User talk:Hrothgar

Hello, and welcome to the Wikipedia.

I see you have found out how to create redirects.

Considering you were making 730 articles in the space of a few minutes, someone panicked and blocked you. I'm not guaranteeing anything, but it looks like it was intended to help, so you will probably be unblocked soon. &#1050;&#1089;&#1080;&#1087; Cyp 10:50, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hello Cyp,

Oh I see, sorry.

It got as far as some date in early September and then stopped working from one machine so I tried it from another. Some time after that one stopped also (after reaching some date in November) I saw your message that it was being stopped intentionally. Well then I won't restart it from another machine, because I obviously don't want to challenge what I now know to be an intentional decision. But shame for it to stop so close to completing the task.

Seems that 11th September failed too. Ah, looks like someone already did that one by hand.

Please accept my sincere apologies if this caused problems. I thought that by running the program during a time of day when US users are largely asleep it wouldn't cause load problems.

P.S. Obviously I will refrain from automated processing in future. However, I am curious to know how the pre-existing redirects such as 1 January were created -- did somebody do them all by hand? Or if they were done automatically, then what is the correct procedure to request something which requires a similar number of edits? I would be most grateful if the block could be lifted -- not because it has much practical effect on me (there are a number of other machines I can use), but because it suggests that the edits were intentionally harmful, which they really weren't. Many thanks.

As not to overload our server, we require that all bots be registered. I recommend logging in (i.e., getting a user account) and then getting permission before using bots.

Yes, most of these redirects are simply done by hand, I believe. --Jiang 11:50, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

You are now unblocked but please get permission before using bots in the future. Thanks. --Jiang

As mentioned above, you are unblocked now.

You may wish to read bots. (Or may already have found it by now.)

You can easily create an account, by the way, by clicking Log in.

I can see that your edits weren't intended to be harmful, no hard feelings intended. &#1050;&#1089;&#1080;&#1087; Cyp 12:07, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * indeed -- I blocked you to halt the bot in case of server overload. I hope you decide to stick around here at Wikipedia :-) -- Tarquin 12:23, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thank you very much for unblocking, and for the pointer to bots.

Please could I have permission as a one-off to run the program to complete the redirects to the end of the year, if I put a pause between iterations of the loop? (If so, please could you tell me the value of the pause I should use?) There are a total of 67 edits remaining to make in order to complete the task and achieve consistency.

If I do that, the edits will still be from a raw IP address because I have not coded the bot to handle cookies, but after that I will make sure to use a named login for future participation.

Can you a) log it in b) make it make "minor edits" so they are hidden in Recent Changes and c) pause by a couple of minutes? Might be best to post a request to our tech mailing list first though -- the guys there know far more than me about what the server can handle. Personally, I'm not too keen on encouraging different date styles -- our Manual of Style aims for consistency. -- Tarquin 12:53, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * Can you also use proper syntax for your redirects - it should be #REDIRECT February 2 not #REDIRECT Evercat 13:01, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Current thinking seems to be that registered bots are allowed about 2 hits a minute under normal conditions. Ideally, you should have some sort of backoff algorithm which makes your bot reduce its efforts or go away temporarily under conditions of high load. I've not got the authority to grant permission: try the Wikipedia-L mailing list, where the developers live. -- The Anome 13:08, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for the tips.

I'll just do them by hand because I see you have to log in to do minor changes, and it will take more time for me to work out how to code the cookie handling than to make the remaining changes by hand.

As regards encouraging different date styles, presumably people are not generally encouraged to link to a redirect page in any event, but it's there to catch what people might type into the search box, just as is the case for the redirects which already existed (e.g. 1 January). The fact that it's already been done manually for 11th September confirms that some people do think of dates according to that format.

Sorry about the deprecated format. I will make sure to use the 2 closing parentheses for the remaining dates, but I'm not going to go back and change the existing ones because that would be a big job for reasons stated above.

--Hrothgar 13:12, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Good to see you've got yourself a username. Someone will be along shortly with a Wikipedia Welcome Basket! :-) -- Tarquin 15:26, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)