Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Joe's Null Bot 5


 * The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Symbol keep vote.svg Approved

Joe's Null Bot 5
Operator:

Time filed: 21:29, Tuesday May 21, 2013 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): PERL

Source code available: On request, it should be two or three parameter changes to the code for task 1.

Function overview:  Traverse Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion with purge/forcelinkupdate

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Template_talk:Db-meta

Edit period(s): 1/day

Estimated number of pages affected: ~250  (revised to 25-50 after trial)

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No):  y

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): y

Function details: Traverses  Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion, does a purge/forcelinkupdate on each item. Checks for server congestion and has a backoff strategy.

This is another maintenance category update issue from templates that do conditional category inclusion based on time, which creates a known caching/category table issue. (See bugzilla #s 5382, 12019, 31628). This time it's empty categories marked with CSD C1, which allows them to be deleted after a four-day waiting period. The categorytable won't get updated when the four days expire, unless and until the empty category is edited or special-purged after the four days are up.

(Additional Null Bot News: I have recently deactivated task 2 and 3, as the project they related to, the deployment of WP:TAFI on the Main Page, has been discontinued.)

Discussion

 *  ·Add§hore·  Talk To Me! 21:44, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks! --j⚛e deckertalk 23:11, 23 May 2013 (UTC)


 * tl;dr nattering': Three cycles complete.  I manually reviewed the resulting category placements after each run and everything seems to have functioned as expected.  One small surprise: I hadn't realized how many of the items in the category when I got to it were long-term stuck (weeks at least).  The average workload for this task will be significantly smaller (25-50 purges/day, rather than 250) than originally predicted. No reports of trouble that I could find. --j⚛e deckertalk 20:25, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
 *  ·Add§hore·  Talk To Me! 14:04, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.