Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WelcomerBot


 * 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.

WelcomerBot
Operator:

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic, unsupervised

Programming language(s): PHP (Peachy)

Source code available: Yes

Function overview: This task is intended to replicate the functionality of the approved, but inactive, SQLBot-Hello.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): BRFA of SQLBot-Hello

Edit period(s): Runs every minute fifteen minutes, only logs in and makes edits if a user needs to be welcomed.

Estimated number of pages affected: A couple of dozen pages per day.

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Yes, although not really applicable (bot will only work on pages that it creates, so none of them will be excluding bots)

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): No

Function details: This task is intended to replicate the functionality of the approved, but inactive, SQLBot-Hello. The code has been completely rewritten due to copyright concerns (the source code of SQLBot-Hello was released under a very permissive license, but it was deleted by SQL, which could be seen as a withdrawal of that licensing), but the functionality is almost identical to that of SQLBot-Hello. As with SQLBot-Hello, this is different from other frequently-denied welcoming bots because it only welcomes specific users, and only if the account creator opts in to this. Account creators will be allowed to choose between a number of templates (currently a dozen or so, but I'm happy to add more on request) and input their signature, so the bot will give a more personal welcome using the creator's signature. The bot will only welcome users if their talk page is blank, so if they have already been welcomed by someone else the bot will just skip it.

Discussion
Have the ACC tool admins (or other people involved in ACC) commented anywhere recently on this task?  MBisanz  talk 04:12, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Stwalkerster has been helping me with developing it and integrating it with the current system. He has also given me SVN access and added me to to the development team of the account creation interface (see here). As well as this I've also been set as lead of the JIRA component for the welcoming bot (here). Other tool admins, such as FunPika and Cobi, have also helped me out. Before starting the development of the bot I also asked around on the IRC channel if people would have liked a new bot, a few said it would be nice, and nobody objected, so it looked like there was still consensus for it. - EdoDodo  talk 04:20, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The old bot has been on the fixme list for quite a while - until yesterday it was actually still running, albeit broken as it was not editing. It's quite a relief to actually pass this task on for someone else to fix/rewrite, as the devs were always a bit cautious about fixing this specific one (or I was at least). Now we'll have a maintainer we can actually poke, rather than having nobody to call to in case of emergency. :D  &#91; stwalkerster &#124; talk &#93;  20:41, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Let's test it out for a bit. &mdash; The Earwig   (talk)  20:48, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll start the trial soon, sorry for the delay but it's a bit complex to get up and running, and I don't have direct shell access because it is running on the ACC's Toolserver account, and not mine. - EdoDodo  talk 12:42, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Starting trial with initial 5 edits to check everything is set up correctly server-side. Then I'll enable it for the 5-day trial. :)  &#91; stwalkerster &#124; talk &#93;  23:01, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, initial 5 (attempted) edits done, it somehow skipped the first one due to a bug that killed it before it could welcome (wrong function name!), anyway, two it skipped cos the talk page already existed, which left two successful edits. I'll enable this properly for the 5 day trial now, set to finish at approx 23:01, 23 August 2010 (UTC), assuming my maths is correct.  &#91; stwalkerster &#124; talk &#93;  23:16, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Meant to add - will configure to run every 15 minutes, at 0, 15, 30 and 45 past the hour, just like the old bot. Means I don't have to go figure out remind myself how to edit a crontab just yet.  &#91; stwalkerster &#124; talk &#93;  23:19, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Trial is going mostly well, except for a bit of an issue with edit summaries at the start. There was also a bit of an issue with escaping of HTML tags but that was fixed. - EdoDodo  talk 22:02, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Trial is still going well, I've tested a number of different welcome templates and they all worked properly. - EdoDodo  talk 21:28, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Slight malfunction here... turns out this is because doesn't accept a sig parameter and instead forces the default signature (ie. the bot's signature). I tweaked the template to accept a custom signature, so this shouldn't happen again. -  EdoDodo  talk 19:43, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Removed from ACCs crontab to prevent it from running.  &#91; stwalkerster &#124; talk &#93;  23:04, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Just ran a code review; have a few improvements here: http://soxred93.pastebin.com/i1NeqDif ( X! ·  talk )  · @022  · 23:31, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Uses the Database plugin in Peachy, for more security
 * Removes the needless runpage check, Peachy does it automatically. All you need to do is to add this to your config file:
 * Thanks for the improvements! Looks like they were committed by stwalkerster in r3184 :). - EdoDodo  talk 01:42, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

Would be nice if someone could take a look at this. The trial finished a week or so ago, and went smoothly, except for a few bugs which were quickly fixed. The framework this bot uses, Peachy, has just gone out of beta, with version 1.0 being released, so the bot is now running with a stable framework. A lot of account creators are eager to have this bot up and running, so it would be nice to have it approved. - EdoDodo  talk 13:01, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
 *  MBisanz  talk 18:53, 2 September 2010 (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.