check the distribution. I added code on Friday and plotting today we see it is Zipf distribution and the cubic function has biased. I've reweighted it (Decreasing column) for a more even distribution. You'll see more greens and blues now. Let me know how well it's working. — Dispenser 06:18, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Dabsolver down
I've been getting a 404 Error Page Not Found for the last couple of days whenever I try to use Dabsolver. Is it down at the moment? This is Paul (talk) 23:00, 12 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Well I'm seeing 600 edit/day with the tool. Are you using the link on the user page?  Which browser?  — Dispenser 00:06, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * DPL Bot posted to my talk page and I used the link from that, but it is working from the user page without any problems. I'm working in Chrome. This is Paul (talk) 15:25, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I added a feature if the page box was blank that it would redirect to the landing page. I forgot to account for the   links.  Your browser might still have that cached.  — Dispenser 16:25, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * OK, no worries, thanks for the explanation. I'll hit the refresh button. This is Paul (talk) 17:24, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

She just puked on me
Hi, Dispenser, Dab solver: From this URL: http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/save.py?title=Warg&action=submit&task=21

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/save.py", line 285, in    main File "/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/save.py", line 215, in main nexttask File "/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/save.py", line 34, in nexttask tup, = cursor.fetchall ValueError: need more than 0 values to unpack

/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/tracebacks/save_n3_vEp.html contains the description of this error.

Cheers! 10:49, 30 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Added error page explaining that the task list is empty. — Dispenser 15:59, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Loss of session data
I keep getting "Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data." When I scroll down and hit "Save page," the edit is saved just fine. This happens on every edit.

Some pertinent details: I am editing, as I do 98% of the time, using my iPad running iOS 9.1, from Mobile Safari. When I click "save" in Dab solver, the page I'm sent to is the mobile version of the edit session.

I have signed in on Dab solver each time (this has been over the last few days). I successfully disambiguated my watchlist (not very big), and have been working since on pages in WikiProject Geology.

I have tried deleting cookies, leaving cookies alone, setting "accept cookies from pages I visit," setting "accept cookies only from the current page," and the error persists.

Any ideas? Let me know if you need more info. — Gorthian (talk) 20:28, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm guessing en.wikipedia.org uses a different edit token from en.m.wikipedia.org. I've disabled that conversion code, so try it now.  I've only been testing with the OAuth interface recently.  — Dispenser 22:23, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * I've been working with Dab solver since I wrote this; the error is still showing up, but in the last hour, I was landing on the regular (desktop) page instead of the mobile version. Which is a large improvement, IMO. But it's still yelling about losing session data, then saving just fine anyway. — Gorthian (talk) 22:33, 1 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Okay, I took a dinner break, and now it's WORKING! Thank you! — Gorthian (talk) 01:53, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) I did testing.  The mobile domain does use a different edit token, but the edit token method works.  You probably just have to renew.  They tend to have a short life (hours) which is why I'm moving towards OAuth which lasts for a month.  (If your scared by the permissions, its actually less than the edit token and easily revoked) — Dispenser 02:23, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Weird text changes
Hi, Dispenser. I ran across an edit that used Dab solver (via the DPL tool) that oddly added some random pieces of text grabbed out of the article as well as fixing the dab link. Checking other (identical) edits, I saw that it did that on other articles, too, but only intermittently. has gone back and cleaned up those mangled edits, but I wonder if it's affecting other users as well. (We had a brief discussion about this, which is where I learned what tool was being used. Then I went and posted to JaGa's page by mistake. :-p) Could you check into this? Thanks. — Gorthian (talk) 20:21, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Stumped by dab link reported in article
The topic points list for Bangladesh has reported for some time that Bengal Sultanate contains a link to dab page Indian mythology. However, the Fix tool reports "no disambiguation links on Bengal Sultanate". I would expect the culprit to be some kind of redirect or transclusion, but for the life of me have not been able to find it. Any help understanding why it's on the list and how to fix it would be deeply appreciated. --Worldbruce (talk) 23:55, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Another wikis in "Dab solver"
Hi Dispenser,

Is there anyway to use "Dab solver" to disambiguate in another wikis? I think it is a fast way to disambiguate! I await your answer, thanks in advance!

Regards, Ivanhercaz &#124; Discusión 02:33, 24 August 2016 (UTC) Please, ping me if you reply me here.

Problem with Dab solver's watchlist
Hi, I've been using dab solver for a little time. However, when I go into my watchlist on this page

It gives this message: /home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/tracebacks/watchlist_points_wMhMDQ.html contains the description of this error.

This has been happening for about two weeks.

Best regards -- Marek . 69   talk   06:54, 29 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Fixed The bug was introduced after standardizing  with a Unicode SQL library.  I've fixed other encoding problems along as well.  — Dispenser 13:58, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Substing the date doesn't work in ref tags
Hello, Opencooper made [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Twelve_Apostles_(Victoria)&diff=748446625&oldid=747916033 this edit], presumably with Dab solver, but it didn't date the "disambiguation needed" tag properly because subst doesn't work within ref tags. [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Twelve_Apostles_(Victoria)&diff=next&oldid=748446625 AnomieBOT had to go and add the date]. I'd appreciate it if this behaviour could be fixed. Graham 87 14:59, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, just confirming that this edit was made using dab solver. Opencooper (talk) 15:32, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Bug T4700. I'd rather have bots handling this than relying on user's system clocks being set correctly (Yes, I realize its getting better with HTTPS failing if set incorrectly).  — Dispenser 14:10, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Using Dab Solver created article
Hi Dispenser! When I used Dab Solver on the article Daniel Son; Necklace Don in this edit, it seems to have created a new article called Daniel Son. Does the semi-colon cause issues with Dab Solver? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 17:23, 21 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Investigating.  is a reserved URL character (example:  ), so something's not handling it correctly.  — Dispenser 17:58, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Fixed/Hacked around. Silly me thinking MediaWiki would encode reserved characters or cgi.FieldStorage would set   in the Python convention.  — Dispenser 19:04, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

"Don't know" and "unlink" links broken
When I click a redlink and select "don't know", my browser gets redirected to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/articlename%7B%7Bdn|%7B%7Bsubst:DATE%7D%7D%7D%7D (where "articlename" is the name of the article I'm fixing) instead of adding a dn template to the edit window, and "unlink" takes my browser to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ instead of unlinking it. Haven't used the dab solver for a few weeks, but these links worked fine the last time I used it. --McGeddon (talk) 20:34, 20 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Fixed I don't know Wiktionary sisterbox links didn't work nor why the "fix" I implemented would even work. Reverted those changes. Overworking myself on some of these things.  22:44, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Specifying Type of Help Needed
Love navigating groups of disambiguation pages with links through DABSolver. I have come across several that have previously been tagged "disambiguation needed," however, the disambiguation may not be related to the topic I'm able to help with. E.g., on several music-related biographies, the help needed is not music-related, but entirely unrelated, such as international geography identifying a birthplace or recording location. Is there a way to further specify what type of help is needed in order to attract the right people to disambiguate? Great tool. Apologies if this question has been asked and answered previously. Thanks. Wikijenitor (talk) 23:31, 10 March 2017 (UTC)


 * That's a good idea and its being proposed (again) at the template. However, I'd like something more automated:   I've added a section  at the end of Topic points listing dab pages most linked to from the selected WikiProject.  Its experimental, so Let me know if its useful.  — Dispenser 05:10, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Error
Hi, I got the following error when trying to analyze a page from the Portuguese Wikipedia which had no links to disambiguate: 	Python 2.7.6: Fri Jun 23 17:53:52 2017 A problem occurred in a Python script. Here is the sequence of function calls leading up to the error, in the order they occurred.

/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py in 510                        '', 511                ))) =>  512                 main    513         except oursql.Error as (errno, strerror, extra):    514                 # Something went wrong with the database main =  /home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py in main    467         else:    468                 skiptask =>  469                 wikipedia.output(wikipedia.translate(site, NoLinksInText)%dict(title=page.title))    470             471         try: global wikipedia = <module 'wikipedia' from '/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/wikipedia.pyc'>, wikipedia.output =, wikipedia.translate = , site = 'wikipedia:pt', global NoLinksInText = {'bs': u'Nisu prona\u0111eni \u010dvorovi koje treba popraviti', 'da': u'Der var ingen flertydige links fundet i teksten', 'de': u'Keine Links auf Begriffskl\xe4rungsseiten im Wikitext gefunden', 'el': u'\u0394\u03b5\u03bd \u03b2\u03c1\u03ad\u03b8\u03b7\u03ba\u03b1\u03bd \u03c3\u03cd\u03bd\u03b4\u03b5\u03c3\u03bc\u03bf\u03b9 \u03b1\u03c0\u03bf\u03c3\u03b1\u03c6\u03ae\u03bd\u03b9\u03c3\u03b7\u03c2 \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf \u03b2\u03b9\u03ba\u03b9\u03ba\u03b5\u03af\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd\u03bf', 'en': u'There are no disambiguation links on %(title)s', 'fa': u'\u0647\u06cc\u0686 \u067e\u06cc\u0648\u0646\u062f \u0628\u0647 \u0627\u0628\u0647\u0627\u0645 \u0632\u062f\u0627\u06cc\u06cc \u062f\u0631 \u0645\u062a\u0646 \u06cc\u0627\u0641\u062a \u0646\u0634\u062f', 'fi': u'Wikitekstist\xe4 ei l\xf6ytynyt linkkej\xe4 t\xe4smennyssivuille', 'fr': u"Aucun lien vers une page d'homonymie n'a \xe9t\xe9 trouv\xe9 dans l'article", 'ja': u'\u30a6\u30a3\u30ad\u30c6\u30ad\u30b9\u30c8\u306e\u4e2d\u306b\u3001\u66d6\u6627\u3055\u56de\u907f\u30da\u30fc\u30b8\u3078\u306e\u30ea\u30f3\u30af\u306f\u898b\u3064\u304b\u308a\u307e\u305b\u3093\u3067\u3057\u305f\u3002', 'lt': u'\u0160iame vikitekste n\u0117ra nuorod\u0173 \u012f nuorodinius straipsnius', ...}, builtin dict = <type 'dict'>, title undefined, page = Page('wikipedia:pt', u'Concurso Nacional Funarte de Canto Coral'), page.title = <bound method Page.title of Page('wikipedia:pt', u'Concurso Nacional Funarte de Canto Coral')> <type 'exceptions.UnicodeDecodeError'>: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128) args = ('ascii', 'N\xc3\xa3o h\xc3\xa1 liga\xc3\xa7\xc3\xb5es a desambiguar em [[', 1, 2, 'ordinal not in range(128)')      encoding = 'ascii'       end = 2       message = ''       object = 'N\xc3\xa3o h\xc3\xa1 liga\xc3\xa7\xc3\xb5es a desambiguar em [['       reason = 'ordinal not in range(128)'       start = 1

/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/tracebacks/dab_solver_UnicodeDecodeError_512_zxLeEl.html contains the description of this error. The tool worked fine with another page which had links to disambiguate, and displayed the translated messages correctly. Thanks! —capmo (talk) 18:13, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Colwidth
This tool might be adding in the obsolete and unnecessary "colwidth" to the reflist. Per Template:Reflist, colwidth is obsolete, and just recently "30em" became obsolete. on its own now will automatically create columns depending on the user's resolution/screen size.

Is it possible to remove this from the tool? Two examples: 1 / 2. This info only came to light when I informed another editor that it was obsolete, and they said they never add it to articles. If it's not from this tool, let me know so I can possibly look at another tool that might be doing this. I did a quick look through the source code and couldn't find anything, so it might not be it. --<span style="font-weight:bold;font-variant:small-caps;color:#FFFFFF;background-color:#ff8711;letter-spacing:1pt;">Jennica ✿ / talk 17:52, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject Lists not updating
For instance, the WikiProject Baseball list has not updated in 6,477 minutes, as of the time of this message. Lepricavark (talk) 21:02, 26 September 2017 (UTC)


 * See T172882 and Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links. The DPL contest might have to be discounted.  — Dispenser 00:03, 27 September 2017 (UTC)


 * That's a bummer, but sometimes things are just out of our control. Thanks for letting me know. Lepricavark (talk) 00:56, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Most of my points are not sticking
I hate to come back here again so soon with another issue, but most the points I've been accumulating in the last week or so have not been sticking. For instance, if I remember correctly, my tally was at 50 last night. Now it is at 39. There was a stretch of about three days earlier this week where zero of my points counted. Has anyone else been having this problem? Lepricavark (talk) 14:41, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Hyperbolick Feedback
I do have some thoughts about the dabsolver disambiguation game.

The winning strategy can often be a link to Wiktionary, but whether there is any link to Wiktionary seems random. Can it be made automatic? Maybe not so much for proper names, but could the interface check Wiktionary for an entry?

Let's see. What else. Well, when scrolling around the pop up page of options from the link that I have clicked, I have to scroll all the way to the top of the pop up to find the little [X] to close it. Sometimes, this does not show up, as if outside the screen. Can it be made one of those things where [X] is always in the corner, no matter how the pop up is shaped on the screen?

The game would also be more fun if for pages with many links, whenever one was done, it would just jump to the next link without searching. Another thing that would be nice is some kind of counter at the top to let you know x of y links on the page have been gone through.

Another thing is that sometimes the same thing will be linked 20 times on the page. I have seen this a lot with "F.C." articles which have a lot of the same Stadium names. This is overlinking, isn't it? so automatically unlink every one after the first?

Other times it is the disambiguation page that really needs the fix. A quick way to jump to editing the disambiguation page would be good. The instructions seem to indicate this is possible, but I don't see how. And some kind of a word-search bar for longer disambiguation pages. And a way to get a "mouse-over" type preview of the page on the disambiguation page similar to the previews on other pages, too.

I think that's it. So far. Hyperbolick (talk) 16:32, 11 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Quite a bit of that exists already at the bottom.
 * Automatic Wiktionary suggestions are already in the interface, is it too unnoticable at the popup bottom? I'm considering removing the wiktionary boxes since 3.7% (~1,600/42,337) of the links are broken (e.g.  ).  And the JavaScript does not skip Special:Search/ part of the link.  Wiktionary is mechanically disorganized, so it'll suggest   and   because its hard to tell where the content is.  I have a heuristics, but we need something better.
 * A static close button is hard to implement as the popup is auto-sized by the browser. Might require a rewrite.  But there's a second close button at the bottom :-)
 * You can actually use and  to move around.  I'll improve the documentation on that.  A running counter seem cool.
 * I've heard this multiple same links before, but only encountered only a handful of times. Is it really that common?
 * There's a bar at the popup bottom with Edit, WhatLinksHere, and more include Dabfix. Wouldn't a "Word search bar" duplicate browser functionality?  I figured marking the scroll bar with the relatedness would be better (like in Google Books).  By "mouse-over" preview are thinking of Hovercards or Popups?  I've always found the short blurbs not enough and prefer using the question mark bubble.
 * Thanks for the feedback. — Dispenser 21:59, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Here is one I did today with the same thing linked in the same paragraph three times. Annoying. No, it's not terribly common, but where it does happen sometimes it's 20, 30 on the page. Hovercards, I think, is what I have in mind. For what's in the content of a link on the disambiguation page. Oh, and I don't think the usual page search function works on the mobile. Hyperbolick (talk) 02:40, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Here are others of those. Seems I've been getting them all morning.  Hyperbolick (talk) 15:15, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Can we automatically have a monthly DPL bonus list task every month? What else would be good, a monthly task for multiple links to fix on a page. 14:49, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Seem to’ve lost the link for these. Hyperbolick (talk) 04:12, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Bug: $ amounts are being stripped
Example 1. Special:Diff/843929452/843930093, manually sorted in Special:Diff/843932483/843932712. Example 2. Special:Diff/845827924/845834187, manually sorted in Special:Diff/845875807/845883755. Sam Sailor 19:48, 14 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Cannot reproduce You seem to have lots of user script, maybe one of them is misbehaving. — Dispenser 03:07, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
 * You are right, I just tried Dab Solver in Draft:SS Yarmouth from my alt account, and all is fine. Can you teach me a smart way to investigate which script is causing the havoc when I return to the Wikipedia page? Sam Sailor 10:49, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Not really, I would just do a binary search to find the problematic script and use JSHint for obvious flaws. I've had trouble with article localizer/reformatter changing Textarea HTML.  — Dispenser 20:02, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Adding support for portal disambiguation pages
Hello and thanks for a great tool,

Would it be possible to allow the tool to work with portal disambiguation pages? There are not many of them, but the tool would be useful for fixing the unsolved dabs (for example Portal:Alien). The template is Portal disambiguation and the category is Category:Portal disambiguation pages. Thanks, Dreamy <i style="color:#d01e1e">Jazz</i> 🎷 talk to me &#124; my contributions 22:32, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

503 Service Unavailable
Is this a wholesale issue? I've looked at https://tools.wmflabs.org/dispenser/view/Main_Page and https://tools.wmflabs.org/dispenser/view/Dab_solver which both are down showing "503 Service Unavailable". I'm sure it's a known issue, but it has been down since friday (as far as I'm aware). Best Wishes,  Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 08:32, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
 * It's been down for a while but seems to be back today. Certes (talk) 13:19, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Long list!
This page has gotten very long. Takes a long time to load and then a long time to scroll. Archive or remove older tasks? Hyperbolick (talk) 11:36, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Login error
When I open https://dispenser.info.tm/~dispenser/cgi-bin/dab_solver.py?page=CBOR&client=notify (which was linked from User talk:NeonMerlin) and click "Sign in", I get:


 * Server error
 * There was a script error


 * A problem occurred in a Python script.
 * A problem occurred in a Python script.


 * /home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/tracebacks/connect_OAuthException_120_hlz3Wi.html contains the description of this error.

Neon Merlin  02:10, 30 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Same for me. Ollieinc  ( talk ) 04:05, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

Hangs forever on Android, times out on iOS
This is a very useful tool. I hope this gets fixed if the issue is more than just that it doesn't work on mobile browsers, which I could live with if necessary. I will try shortly with Chrome on Linux. Elinruby (talk) 16:35, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Dab solver is available via its IP address
Editors unable to access Dab solver via the usual URLs may be able to use http://69.142.160.183/~dispenser/view/Dab_solver. https: access also works, but requires accepting an expired certificate. Certes (talk) 16:59, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

can't log in
Hi guys, I haven't been able to log in to the dab solver tool for several days. When I click on the "connect to Wikipedia" button I'm taken to a page that talks about a Python error. Any ideas? Thanks :) Dr. Vogel (talk) 14:13, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi, I'm also experiencing this error. Phuzion (talk) 14:00, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

, every time I've gone to use this tool recently my connection has timed out. Do you know the cause of the downtime? czar 19:47, 5 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I have also been getting the connection timeout error. I ran Windows Network Diagnostics and it said this:

"Resource is online but isn't responding to connection attempts"

"Remote computer isn't responding to connections on port 443, possibly due to firewall/security settings, or it is temporarily down" Meltdown627 (talk) 16:58, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Cannot access
Every time I try to log in to try and disambiguate my watchlist it says that it's not found? 5 albert square (talk) 15:47, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Does the previous section of this page help? Certes (talk) 16:03, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I tried the link above and no difference 5 albert square (talk) 20:02, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't really understand "disambiguate my watchlist". What exactly do you want to do, and what happens when you try? Certes (talk) 20:12, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm trying to log in on it. I select to Sign in, then Connect to Wikipedia, then Allow. It just comes up not found. 5 albert square (talk) 20:28, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah, you're right: signing in has the dead domain name hard-coded. We can only use the tools anonymously until Dispenser finds time to fix them, so no watchlist access.  Certes (talk) 21:55, 19 November 2020 (UTC)