Wikipedia talk:Article alerts/Bugs/Archive/Old/Fixed

Does the archivetime work?
The archive time is set to 90 days on WP:PHYS but AAbot seems to ignore it.Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 22:00, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
 * That's strange. Maybe there is a manual setting from the test phase which still persists. I will ask Legoktm about it. --B. Wolterding (talk) 15:37, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
 * The problem should be fixed now. Let's wait and see whether entires will now remain on the list for 90 days. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:47, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Article falsely listed as a DYK
From User talk:Stepshep
 * Thanks for setting up article alerts for WikiProject Kentucky. I think it's going to be really useful. I noticed one anomaly, though. According to the article update page, John Breckinridge Castleman was listed on DYK on December 10. But according the the article history, that article hasn't even been touched since November 25, 2008, and it was hardly a major expansion. It's still a cool bot, but it may have a little glitch. Just thought I'd let you know.| Acdixon (talk • contribs • count) 00:40, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the report. It appears that this recent edit to the talk page updated the internal timestamp of the DYK category entry - although it shouldn't have. Currently the bot relies on this timestamp only and doesn't evaluate the date given in the actual DYK tag on the talk page (which is August 2 2007 in the present case). I agree that the bot should be more careful at that point. For the time being I'm listing this under "known problems" above. --B. Wolterding (talk) 15:39, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
 * (copied from below)For the second day in a row the DYK section has a bunch of incorrect information at WP:CHICAGO. I see some other project such as WP:OHIO and WP:PHYSICS are having the same problem and some projects such as WP:COMICS are not.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:51, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
 * (copied from below) May be a related problem but this change in today's run gave a DYK entry from 16 Mar 2008 as though it had happened on 9 February 2009. Keith D (talk) 01:30, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Another long list of false notifications today for WP:CHICAGO.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:23, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
 * It seems to be back in order. The last two days have had no problems.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:16, 13 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Something like this happened with WP:COMICS, see WikiProject Comics/Article alerts. I added the dyk template to quite a few talk pages, which accounts for almost all of the false positives, but the one that I can't account for is Talk:John Stanley (comics), talk page hasn't been edited this year. I'm guessing the 9th November listing of William Donahey is related to issues above. Hiding T 11:28, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

(←)Two more false positives for WP:SHIPS (Article alerts page): GREEK SUBMARINE Delfin and GREEK FRIGATE Hellas are both listed as DYKs on 1 March. Neither article/talk page combo has been edited recently… — Bellhalla (talk) 12:58, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Should be fixed now. But please report any further false positives. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:35, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Failed to run
The bot didn't run at all in the last two days. I don't know why that is.Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 05:39, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't know either why it didn't run, but I'll leave Lego a notice. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:45, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * According to Lego, the bot was erroneuously not scheduled to run. This appears to be fixed now. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:44, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect nominator (FAC)

 * Note: this was due to vandalism ; still the problem could have been avoided by better result caching in the bot code. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:40, 17 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah. I missed that. Thanks, §hep  Talk  21:58, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I improved the code at that point - nominator and nomination date, once known for an article, will never be updated by the bot, so they should be insensitive against vandalism. --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:13, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
 * The fix is on the live bot now. If we can somehow get hold of a fresh example, we should verify it. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:36, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) No comments in a month +, I'm assuming the fixed work and so I'm archiving.Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 07:31, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Broken pipe introduced by already present brackets

 * See "Known problems" above. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:45, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Fixed. --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:04, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
 * The error has not been reported again for quite a while; it seems that the fix has worked. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:57, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

AfD discussion result error when template is removed

 * Yes, that's indeed what the bot does. It's not correct, but this one might be a tricky one to fix. --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:14, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * How about an "ifexist" check? Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 23:59, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Not sure what you refer to? Well, the internal situation in the bot at that place is as follows: The database delivers a list of "all pages with AfD tags that have talkpages in category (wgcat)". The alerts are built from this list. If you remove the project tag, the article just disappears from the list. Which it does as well if an AfD is closed as "keep". Of course there are ways to fix this, but I need to think a bit about a good variant that is good to implement for all workflows (same problem would appear for any other workflow too).
 * By the way, what is the expected situation in this case: Should the bot just drop the entry from the alerts list? Or should it list a message "project tag removed from ..." or similar? --B. Wolterding (talk) 20:52, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Well for that specific example, the bot could do a "hard check" to see if Ripcurl still exists. If it doesn't exist, then it's been deleted. If it exists, but it's not marked by physics, then you'd simply remove the entry from the alerts. A message such as "The project's tag was removed form the article" could be nice, but I don't think it's necessary, and it would possibly trigger a flew of requests to have the bot list what articles have been de-tagged, and what have been tagged. Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:28, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Fixed now. If in an active entry, the article is removed from the project / workgroup, the entry will silently be dropped from the list, and not be displayed as "closed". --B. Wolterding (talk) 01:30, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Fix is live. Does anyone have a comparable example so that we can check what happens? --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:37, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * No comments in 1 months+. I'm assuming this is fixed & archiving.Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 07:31, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

ITN glitches

 * The technical background is as follows: The bot looks for the ITNtalk template on the talk page to read the date of main page appearance. In the case at hand, it doesn't find the tag (because the date is integrated into ArticleHistory here). Therefore it assumes that the date is that of the category entry - which is often false as we know from the DYK problems.
 * I can confirm that this behavior will change with the next version of the bot - it would just ignore the article on not finding ITNtalk. (BTW, the same solution is now implemented for DYK.) I'm not sure whether this is the final solution to the problem yet. --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:12, 3 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Is this normal/related to the fix? Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:03, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
 * No ,that was a problem with the rollback after the (attempted) rollout. ITN should now appear again. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:38, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Entries disappear from the alerts list when AfDs are closed
Note that the bug reported below occurs with all deletion-related processes, not just AfD. I have made a change in the code that will hopefully resolve this problem. However, the change is not yet in the live bot at this time. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:21, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * It is now in the live bot; I have seen several examples where it worked, i.e. AfD articles are reported as "deleted" rather than disppearing from the list. Marking this as "verified". --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:31, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Reports not being created (15 March 2009)

 * I suspect that the bot has a problem with the ampersand in your project name. As a temporary workaround, I have added the subscription template to the WP:DND redirect page. The alerts should appear tomorrow at WP:DND/Article alerts, hopefully. --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:13, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay; thanks. I'll let you know if there are any other problems. –Drilnoth (T • C) 01:34, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
 * This problem is now fixed in the code. However, please leave the workaround in place until the change is actually rolled out. --B. Wolterding (talk) 13:03, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The bug fix is now live, and the WP:WikiProject Dungeons & Dragons/Article alerts page now works as expected. I have removed the workaround for the subscription. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:52, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Bot Error message needs changing

 * Message changed. --B. Wolterding (talk) 13:02, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Rolled out; OK. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:41, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Category:ArticleAlertbot subscriptions omission

 * Because WP:CHICAGO doesn't have a ArticleAlertbotSubscription template placed on the page. I think that the Chicago project was one of the participants in the early test phases, and that the manually configured subscription that was set up back then (when the template-based subscription template was not yet in place) is still active today. If you place the subscription template on the page, the manual configuration can be removed from the database (this won't happen automatically though). --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:01, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * You should make sure all test projects get added. Also, what page do I correct and what exactly do I do?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 02:59, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * As with all other projects, you need to place ArticleAlertbotSubscription on your project page. This has been done meanwhile, and now your project appears in the category. I will ask Legoktm to remove the old subscription from the test phase, so that you can control all settings via the subscription template. --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:37, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Problem solved meanwhile. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:39, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Missing copyvios
The bot currently looks in, but the tagged articles go to. Maybe there has been a recent change to the category scheme. Anyway, I've change that in the code now. --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:00, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Fix is live and appears to work. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:45, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

RfC text mangled up (again, but different this time)

 * Different bug, different cause. Fixed in the code now. --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:29, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The fix is live. However, this will only be effective for RFCs that are added from now on. Let's see whether the bug appears again. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:46, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Error for the WikiProject Bahá'í Faith alerts.

 * Yes, most probably a bug related to the diacritics. Haven't found it yet, though. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:20, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Same thing seems to be happening with WikiProject Pokémon.Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:13, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * This is definitely related to the international characters, but seems a very weird error. Actually, on my local PC, everything works fine for these projects. The bug is probably related to the slightly different character encoding on the tool server. I have attempted a fix in the code; but we need to see what the effect is, next time the code is rolled out. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:04, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Categories after redirects

 * This happens when there is no line break after the redirect specification. Needs to be fixed in the bot. Unfortunately the category will now stay in the article alerts page until the item expires. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:23, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I believe the linebreak would not categorize the redirect - at least I had problems in the past and seem to remember that it has to be on one line. Most likely why we do not see that many categorized redirects about. In this particular case it was a save from prod where the article would not show notability any time soon but would be a plausible searchterm which would be covered at the target. Agathoclea (talk) 21:41, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Problem in the code should be fixed now. --B. Wolterding (talk) 20:11, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Anime and manga/Assessment/Article alerts does not implement 2 correctly.

 * First, I hope I have fixed this now and the next bot run will produce the correct results (current setting is discussions=1 but you can change this). Second, the underlying technical problem is this: Due to the way the bot reads the subscription parameters (namely, via the category sortkey), there is an upper limit for the length of all parameters combined (approx. 70 characters). It appears that this was exceeded here. By "saving" a few characters by deleting whitespace, I was able to fix it. However, in the long run, it may be necessary to modify the way the bot handles its parameters. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:01, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that did the trick. A note on the subscription page should help; you could also consider abbreviating the subscriptions in the short term. G.A.S talk 20:12, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Peer review inlining
This is a bug, not a feature - but not necessarily in the bot; it's rather related to the collapsible section mechanism I think. I quite clueless here, will refer this to the village pump. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:35, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Fixed by Anomie, the bug was in Template:PR/header. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:21, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

no updates for WikiProject Oregon since May (restored banner on Aug 1)
Probably related to a temporary outage of the bot - meanwhile it's working again. --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:05, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Same applies to the following report from WP Chicago: