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Senior Editor II
Senior Editor II

Many many false positives

Hi! On the Hungarian wiki, InternetArchiveBot is archiving way too many live links. For each dead link, it archives about 10 live links. For instance here or here. Yes I know I could report the links one by one, but even if I report 100 links, the next day 100 others will be wrongly archived. This has been going on for years. Can you please throw an eye on it? Thanks and kind regards, Whitepixels (talk) 07:42, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Whitepixels, I've disabled dead link checking on your Wikipedia for now, until this can be more closely investigated. It will only handle tagged dead links. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 12:24, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Cyberpower678: I expect this is why IABot is now writing edit summaries on enwiki in Hungarian (based on the above sqwiki thread)? stwalkerster (talk) 13:48, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Stwalkerster, yep. :-( I shut down the web interface to prevent further use until this is fixed. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 14:50, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi and many thanks for looking into it. Some more examples (if you need any), where (nearly) all archived links were/are live: 1, 2, 3 (here 2 links are dead, but 7 were archived), 4 etc. Kind regards, Whitepixels (talk) 14:52, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

As it is not clear (to me) from the thread if this is already known, but the English Wikipedia is affected as well. IABot is changing many url-status' to dead which are perfectly fine and live. Just some examples I ran into: [1] [2][3]. Unfortunately, I cannot log in to your tool, therefore, if these URL need to be individually reported, please do it for me. However, as this appears to be a more general problem, reporting individual URLs is probably (hopefully) not necessary, or is it?
BTW. As can be seen in the examples, IABot still messes up the date format. Please adhere to the |cs1-dates=y parameter of the {{Use dmy}}/{{Use mdy}} etc. templates. It is quite annoying when all references were carefully set up to use the ymd format, and your bot comes around and messes them up... (Why does the bot edit the date anyway when the correct date was already present?)
Thanks. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:32, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, IABot follows template formatting directives on articles. When a Use (whatever) dates template exists it overrides IABot's judgement about which date format to use. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 22:38, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
(edit-conflict) Thanks for the answer, but IABot does (unfortunately) not adhere to the directive. If f.e. an article contains {{Use dmy dates|date=July 2020|cs1-dates=y}} this means that the dmy format is to be used in the article text and the ymd format is to be used in the references (which is perfectly fine per MOS and many article use this format). Since IABot only deals with references, it is actually the argument given to the |cs1-dates= parameter that is important to the bot (y here, but other values are possible as well, see help), not if the template is named {{Use dmy dates}} or {{Use mdy dates}}. Only, when the |cs1-dates= parameter is not present, IABot should fall back to dmy or mdy depending on the name of the "Use xyz" template ({{Use dmy dates}} or {{Use mdy dates}}). Exception: Individual |df= parameters in specific templates override the format for that specific template. IABot, however, still appears to completely ignore the |cs1-dates= parameter which was introduced about 1.5 years ago. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:00, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
No one informed me of such a change, to the template. But regardless, it seems like a simple config change to the bot should resolve this. But I need to know everything first. What other directives are there?—CYBERPOWER (Around) 23:04, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Yeah, I think it should be quite easy to read that parameter. So far, there is only |cs1-dates= which can take nine possible arguments (see Template:Use dmy dates#Auto-formatting_citation_template_dates - also supported by {{Use mdy dates}} and all aliases). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:21, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
If IABot does not support the short date formats already, which are selectable by this parameter, I think it would be reasonably safe to substitute them by their long equivalents (at least much better than not adhering to the parameter at all).
Regarding the |df= parameter of the CS1/CS2 citation templates, this is much less important than the |cs1-dates= parameter of the Use xyz templates (because it only applies to individual citations), but if you'd want to implement support for this as well, I would be willing to research the valid arguments tomorrow (strangely enough, I couldn't find a help page for this right now, only old threads while it was still in development in 2015 and there still were several changes). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:11, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Edits of InternetArchiveBot on hiwiki

I have seen that this bot has archived a lot of official pages on hiwiki. Can you please that from archive? You can do it by following:

  1. Do not archive links which doesn't have subpage.
  2. Do not archive links which are kept in section named "बाहरी कड़ियाँ".

I think you can find a better way to solve this issue.☆★Sanjeev Kumar (talk) 15:02, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – August 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2020).

Administrator changes

added Red Phoenix
readded Euryalus • SQL
removed Jujutacular • Monty845 • Rettetast • Madchester

Oversight changes

readded GB fan
removed Keegan • Opabinia regalis • Premeditated Chaos

Guideline and policy news

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:20, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

IA Bot on SqQuote

Hello, Cyber!

Can the IA Bot work on other wiki projects except Wikipedias? I'd like to set it up for work at the Albanian Wikiquote. Do you need anything provided by me? I believe the configurations and translations would need to be like they are for SqWiki (we may have to create 1-2 templates but we'll just import them from SqWiki). - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:31, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

Changing Username

Current Username - Prashantballal Change to - Prashant Ballal

I just joined Wikipedia and madhe a mistake creating username. So I request you to make changes as mentioned above. Prashantballal (talk) 09:36, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

@Prashantballal: Why are you asking here? Follow the instructions at WP:CHU. (talk page stalker) Jackmcbarn (talk) 20:59, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
Probably, because Prashant Ballal didn't knew about that page already but felt reasonably encouraged to ask an admin personally by this comment on Cyberpower's user page:
"At current I have helped to create accounts for 2512 different users and renamed 793 other users."
Just guessing...
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:38, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Admin stats

The bot seems to have stopped updating AdminStats before it got to mine. That issue aside, I'm not sure the bot controls this, but I've noticed over the last several days that it wasn't updating exactly accurately. Don't know if you or your bot is what updates the xtools.wmflabs.org, but that's been off for a few days. Specifically, what I have deleted at at CSD has not been even closely accurate. I think this is a recent thing. If I delete 30 pages, it might log that I deleted 5 or 10. It's been under-counting those stats for several days. Haven't compared it with any of the other stats. — Maile (talk) 18:42, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Well, maybe this is the cause: Toolserver replication lag for enwiki — Maile (talk) 23:48, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
Admin stats are back up and running. — Maile (talk) 12:33, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Source code for Cyberbot 1

I would like to know whether you can share with me, the source code of this page, so that I can implement the same in Malayalam Wikipedia. Adithyak1997 (talk) 03:02, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

The source should already be public under User:Cyberbot II.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 13:40, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

A couple of years ago InternetArchiveBot tagged as dead links all citation of Sea Slug website pointing to urls like http://www.seaslugforum.net/factsheet.cfm?base=xxxxyyyy. In fact, Sea Slug Forum is still alive but changed its way of adressing using the pattern http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/xxxxyyyy.

For example http://www.seaslugforum.net/factsheet.cfm?base=doriverr is now http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/doriverr.

Moreover, in it wiki we use a template, SeaSlug, that automatically format the correct link, simply including the code {{SeaSlug|xxxxyyyy}} (in the above case should be {{SeaSlug|doriverr}}).

Could you program InternetArchiveBot to go back and replace all the occurrence of

{{cita web|url=http://www.seaslugforum.net/factsheet.cfm?base=xxxxyyyy|titolo=SeaSlug|lingua=en|urlmorto=sì|urlarchivio=https://web.archive.org/web/20070929120538/http://www.seaslugforum.net/factsheet.cfm?base=xxxxyyyy|dataarchivio=zzzz}}

simply with

{{SeaSlug|xxxyyy}}

? --Esculapio (talk) 18:58, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Esculapio, Sorry, but that's not in the bot's scope. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:47, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Shouldn't a bot make up for its own past mistakes? --Esculapio (talk) 21:24, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Esculapio, if they changed the URL structure without leaving a redirect in its place, the bot can't know where the destination URL is. From it, and other readers that click the link, it would appear to be a dead link. That's not a mistake, that's a consequence of designing a website poorly. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 22:04, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Esculapio might want to submit a request at Wikipedia:Link rot/URL change requests. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:06, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
This is what URLREQ is for, but alas it only works for Enwiki. Each wiki is on its own for URL moves. Requires custom programming (this doesn't look difficult). Probably Itwiki has something like WP:BOTREQ ? -- GreenC 23:32, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
I will post the request on it.wiki, thanks.--Esculapio (talk) 11:25, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Message archived in unanswered mode

Will you take any action on this?☆★Sanjeev Kumar (talk) 04:09, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

संजीव कुमार, if your community doesn't want links archived in that section, they can turn off the function that touches links outside of references. That's up to the community to decide. —CYBERPOWER (Message) 11:46, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
Actually I didn't discuss in community yet, but it is happening that people are putting spam links in this section and your bot is archiving them. I was asking for this option. I shall discuss in community and let you know.☆★Sanjeev Kumar (talk) 11:55, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
संजीव कुमार, Let me know what they want, and I'll change the config. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 12:20, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Restart IAB on arwiki after T254096

Hello, so I tried IAB bot again after T254096. So, why the bot adding |url-status=bot to Cite web template? Thanks on advance--Alaa :)..! 22:28, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

علاء, That might be a glitch in v2.0.2. Should be fixed in v2.0.3 which will be deployed today. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 22:29, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll restart again tmw. Best --Alaa :)..! 22:32, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

About InternetArchiveBot

Please, could you create a subpage or just group all the InternetArchive links changed for each article because its creating a noise in the article talks on Spanish Wikipedia, There are articles that in their discussions only have hundreds of links left by this bot. Thanks Wilfredor (talk) 17:30, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Wilfredor, ? —CYBERPOWER (Around) 16:29, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

IAbot for Commons

Hi Cyberpower. I'd like to work on phab:T190241 ("InternetArchiverBot [sic] for Wikimedia Commons"), which has been sitting untouched for a while. I took a look at the source code, and it looks like defining and configuring the bot for commonswiki would be within my wheelhouse, but I'd of course need the appropriate level of access on the interface. If I'm right on that, could we please discuss next steps? Best, --Mdaniels5757 (talk) 20:57, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Mdaniels5757, I welcome the addition of developers. I need volunteers willing to help with the development of InternetArchiveBot. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 12:17, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
OK, that's good to hear. Where might my assistance be helpful? —Mdaniels5757 (talk) 16:42, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
(Unarchiving this.) I'm still interested in helping, how can I do so? —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 16:37, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
Mdaniels5757, Sorry for not responding. How good are you at PHP? —CYBERPOWER (Around) 16:57, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
@Cyberpower678: No worries! I'm not an expert, but I have a working knowledge of PHP. (Also, for this particular task, isn't the configuration mostly through the interface?) —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 17:05, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
Mdaniels5757, For commons, no. IABot is not designed to run through File space. All it will do is run through whatever the mainspace for you guys is. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 17:12, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
@Cyberpower678: Oh, OK. I'd be interested in expanding it to file-space (or other arbitrary namespaces). —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 17:17, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
Mdaniels5757, then I would maybe start by looking at internetarchivebot on GitHub and maybe install it to your local machine as a test instance. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 17:19, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Request: IAB Clean of all "TV by the Numbers" refs

I've helped contribute to some TV articles, and I know that myself and a number of other users frequently referenced the site TV by the Numbers (TVbtN) for ratings information. TVbtN is now a dead site. I've used IAB to archive the ratings refs that used TVbtN for a couple of articles myself, but I'm sure there are a bunch of other TV-related articles that use TVbtN for their ratings refs. Is there any way to get a massive IAB run on any ref that uses TVbtN as a source and mark the original link as dead? Appreciate whatever you can do, thanks. - SanAnMan (talk) 12:52, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

SanAnMan, Yes. By querying the domain and pulling up all articles IABot found them on, a bot job can be run on that list. Currently only admins can queue by domain, so I will do this for you. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 16:29, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
SanAnMan, 8650 articles were found with the domain in it. You can track the progress of the bot here. The queue is currently stuck however and I need to fix it, which will happen tomorrow. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 16:35, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
Cyberpower678 Thanks much for your help and for the work you've done with IAB. I for one greatly appreciate people like you who make editing easier. Best wishes! - SanAnMan (talk) 12:53, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

IABOT for Catalan Wikipedia

How would one go about adding support for another language? Would I first make a petition on the language's wikipedia and then come back here for you to activate it? Undvik (talk) 18:15, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Undvik, yes. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 18:16, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

IABot deactivated on nlwiki

Hello, the nlwiki community reported that IABot was malfunctioning. Way too many live links were marked as dead; the decision was taken to deactivate the bot on nlwiki. I did some investigating and discovered a possible cause: Spamhaus' CBL has blacklisted (what I presume to be) the IP address used by the bot, see here. Is this plausible? --bdijkstra (talk) 17:53, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Bdijkstra, that is the IP of the bot, but I wonder why it got blacklisted. I mean yea, it's a bot, but it's not malicious. I have removed the listing. Maybe that may help resolve things. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 18:14, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
Looking at the description it is most likely not the bot software that is the problem, but some botnet program running on the same machine or on a different machine behind the same NAT router. --bdijkstra (talk) 18:22, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
Bdijkstra, Nope. This IP belongs to IABot only. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 18:23, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
I hope you're right. Is there a way to tell IABot to only check the live status of an URL? I'd like to check a few links before enabling the bot again. --bdijkstra (talk) 08:29, 16 June 2020 (UTC)
I guess you missed my question? I didn't see it in the FAQ. --bdijkstra (talk) 08:19, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
Bdijkstra, I am however exploring methods of setting certain IABot jobs to appear as different IPs based on whatever region Wikipedia it's working on. This is in hopes of getting around some geo-restrictions. So on nlwiki, IABot will appear to third party sites as making requests from the Netherlands. But a setup like this is insanely difficult to setup.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 18:51, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
Shouldn't it be based on the geo-location where the site of the reference (URL) resides? References to Dutch sites, not only exist on nlwiki. You don't bypass geo-restrictions on cnwiki by making it appear as a request from China. -- Sb008 (talk) 22:55, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
Sb008, You're overthinking it. A certain language Wikipedia is not likely going to include a link that is geo-blocked for them. Enwiki is least likely to include a Japanese geo-blocked site, and vice versa. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 23:02, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
I would not have thought that IP geolocation is an important reason to block IABot. Anyway, perhaps there are VPN providers that allow dynamic programmatic country selection? --bdijkstra (talk) 08:29, 16 June 2020 (UTC)
Bdijkstra, I have a VPN provider that lets me move my digital presence at will. I'm going to see if I can integrate that. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 12:24, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

As IABot continues to create damage to the project, request to stop IABot until the problem is fixed

Hi Cyberpower, since IABot continues to incorrectly change |url-status= from "live" to "dead" in thousands of citations after several users have reported the problem to you (see above threads, some of them already archived), and as I cannot login to your tool to stop the bot myself, I am now asking you to stop the bot on the English Wikipedia until the problem is fixed. As the problem seems to be present also in other WPs it might be wise to stop it globally. This request is with some regret because IABot is one of the few bots which usually does good work, but the damage it is creating to the project right now is no longer tolerable. As its maintainer you are responsible for the bot's edits. Thanks. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:57, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

and as I cannot login to your tool to stop the bot myself speaking of, shouldn't the kill switch be onwiki? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:08, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I agree. So far, it was my impression that a bot's shutoff button must be on-wiki. When I tried to stop the bot myself an hour ago I was perplexed to find out that it is located elsewhere (where I don't have access). All Wikipedians should have access to the shutoff button, otherwise it doesn't make much sense... (To a lesser extent this also holds true for the bug reporting tool, but at least it is possible to discuss problems on Cyberpower's talk page - if the threads would not be archived away after less than 3 days (unless users add {{subst:DNAU}} to keep Sigmabot from archiving)...) --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:20, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I've disabled the bot using the UI. The edits you linked above seem possibly problematic. There's also [4][5] at a glance of recent contribs of the bot. The first link on the first diff isn't dead, and I'm also not sure why the bot wrapped it in a CS1 template rather than using {{Webarchive}}? The second also isn't dead. In either case, I think caution is better than letting the bot run amok, if there are indeed issues. And yes, I do think the shut-off switches should be onwiki - an editor shouldn't have to OAuth into a foreign website (which itself could be down / have issues) to disable the bot. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:42, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
ProcrastinatingReader, bots are not even required to have run pages. IABot having one is a courtesy and keeping it on the UI provides better oversight of what’s running an not. Every user with an account has access to the UI. —CYBERPOWER (Message) 11:24, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I know, I just feel like it'd be a good idea for a high profile and complex bot like this one. Bugs can creep into any software, sometimes for the silliest and smallest reasons, and I just feel making the shut-off switch accessible is a good idea for the odd mishaps that do happen. Just a request, not a demand :) ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:30, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, please explain why you do not have access to the bot UI. If you have an account here, you have access there. —CYBERPOWER (Message) 11:10, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Apparently not. I don't have an explanation, but I can't log in there. I already mentioned further above, I also can't log into the bug reporting tool nor into Phabricator (at least the latter requires a separate account AFAIK not covered by the global account already). I also can no longer log into Wikidata, Commons, and a number of other sister projects (at least this once worked years ago), although other language entities still work fine. (Strangely enough, when renaming pages in the English Wikipedia, this can still be seen under my account in Wikidata, whereas manual login doesn't work.) Perhaps this has to do with my (rather strong) security settings, but then I can't change them easily (and also can't risk to fiddle with them at present). At least it is good to know that I should be able to log in to the shutdown button (so it makes sense to investigate this further when circumstances allow for it). Either case, if I am facing this, there are probably other users seeing this as well - so, it might be worth thinking about how to more tightly integrate the shut-off button into the English Wikipedia (similar to how its done for f.e. Sigmabot), so that in a case of emergency it really can be accessed by anyone under any circumstances.
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:58, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, actually you literally are the only one reporting this. But this does make me curious. When you click the login button on the UI, what do you see? Screenshots are preferred, but not required. It sounds like you are suffering from bad session data. Did you try clearing your cookies and logging in again. Usually fixes a lot of problems. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 12:06, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, Also the run page is not designed to be access by ANYONE. It's designed to be accessed by trusted users. Since putting the run page onto my JS is not a good option, I could technically EC protect it. But that leaves the other Wikipedias. IABot's run pages have seen significant IP abuse in the past. Keeping it on the UI, eliminates this problem entirely. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 12:08, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, yes, it appears this has gotten too far out of hand, so I will be disabling link checking, globabally when I get to my computer. To add insult to injury, it is not a problem I can reproduce for debugging, so I have been having a really hard time figuring out what’s going on. —CYBERPOWER (Message) 11:22, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Thank you. I guess, it already does this, but in order to make the bot immune against temporary glitches with a site or the net, does IAbot probe a link several times over a long enough period of perhaps half a year before changing its status to "dead"? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:58, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, yes. IABot has 7 day waiting period for live links before checking. If a link is suspected to be dead, it must fail 3 consecutive checks, with each check having at least a 3 day waiting period. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 12:03, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I can think of many reasons why a site might go off for some while without being dead forever (in these strange times even more than before). Perhaps the waiting period should be extended to 3 or even 6 months to be on the safer side. After all, the bot won't switch a link back to "live" if it would go online again months later, or will it?
However, this is unlikely the problem we are seeing right now, because then it would affect (a few) individual sites, not the many sites of diverse orgins as reported by various users. This appears to be more general in nature, that is, rooted in the bot's implementation somehow rather than the web sites.
As someone reported toolserver time lack issues above, and timing issues are often difficult to track down, another very wild guess (being totally ignorant on the actual implementation): If there are several modules/processes involved, does the system (perhaps only under some further trigger conditions to be found) accidently default to assume "dead" (rather than "live") when the inter-process communication breaks down/times out for some reason thereby creating incorrect "dead" probe events?
Good luck.
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:44, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, If a site goes down for more than 9 days, it's generally got a reliability problem to begin with and an archive should be attached to the reference. So extending the waiting period is not going to solve anything. The bot generally doesn't check links it thinks are dead because, why? But given the issues it's been having, it might be a necessity at this point. I've been wanting to deamonize the bot, so having a dedicated task to check links, especially dead might be a good approach to mitigating this issue.
IABot generally keeps inter-processes to a minimum. You can see the algorithm being used to test dead links at deadlinkChecker on GitHub —CYBERPOWER (Around) 14:44, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
The bot design was working well enough for years it's probably not the core design idea. One solution is as much logging as possible - log the entire header for every network connection. Then for the false positives, review the headers. So you can isolate if it's external to the bot or internal. -- GreenC 14:58, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Another idea for testing purposes is different programs like wget and w3m, in my experience they sometime work on sites that don't work with curl (for no explainable reason). Some header commands:
wget -SO- -q --retry-connrefused --waitretry=5 --read-timeout=2 --timeout=5 --tries=2 --no-dns-cache --no-check-certificate --user-agent="Your Agent String" "https://example.com" 2>&1 >/dev/null
w3m -header_dump "https://example.com"
-- GreenC 15:08, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Error in IABot's meta userpage

Hey, the link in the infobox on IABot's seems to point to the old github repository. Unfortunately I can't change it due to the Abuse Filter. Can you change it? Thanks --Nintendofan885T&Cs apply 21:57, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Nintendofan885, there’s an abuse filter protecting my boy’s user page? :O —CYBERPOWER (Around) 00:55, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
It's because there's an Abuse Filter on meta that disallows people who aren't autopatrollers from editing other people's user pages --Nintendofan885T&Cs apply 09:48, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Nintendofan885, Wait, the link is up-to-date. What are you looking at? —CYBERPOWER (Around) 00:57, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
On the meta userpage the infobox has the old link in the 'Source code published?' section of the infobox --Nintendofan885T&Cs apply 09:48, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Nintendofan885,  Done —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 15:05, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

sad but true

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - think I did a bit of both. ref — Ched (talk) 05:00, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Ched, We live in such uncertain times. Even time isn't immune to the pandemic. :-) —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 13:09, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Many many false positives

Hi! On the Hungarian wiki, InternetArchiveBot is archiving way too many live links. For each dead link, it archives about 10 live links. For instance here or here. Yes I know I could report the links one by one, but even if I report 100 links, the next day 100 others will be wrongly archived. This has been going on for years. Can you please throw an eye on it? Thanks and kind regards, Whitepixels (talk) 07:42, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Whitepixels, I've disabled dead link checking on your Wikipedia for now, until this can be more closely investigated. It will only handle tagged dead links. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 12:24, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Cyberpower678: I expect this is why IABot is now writing edit summaries on enwiki in Hungarian (based on the above sqwiki thread)? stwalkerster (talk) 13:48, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Stwalkerster, yep. :-( I shut down the web interface to prevent further use until this is fixed. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 14:50, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi and many thanks for looking into it. Some more examples (if you need any), where (nearly) all archived links were/are live: 1, 2, 3 (here 2 links are dead, but 7 were archived), 4 etc. Kind regards, Whitepixels (talk) 14:52, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

As it is not clear (to me) from the thread if this is already known, but the English Wikipedia is affected as well. IABot is changing many url-status' to dead which are perfectly fine and live. Just some examples I ran into: [6] [7][8]. Unfortunately, I cannot log in to your tool, therefore, if these URL need to be individually reported, please do it for me. However, as this appears to be a more general problem, reporting individual URLs is probably (hopefully) not necessary, or is it?
BTW. As can be seen in the examples, IABot still messes up the date format. Please adhere to the |cs1-dates=y parameter of the {{Use dmy}}/{{Use mdy}} etc. templates. It is quite annoying when all references were carefully set up to use the ymd format, and your bot comes around and messes them up... (Why does the bot edit the date anyway when the correct date was already present?)
Thanks. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:32, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, IABot follows template formatting directives on articles. When a Use (whatever) dates template exists it overrides IABot's judgement about which date format to use. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 22:38, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
(edit-conflict) Thanks for the answer, but IABot does (unfortunately) not adhere to the directive. If f.e. an article contains {{Use dmy dates|date=July 2020|cs1-dates=y}} this means that the dmy format is to be used in the article text and the ymd format is to be used in the references (which is perfectly fine per MOS and many article use this format). Since IABot only deals with references, it is actually the argument given to the |cs1-dates= parameter that is important to the bot (y here, but other values are possible as well, see help), not if the template is named {{Use dmy dates}} or {{Use mdy dates}}. Only, when the |cs1-dates= parameter is not present, IABot should fall back to dmy or mdy depending on the name of the "Use xyz" template ({{Use dmy dates}} or {{Use mdy dates}}). Exception: Individual |df= parameters in specific templates override the format for that specific template. IABot, however, still appears to completely ignore the |cs1-dates= parameter which was introduced about 1.5 years ago. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:00, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
No one informed me of such a change, to the template. But regardless, it seems like a simple config change to the bot should resolve this. But I need to know everything first. What other directives are there?—CYBERPOWER (Around) 23:04, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Yeah, I think it should be quite easy to read that parameter. So far, there is only |cs1-dates= which can take nine possible arguments (see Template:Use dmy dates#Auto-formatting_citation_template_dates - also supported by {{Use mdy dates}} and all aliases). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:21, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
If IABot does not support the short date formats already, which are selectable by this parameter, I think it would be reasonably safe to substitute them by their long equivalents (at least much better than not adhering to the parameter at all).
Regarding the |df= parameter of the CS1/CS2 citation templates, this is much less important than the |cs1-dates= parameter of the Use xyz templates (because it only applies to individual citations), but if you'd want to implement support for this as well, I would be willing to research the valid arguments tomorrow (strangely enough, I couldn't find a help page for this right now, only old threads while it was still in development in 2015 and there still were several changes). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:11, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
As IABot continues to incorrectly change the |url-status= of links in citations from "live" to "dead" even for links which are accessible without any problems (f.e. here) after several users have reported the issue, it is high time to either fix the problem or stop the bot also in the English Wikipedia.
Since threads get archived way too fast on this page for a meaningful discussion (less than 3 days), I have restored a related thread and set it to "don't archive" until fixed. Please consider to change the archiving default to something more reasonable like at least two weeks.
Do you need any further input from me in regard to the date format issue with the |cs1-dates= and/or |df= parameters?
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 18:51, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
Unfortunately, IABot continues to create damage to the project ([9]), and as the problem is not local to a specific url or article, there is no point to block it locally. Therefore: Please stop the bot on the English Wikipedia until the problem is fixed.
Thanks.
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:54, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I just found some documentation for the |df= parameter and its six possible values dmy, dmy-all, mdy, mdy-all, ymd, ymd-all, as supported by the various CS1/CS2 citation templates:
Template:Cite_book#csdoc_df.
However, this would be icing on the cake because it would only affect a few individual citations - much more important is to let the bot adhere to the |cs1-dates= article-wide parameter of the Use xyz templates.
Hope it helps.
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:28, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, support for df was removed after CS1 started automatically formatting date references in the output. I'm more interested in the cs1-dates directive of the template. —CYBERPOWER (Message) 11:44, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
I can't remember having seen any announcement of |df= being deprecated or removed, but, yes, it is rarely used (if ever) after auto-date formatting was introduced.
Regarding |cs1-dates=, further above I gave all the details and a link to the documentation which might be necessary to implement support for it. Do you need any further info? Nice weekend...
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:54, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
I have meanwhile checked the CS1 template sources, the |df= parameter is still fully supported there, so not deprecated.
Another small hint in regard to the "Use xyx dates" template (redirect) names to be checked for, for comparison this is the list of patterns searched for by the citation templates:
  • '{{ *[Uu]se +dmy +dates *[|}]'
  • '{{ *[Uu]se +mdy +dates *[|}]'
  • '{{ *[Uu]se +DMY +dates *[|}]'
  • '{{ *[Uu]se +MDY +dates *[|}]'
  • '{{ *[Uu]se *dmy *[|}]' (that is, with and without space)
  • '{{ *[Uu]se *mdy *[|}]' (that is, with and without space)
  • '{{ *[Uu]se +MDY *[|}]'
  • '{{ *[Uu]se +DMY *[|}]'
  • '{{ *[Dd]my *[|}]'
  • '{{ *[Mm]dy *[|}]'
  • '{{ *[Dd]MY *[|}]'
  • '{{ *[Mm]DY *[|}]'
Greetings --Matthiaspaul (talk) 06:28, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, The df parameter is effectively deprecated as the cite module auto-formats now. IABot has dropped support for df since it now relies on CS1 to do the formatting. df only alters the output of the dates. It's not a bot directive for bots. I just noticed now that you provided docs for what I'm really interested in, being cs1-dates. I somehow managed to gloss over that. I will investigate and update the configuration accordingly. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 13:29, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Great. :-) --Matthiaspaul (talk) 13:48, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, here is the formatting config I installed for IABot on enwiki:
%Y-%m-%d on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(dmy|mdy)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs-dates\s*=\s*(ly|sy|yy|y)
%-e %b %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(dmy|mdy)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs-dates\s*=\s*(ls|ss|s)
%-e %B %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(dmy|mdy)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs-dates\s*=\s*(ll|l)
%-e %B %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*dmy\s*(dates)?
%B %-e, %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*mdy\s*(dates)?
%-e %B %Y
%B %-e, %Y
@default: %Y-%m-%d
—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:19, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
The parameter is named |cs1-dates=, not |cs-dates=. If one of the long/short specifiers is given, the name of the template is used to derive the main format. I would group "ls" into the long formats. To be perfect, the various long/short variants would all have to be treated differently depending on if the parameter is |publication-date=/|date= or |access-date=/|archive-date=, but I think that flexibility is not needed. If the pattern match is case-sensitive, Use/use and dmy/DMY & mdy/MDY must be included. To only test for template names actually in use, the list would have to be even more complicated (like above - some variants exist with space, some without space), but since performance isn't that important for a bot (compared to a template, that is), it doesn't matter that the regex would match template name combinations which do not actually exist. The following simplified list should do it:
%Y-%m-%d on match \{\{\s*(Use|use)?\s*(dmy|mdy|DMY|MDY)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(y|yy|ly|sy)\s*(\||\})
%-e %B %Y on match \{\{\s*(Use|use)?\s*(dmy|DMY)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(l|ll|ls)\s*(\||\})
%B %-e, %Y on match \{\{\s*(Use|use)?\s*(mdy|MDY)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(l|ll|ls)\s*(\||\})
%-e %b %Y on match \{\{\s*(Use|use)?\s*(dmy|DMY)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(s|ss)\s*(\||\})
%b %-e, %Y on match \{\{\s*(Use|use)?\s*(mdy|MDY)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(s|ss)\s*(\||\})
%-e %B %Y on match \{\{\s*(Use|use)?\s*(dmy|DMY)\s*(dates)?\s*(\||\})
%B %-e, %Y on match \{\{\s*(Use|use)?\s*(mdy|MDY)\s*(dates)?\s*(\||\})
%-e %B %Y
%B %-e, %Y
@default: %Y-%m-%d
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:21, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
And, of course, the CS1/CS2 templates also support formats using only a month and year, only a year, various forms of date ranges, several named dates, and dates with prefixes, basically everything allowed by MOS. I have no idea how your bot handles all of these special cases, but if it doesn't already, I think the easiest way to deal with them is to not attempt to change these formats at all.
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:44, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, pattern matches aren’t case sensitive. If you understand how the configuration of dates work, I can just give you access to modify it directly. Just be aware it runs like a switch case statement so it will use whatever condition matches first, or default. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 23:31, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Matthiaspaul, new configuration is now
%Y-%m-%d on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(dmy|mdy)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(y|yy|ly|sy)\s*(\||\})
%-e %B %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(dmy)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(l|ll|ls)\s*(\||\})
%B %-e, %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(mdy)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(l|ll|ls)\s*(\||\})
%-e %b %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(dmy)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(s|ss)\s*(\||\})
%b %-e, %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(mdy)\s*(dates)?.*?\|\s*cs1-dates\s*=\s*(s|ss)\s*(\||\})
%-e %B %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(dmy)\s*(dates)?\s*(\||\})
%B %-e, %Y on match \{\{\s*(use)?\s*(mdy)\s*(dates)?\s*(\||\})
%-e %B %Y
%B %-e, %Y
@default: %Y-%m-%d —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 14:41, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
Yeah, this looks fine to me and should cover at least all forms of dates containing all three of day, month, and year in a reasonable way. Regarding the other formats, thanks for the offer, but I'm swamped with other tasks at present, so realistically I won't have time to dig deeper into this in the near future. If you want to have a look at the CS1/CS2 date mangling code, it's here: [10][11]. But I would recommend to apply the auto-formatting only to the 3-tuple formats above for now and leave all the other forms you might encounter unchanged (unless you get complaints). It's always possible to further refine this at a later stage.
--Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:04, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

reportfalsepositive redirects to config

Hi, Euro know noticed that trying to access https://iabot.toolforge.org/index.php?page=reportfalsepositive we get redirected to https://iabot.toolforge.org/index.php?page=systemconfig&systempage=wikiconfig&wiki=hewiki (with Temporary Redirect in http). Any idea why isn't it possible to access reportfalsepositive? Thanks, Eran (talk) 19:59, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

IAbot error

Hello. I am Suicasmo on zhwiki. I tried to running IAbot to archive urls, but it was not working since yesterday due to Permission error. The error message said the reason is this permission is obtainable with the following groups: admin, root. Would you help me to fix this problem? Thanks indeed.--Suicasmo (talk) 07:27, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2020).

Administrator changes

added Eddie891
removed Angela • Jcw69 • Just Chilling • Philg88 • Viajero

CheckUser changes

readded SQL

Guideline and policy news

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:56, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

September 2020

Information icon Welcome to Wikipedia. It might not have been your intention, but you removed a speedy deletion tag from a page you have created yourself. If you believe the page should not be deleted, you may contest the deletion by clicking on the button that says: Contest this speedy deletion which appears inside the speedy deletion notice. This will allow you to make your case on the talk page. Administrators will consider your reasoning before deciding what to do with the page. Thank you. Liz Read! Talk! 03:21, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Sorry to template you but it is inappropriate for you to remove a CSD tag from a page you created. Also, if the category is still empty 7 days after it was originally tagged, it will be deleted.
Please see Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion#C1. Unpopulated categories for information on what unpopulated categories are allowed. Right now, Category:Wikipedia Arbitration Committee Elections 2020 voter guides doesn't meet any of the stated criteria that would allow it to exist while it is still empty. Unless it falls into one of the accepted cases (disambiguation categories, category redirects, featured topics categories, categories under discussion at WP:CFD or WikiProject categories), all empty categories are deleted if they are still empty 7 days after being tagged. Liz Read! Talk! 03:27, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
Liz, the category was created less than 7 days ago. Why are you hell bent on red linking ACE pages for the upcoming election? —CYBERPOWER (Message) 11:00, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Partial blocks on RPP

In Special:Diff/976233176, Cyberbot I commented that "This user who requested protection has been blocked". The user was in fact only partially blocked from a page unrelated to the request, so a comment about it there doesn't seem relevant. Can you update it so that it doesn't make that comment for partial blocks, unless the partial block includes either the page they requested protection of or WP:RPP itself? Jackmcbarn (talk) 20:59, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Actually, as I look closer, I also notice that it misidentified the original requester, but that's not its fault, since another user added their own signature before the original request. I still think that it would be a good change to make. Jackmcbarn (talk) 21:01, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
Jackmcbarn, I don’t think the bot is even capable of detecting partial blocks. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 21:10, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
It looks like that would indeed need support to be added here in Peachy. Or if that'd be rather complicated, maybe a quick simple solution would be just to make that code treat partially blocked users as unblocked. Jackmcbarn (talk) 21:14, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
Jackmcbarn, Peachy is old and deprecated and was written in the days of PHP 4. We are approaching PHP 8 and I don't have the manpower to maintain. I am creating a thin framework to lift existing bot tasks off of. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 22:02, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Disabled on no:wp

I had to disable to IABot after a few hundred edits after you re-enabled it yesterday. I checked 50-60 edits, and have reported 22 false positives - an unacceptable high number of false positives. - 4ing (talk) 20:44, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

4ing, It's being looked into. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 15:32, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

I've tried to use User:InternetArchiveBot to fix the dead links to TSSZ News, which has shut down in June 2020, on plenty of articles. However, since the site isn't technically dead yet (just has a closure notice), the bot doesn't replace the links to archives. Could you do something about this? ❤︎PrincessPandaWiki (talk | contribs) 23:05, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot on simplewiki

Hello, Cyberpower678/Archive 73. You have new messages at simple:Wikipedia talk:Bots.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Interwiki talkback}} or {{Itb}} template.

--Chenzw  Talk  16:55, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot on Spanish Wikipedia

Please, your bot is filling the discussion pages with all the changed links, please add this to another namespace or remove this functionality. We don't need to know that every link was changed. Wilfredor (talk) 01:03, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Different archive places

I just found out that the bot sometimes archives in different places. I'd appreciate a discussion of the criteria. Perhaps this has already been explained or discussed, but the archives of this page are almost useless, as they can only be searched one at a time. deisenbe (talk) 10:29, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot on da.wiki

Hi! You left a note on da:Wikipedia:Anmodning_om_botstatus#InternetArchiveBot that you started up the bot. I see no edits made by the bot. I made the bot do one edit and that did not go 100% as planned. Can you tell us what the status is? --MGA73 (talk) 08:53, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

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