User talk:SuggestBot/Archive 4

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

Archive 6

Weighting

The suggestions provided here give me the impression that too much weight is given to minor/semi-automated/maintenance edits and especially recent edits. This is most apparent by the suggestions of Benign prostatic hyperplasia, Urology, Urethra, Urethral cancer, Bladder stone, Urinary incontinence, Pre-prostatic urethra, Transurethral needle ablation, and Membranous urethra, which were all suggested just because I recently created and populated a single entry: Category:Prostate.

In general, the bot should be focusing on areas where I've (a) made the most significant changes in terms of gross character changes, or (b) where I've made the most net change to an article's relative size, or (c) where I've introduced new content. Focusing on recent edits could actually be a good thing in many cases, since it helps keep things fresh, but digging deeper than the past 5% of someone's edits is also important for making quality suggestions.

One solution might also be to set a cap on the proportion of suggestions that can come from a certain relative period of edits, unless no other suggestions are available.   — C M B J   23:55, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this issue, sorry to hear it messed up your suggestions! I checked the edit history of the articles in that category and noticed you were using HotCat to add them. SuggestBot is supposed to ignore edits made with many of the typical tools (HotCat, the disambig tool, reverts with Twinkle and Huggle, etc...) for the recommendations. I've made a note to verify that it still does that correctly, might be that we have a bug there. Also, thanks for the ideas on how the selection can be improved! I've made some similar thoughts myself, but have not yet had the time to work on it. Will keep them in mind when I do so!

By the way, I noticed you used the request template for these suggestions. You might already be aware of this, but if you are concerned about the selection of articles SuggestBot uses as a basis for its suggestions, you can seed it yourself by specifying articles or categories, as explained here. While that doesn't ensure great suggestions, it'll at least make sure the bot doesn't start with articles you're not interested in.

Thanks again for the feedback! As mentioned I'll check to make sure the HotCat edits are ignored as they should be. Let me know if there was anything confusing here, or you have any questions about the bot. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:03, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Feedback

Thank you for allowing me to participate in this project. I found the concept promising; but implementation in the present form is not sufficiently useful to me to continue participation. I offer these comments in way of explanation. I found two basic shortcomings. The first was a disappointing information format. The second was a lack of feedback opportunities.

• The size of the periodic suggestion post seems inappropriately large in comparison to the number of article suggestions. This is partly because of explanatory information included within the post rather than simple links to the explanatory information on a single separate user or project page for individuals needing that information.
• I was disappointed by continued appearance of articles of no interest to me in sequential periodic reports. I suggest keeping track of the articles suggested to an individual participant so those articles not be repeated in subsequent suggestions.
• I was disappointed by the need to screen through repeated explanatory information in sequential periodic suggestion reports. I suggest sending this information only in the first report to each individual participant. Changes from previous reports might be an exception. As suggested earlier, links to a user or project page might be more efficient.
• I could understand why most of the articles had been suggested to me, but I found comparatively few I was interested in improving. In comparing the suggestions with the articles I have worked on, it appears the screening algorithms may not effect uniform coverage of Wikipedia projects and topics. I was unable to find enough information about the screening routines to offer suggestions for improvement.Thewellman (talk) 14:53, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I apologise for not responding to this sooner, travelling and a busy work schedule has taken my attention. I am also sorry to hear you did not find SuggestBot useful. Thanks for taking the time to provide us with this feedback, it'll help us understand where there's room for improvement. We continuously strive to improve the bot and hopefully we can serve you better at some point in the future!

The problem with recurring suggestions of uninteresting articles was due to a bug introduced when we released our updated design a few weeks back. Up until then SuggestBot correctly kept track of which articles you had been suggested so it would not suggest the same articles again and again. That bug has now been fixed, thanks for bringing it to my attention!

You bring up a good point regarding the explanatory information not having to be repeated again and again, I'll look into fixing that. Having a page that explains the various elements in the suggestion posts has been on my mind for a while, this sounds like a good reason for putting that together.

When it comes to how SuggestBot picks articles to suggest, it is a combination of collaborative filtering and information retrieval techniques, explained in more detail in the research paper about it published in 2007 called "SuggestBot: using intelligent task routing to help people find work in wikipedia". It does aim to find articles similar to those you have already edited, but also only suggests articles that are marked with cleanup tags by the community. There might sometimes be a bit of a conflict between those two, resulting in articles that are not clearly relevant to you. If you would like more detailed information about how it works, let me know, I'd be happy to explain.

Again, sorry about the tardy response and that SuggestBot wasn't useful for you. Let me know if you have any questions about any of this and I'll do my best to answer. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:32, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion code length

Would it be possible to (by default) include the suggestion as a talk page transclusion? The length of the code on the talk page is rather extreme. It seems that it would help talk page usability if the actual suggestions were saved to either User talk:USERNAME/SuggestBot/suggestion date or suggestion ID or User talk:SuggestBot/USERNAME/suggestion date or suggestion ID and transcuded onto the user's talk page.– Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 20:40, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry about the slow response, travelling and work kept me busy with other things. Transcluding the suggestions is an interesting idea, thanks for bringing it to my attention! I've noticed the large size of our newer suggestion posts, might be that we can do something clever with a bit of template transclusion, or simply transclude them from a different page. My first tests didn't really help size-wise, but I'll investigate a bit further to see what I can do. It's perhaps something that I'd prefer to have some Lua-templates to handle to make sure we don't struggle with performance (SuggestBot already has issues posting to large pages, I wouldn't want to further complicate that), so it might take a little while until I have a good solution figured out. Thanks again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:13, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Question/suggestion

What is the default order of the table? It seems to be random. Why not make it sorted by Most Views at the top? Abductive (reasoning) 04:53, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

That's a good question, it's by default ordered by the "Tagged with…" column, the one to the far right (it's not sorted alphabetically, though). It's that way mostly because of historical reasons and that SuggestBot picks the articles from categories of types of cleanup tasks, so in the template that's used to create the suggestion posts each article is associated with a specific task category. In an earlier discussion here on the talk page there was mention of the possibility of changing how things are shown. As I mention there the list of articles is now just rows in a table, so it more easily lends itself to being changed compared to what we had before, and setting a default sort column shouldn't be too complicated. For some of our users, sorting it by the number of views would make most sense, I have thought of doing it that way earlier. So adding an option to specify which column to sort by is now on my list, will look into it, thanks for bringing it up! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:45, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

thanks for your suggestions.

	thanksthanksthanks
	thanks for your suggestions . i have enjoyed editing at least one . if you ever get lonely or bored , look at my user page. jjbernardiscool (talk) 09:37, 29 July 2013 (UTC)jjbernardiscool (talk) 09:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Help!

Hi, I'm having trouble with usind SuggestBot. I followed the instructions and it is not working when I try to put on my talk page. Could you please help! If you could, that would be great! Castigonia (talk) 23:46, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for getting in touch! I stopped by your user talk page and noticed SuggestBot had stopped by too with some suggestions. Hope you find them useful, let me know if there's anything else about SuggestBot I can help you with. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 01:12, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Glossary tagged as unencyclopaedic

It would appear that SuggestBot has assessed Glossary of underwater diving terminology as unencyclopaedic. What criteria are used to make this judgement, and is this judgement supported by human assessment? Thanks, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:27, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

The articles that SuggestBot describes as "unencyclopaedic" are gathered from the two Wikipedia categories Category:All NPOV disputes and Category:All articles that may contain original research. Glossary of underwater diving terminology is in the latter of those two categories because the term "O-lay" is tagged with {{OR}} at the end of its description.

SuggestBot's designed to only suggest articles that are tagged with certain cleanup tags (e.g. {{Refimprove}} for articles needing more sources). It assumes that those tags are added through human assessment, the bot doesn't attempt to do that assessment itself. We do add marks whether articles need specific improvement tasks, but that only applies once an article has been chosen and to be chosen it needs to have a tag applied already, as mentioned.

Let me know if my explanation was confusing or if you have further questions about how SuggestBot works, I'd be happy to help out. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:19, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

The explanation is clear enough. The table not so clear. I would suggest a link from the "Tagged with" classification explaining what criteria are referenced, as a single in-line OR tag in a long glossary is not easy to spot if you don't know what you are looking for. Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:46, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

I've made a note to make sure I also document the "Tagged with" column properly, probably on its own page, as I work on improving SuggestBot's documentation, thanks for pointing that out. You're of course also right about the difficulty of finding the OR tag, so I'll be reviewing the category we're grabbing articles from to see if I can find one that doesn't use in-line tags. We prefer page-wide or section tags as they're much easier to find. I've earlier encountered the same problem with a different tag category, so it's definitely something I want to fix. Thanks for getting in touch, I'm happy that we found the OR tag issue so I can fix that and hopefully make SuggestBot a little bit easier to work with. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:26, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Table suggestion

Hello! Having SuggestBot recommend articles for me has been great, since I've been able to find and improve articles I didn't even know existed, even if in only small ways such as grammar. So thank-you very much! However, I do have a suggestion to be considered. I know some users create subpages to receive newsletters and SuggestBot suggestions and such, however I personally prefer having all my messages on one page. Having SuggestBot's table and then the 'Changes to Suggestions' bit can actually be quite long, so I was wondering if it would be possible to make the table come collapsed? That way, I could still read the suggestions, but other users who leave me a message don't have to scroll past them all the time. This is just an idea though, and I'm aware that I might eventually need to archive my talk page anyway (although I usually already delete dab & tb notices after I've dealt with them), but if you would consider that it would be greatly apprecitated! Thanks very much, DarkToonLink 07:02, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I'm happy to hear hear SuggestBot works for you, that's awesome, and thanks for using it! Also, thanks for the great idea about collapsing the table! I did some testing and it seems the best way might be to add {{Collapse top}} and {{Collapse bottom}} around the table (the other alternative seems to be to throw another table around it, which I don't like as much). It sounds like a great candidate for a parameter to SuggestBot's config template. so I'll add that to my list of things to work on. I'm also working on writing up a documentation page about the columns in the table so that'll no longer be part of the suggestion posts, as it takes up quite a bit of space. Thanks again for a good idea and for using SuggestBot! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:00, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome! Thanks for all your work in maintaining SuggestBot and I wish you luck with all your future developments with it as well! DarkToonLink 07:36, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Odd timestamping glitch

Please take a look here, and can you explain why the bot has randomly edited just to change its own timestamp on the last two postings? It did so twice on the 29th of last month, and four times today. Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 00:55, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Red x means....

Something? What? Thanks, --(AfadsBad (talk) 01:29, 4 October 2013 (UTC))

The red X means that SuggestBot's calculation indicates that an article might need a specific type of improvement to reach a high level of quality. There are five columns in the table where these might appear, each column corresponds to a specific type of task. They are described in the explanation that is posted below the table (I'm also working on writing a documentation page for this), each column has a corresponding question is attempts to answer which from right to left in the table are as follows:

1. Content: Is more content needed?
2. Headings: Does this article have an appropriate section structure?
3. Images: Is the number of illustrative images about right?
4. Links: Does this article link to enough other Wikipedia articles?
5. Sources: For its length, is there an appropriate number of citations to sources in this article?

So a red X in the "Sources" column means that SuggestBot's calculation indicates the article needs more sources. The other four columns work in the same way. Note that the table is sortable, so you can sort on any of the columns, allowing you to find the articles that match a task that you're interested in (e.g. sorting by the "Sources" column will bring the articles needing more sources to the top of the list).

Let me know if my explanation was confusing, or if you have other questions about Suggestbot, and I'll do my best to help you out. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:08, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. It was not obvious from the content, but I did not understand the bot came up with the assessmnts. Looks like a good idea. I will head back to obscure plant families and West Coast hip hop. --(AfadsBad (talk) 21:46, 4 October 2013 (UTC))

If the table is sortable, is there any way to easily remove the table? (short of editing/deleting each post). I'm not a huge fan of the red x's all over my talk page. I realize that the simple answer is to unsubscribe from suggestbot if I dont like it, and really, I don't have much time for editing these days, anyway, but I'd like to keep getting suggestions in case I do.

--Susan118 ^talk 16:31, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Hello, thanks for your question and for using SuggestBot! I can totally understand wanting to not having the red X's all over the place. It's also something I'll be working on in the near future, because one of our users suggested it should be possible to tell SuggestBot to hide the table (see [[#Table suggestion|this thread). All that's needed to hide the table is to add {{Collapse top}} right before it and {{Collapse bottom}} right after it. So it'll require a little bit of manual work for now, but some time in the near future I should be able to get around to adding that as an option to SuggestBot so it does it automatically.

Another option to look at is to ask SuggestBot to replace the last set of suggestions (add "|replace" to the SuggestBot config template), that means it won't keep adding suggestions to your talk page but instead always replace the last set (see User:SuggestBot/Getting Recommendations Regularly#Parameters for info on that).

Lastly, you could also set up automatic archiving for your user talk page, similar to what I've done here. See Help:Archiving a talk page for more information on how to do that. Hope some of those options are helpful to you, please let me know if there are any questions! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 17:16, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Only Editable Pages

It would be better if Suggestbot only suggested articles that are able to be edited! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Today's Xtra (talk • contribs) 21:05, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for getting in touch! Sorry about the delay in responding to this. I'm sorry about you getting suggested articles that you could not edit. As far as I could tell from looking at your suggestions, a couple of them were semi-protected. For most of our users that wouldn't be an issue (because the criteria for getting autoconfirmed status are typically easy to meet). The ability to not recommend semi-protected articles to users who cannot edit them would be a nice feature, though, and based on some other issues it could be a useful addition to how we select articles, so I've added it to our list of ideas. Thanks again for using SuggestBot, sorry about the delay and the non-editable articles. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:44, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Malfunctioning bot - blocked

The bot appears to be malfunctioning, posting several times to a single talkpage just updating the timestamp. I have blocked the bot until the operator can tackle the issue, any admin is free to unblock once he has done so :) Snowolf ^{How can I help?} 02:36, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

It's an issue I investigated last week and thought would no longer be a problem, but apparently it still is. I've shut SuggestBot down for now and will look into fixing the problem. Thanks! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:43, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who accepted the request.

SuggestBot (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

---

Request reason:

Got blocked because SuggestBot has issues with saving some pages. Requesting unblock to make test edits in userspace as we work on figuring out where exactly the problem is and how to go about fixing it. All automatic parts of SuggestBot are currently shut down, the bot can only run manually.

Accept reason:

Per block message above. — Daniel Case (talk) 22:00, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Opt out 404

If anyone wanted to opt out of the thing, the page doesn't exist. -- ^t numbermaniac ^c 12:31, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Oh darn, that got lost when we moved to a new blog system. I'll get that looked into as soon as possible, thanks for the notice! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:14, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

an example on Nettrom's user talk page

Hello! I have just learned about SuggestBot, so I clicked on the link above to see an example, but was unable to find it on the userpage. Maybe it's been archived? —Anne Delong (talk) 13:00, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for letting me know about that issue. Yes, it was probably archived as my talk page is also automatically archived. I have now created a documentation page with examples that will be permanent, and changed the link so it points to the right place. Thanks again for letting me know so I could fix it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:42, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Redirects

This handy tool is very hard to find, and doesn't show up in Search. As an IP, I cannot create redirects; however, I did submit a request [here] — So, please see that, and if you create redirects, please clear my request [instructions here]. ~Thanks, ~Eric:71.20.250.51 (talk) 06:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC) —Update— Apparently, this suggestion fails WP:XNR and WP:SHORTCUT, per comments on the redirect request [linked above]. Any other means of making SuggestBot easier to find? ~E:71.20.250.51 (talk) 08:07, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

I added a comment to the redirect request, the mixed case shortcuts might happen. There used to be a link to SuggestBot from the Community Portal, I believe. I'll look into whether there's space to add it again there, but it might take a few days as I've got a lot on my plate at the moment. Thanks for working on getting the word out there, much appreciated! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:58, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, User:SuggestBot is a nice tool. ~Eric:71.20.250.51 (talk) 16:34, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Orphans only

Is there a way SuggestBot can send me articles tagged as Orphan only and omit the rest? JMHamo (talk) 02:50, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for getting in touch! It's not currently possible, but I'm working on changing that. We'll make it so our suggestion posts use a Lua module, which will have the added benefit of making the list of categories and number of articles configurable (e.g. "15 orphans only, thanks"). Can't say right now exactly when it'll happen, but it's on the todo list. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:11, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Page curation

Hey, I just tried out the bot and got a pretty random smattering of articles not really related to my interests. I'm guessing it's because I've done a lot of page curation, which means my last 100 edits are pretty random. It might be helpful to see if the bot can be designed to exclude page curation edits from the list of edits it uses in the algorithm. Other than that, though, a very cool bot indeed! Wieno (talk) 14:11, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for trying out the bot, and for letting us know about this problem! I had failed to pick up Page Curation as a typical tool so we could exclude those edits from being counted, so you're absolutely right, that leads to random suggestions. I've now updated our code so it'll also filter out curation edits as well as other typical tool-related edits (e.g. AWB, Twinkle, and HotCat). Happy to hear you like the bot, hopefully future suggestions should be much better! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:21, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Awesome. I'll give it another try and see how it goes. Thanks for such a quick response! Wieno (talk) 03:49, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Current status and downtime

Hi! I see the bot is currently down, and has been since the 13th - may I ask if you have an ETA on when it'll be back suggesting? :) Regards, Nitrolinken (talk) 15:42, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi and thanks for getting in touch! Unfortunately I do not have an ETA at the moment. I have notified our system administrators about the issue, but have yet to hear back from them, so I know very little about the problem. Once I do know more I'll make sure to post an update, though. Thanks again for getting in touch, my apologies for not being able to suggest you any articles yet. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 21:15, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

@Nitrolinken: Just pinging you to let you know that SuggestBot is now up and running again, which I'm sure you'll also notice when it sends you some suggestions in a few minutes. Sorry about the wait, hopefully we'll be able to service you sooner next time around! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:58, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

@Nettrom: I appreciate very much the response, and I understand that getting an ETA isn't always double when certain parts are in other people's hands. Fear not about not being able to suggest anything yet; there's bountiful of data to correct at Wikidata, and more so to implement in templates that'll take data sharing across interwikis to the next level! I'll be sure to take a look at the suggestions, so that I can get some flesh on my bones of prose, structure and content otherwise in general. Thanks for the notification! Regards, Nitrolinken (talk) 20:54, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

User:SuggestBot/Documentation/Task categories page mistake

Hello! I thought I should let you know that it says, "There are currently seven task categories that SuggestBot uses:", but then you list eight task categories. Mackey23 (talk) 01:23, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for spotting that and notifying us! I checked SuggestBot's configuration just to make sure it was correct and yes, there's eight of them. The documentation's updated now, thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 02:49, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

number of views error

the number of views doesn't seem to be showing-up, at least when it posted to my talkpage, thx Tom B (talk) 15:34, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi, sorry to hear about that, and thanks for reporting it! I've seen the problem pop up, but thought it was occurring infrequently. Did a spot check with SuggestBot's latest contributions and it looks like it's more common at the moment. I had some programming code that aims to solve the problem already done, so I have made that change to SuggestBot. Hopefully that will improve things, I'll monitor it over the next few days. Thanks again, and please don't hesitate to get in touch again if it continues to malfunction! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 21:57, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

I've put a temporary fix into place, but as I've written in the latest status update on User:SuggestBot it doesn't really seem to fix much. I'll be exploring some other possible solutions too, hoping that we can get our popularity data from a slightly more reliable vendor. Sorry again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:09, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Red "X" characters

In the suggestions table where there are red "X" marks under Content, Headings, Images, Links, and Sources, it's unclear what those Xs mean. At first I thought they meant that the article had those characteristics already covered. But when I hovered over the X, I saw alt-text that states "Please add....". So my intuition was incorrect, and the red X means that the article needs more of that type of item. Since the X is much like a checkmark (as in: "all done!"), I think it's not a good design choice for the table. Runner1928 (talk) 18:45, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi and thanks for getting in touch about this! I agree that the X's can be difficult to understand, which is why the popup has a description of the task associated. The introduction to the suggestions also link to the documentation, which has a specific section about the task columns to hopefully make them clearer.

Here's a short recap of how these X's came to be: When we designed this we went through several iterations, wrestling with the problem of how to highlight that an article requires a specific improvement. Different types of icons were tested, for instance we had check marks, smiley faces, but also construction cones. We also tested if it was better to only highlight the columns that identified a need for improvement, rather than have a marker in every column. Our initial design iterations led us to only mark the columns that needed improvement because it creates a lot less clutter, but the problem is then how to signal an improvement need. Check marks are confusing because they identify a completed task, and these are not completed tasks. While we looked for other icons, the "X" continued to be the best option, and we finally decided on one that was not too overwhelming. This was then tested in a beta where our users did not raise the issue.

As mentioned I understand the confusion. I would welcome suggestions to alternatives, preferably icons available here or on commons, or a text representation too if that's possible. Hope this helps, let me know if there are any questions! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:30, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

How about red flags? They come in a variety of colour intensities, this draft uses the second most intense one, which on my screen does not look overwhelmingly red. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:55, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

One-time request functionality

Hi, I put the one-time request on my talk page last night and I'm still not seeing anything (if I recall correctly, it was supposed activate in 15 minutes or so). Am I doing something wrong, or is the one-time request template temporarily broken? Supernerd11 :D Firemind ^_^ Pokedex 13:39, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi Supernerd11! I'm sorry about this, but I had to take the bot down for maintenance around midnight UTC today. Our friendly system administrator is installing more hardware for reliability, requiring the bot to be offline. Hopefully we should have it back up before the end of the day, my apologies for the inconvenience! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 14:04, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Oh, okay. It's nothing to worry about, I just figured I messed something up again! Supernerd11 :D Firemind ^_^ Pokedex 14:15, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Useful suggestions?

I put all Pembrokeshire categories in my first request for suggestions, and most of the results were not related to Pembrokeshire. However, some suggestions led me to articles in other parts of the country, and I was able to make some quick edits there. So the suggestions were useful (for Wikipedia) after all! It will be worth doing again. If nothing else, it has given me a better insight into just how much needs to be done. Tony Holkham (talk) 11:31, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi Tony Holkham, thanks for trying out SuggestBot and for giving us feedback! I'm sorry that your suggestions didn't cover Pembrokeshire, that's clearly not the way it should be, so I've added your list of categories as a useful testcase for when we work on improving the bot. From our logs I saw that one of our methods for finding similar articles was not used as all, which is definitely something we'll look into.

I'm happy to hear that you found some articles to work, though, that's what we're here for. Thanks again for trying the bot and in particular for the useful feedback! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:55, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Filter Articles

SuggestBot was really useful until... I started to do anti-vandalism and cleanup work. Then I was all over the place. And the suggestions were all over the place too. I was thinking maybe to make a filter. For example, don't count any contributions made by AWB, STiki and Huggle etc. Thanks, TheQ Editor (Talk) 12:45, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi TheQ Editor, thanks for using SuggestBot and for letting us know about this problem! Sorry about taking a few days to get back to you, finishing up a research paper for the CSCW conference takes all of my time.

We want SuggestBot to be useful also to those who do anti-vandalism & cleanup work, so the bot should be filtering out tool-based edits, I know we check for both AWB, STiki, and Huggle. Might be that our filtering method is outdated, so I've noted it in our issue tracker and will look into it. The way SuggestBot works it is also quite sensitive, if you have a bunch of edits to related articles and then make one edit to an unrelated one, it can throw the suggestions off quite a bit. I'll also be looking into fixing that at the same time. Thanks again for using SuggestBot and reporting this issue, and let me know if there's anything else! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 14:29, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Unencyclopaedic

In the bot's suggestions (User:Thnidu/Suggestions), I wasn't sure what the heading "Unencyclopaedic" referred to, so I searched for Wikipedia:Unencyclopaedic. Surprise! No such page, and no redirect. But the search page asked

Did you mean: Wikipedia:Unencyclopedic

That seemed reasonable, so I clicked on it and was redirected to

Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions#Just unencyclopedic

Kind of roundabout, don't you think? I'm making a redirect for the British spelling to that same section, but I recommend that you change the bot's text to the American spelling, Unencyclopedic, to match the section title and the existing redirect.

--Thnidu (talk) 07:29, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi Thnidu, thanks for using SuggestBot and getting in touch about this! Pardon the delay in responding here, I'm finishing up a research paper at the moment so things are a bit hectic.

I understand the confusion here, you're not the first one to mention this problem. We have a page documenting the task categories but I noticed that it's quite difficult to find unless you know where to look. I've added a note in our issue tracker to link to update our templates to link to the documentation, and at the same time I'll either change the spelling or figure out a less confusing category name. Thanks again for the feedback and for using SuggestBot! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 14:15, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Nettrom: Thanks. If you rename the section, add an anchor with the old name so you don't break all the old links. Or else find them all and rename them.--Thnidu (talk) 21:13, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	Congratulations! TheQ Editor has marked Legobot as the 3rd best bot on the English Wikipedia. When you don't do what to edit, just leave it to SuggestBot. Cheers, TheQ Editor (Talk) 00:25, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Hi, thanks so much for the barnstar, I appreciate it! Always happy to learn that SuggestBot continues to be a useful tool. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 00:26, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Could SuggestBot make suggestions based on my Watchlist?

I just tried SuggestBot for the first time, and it looks fantastic - thanks. Lately I have been doing some cleanup work so my recent edits are not much help for suggestions. What would be a lot more meaningful would be to look at my Watchlist as a basis. I know I could copy them all out, reformat, and plug into the SuggestBot template, but it would be brilliant if it could just interrogate the Watchlist automatically. --Gronk Oz (talk) 06:35, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I agree, sometimes when I tag some pages related to chrisinaity for citation needed, I got Franciscan Church of the Annunciation come up this morning. But, at least it opts out all semi-automatic edits, if it didn't, I would probably get results about sex and mickey mouse. Vandals seem attracted to those. I'm alright with the watchlist idea, but if there was an option to insert 100 pages manually, it would be awesome. My watchlist contains a lot of Sophia the First articles just for catching vandals.  ΤheQ Editor  ^Talk? 16:14, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Good thoughts. So perhaps if there was some place (such as a user sub-page called "SuggestBot" perhaps?) where one could easily maintain a list of the sort of articles that should be targets, is that the sort of thing you are thinking of? For me, that would be just as good, or perhaps better than the Watchlist idea. --Gronk Oz (talk) 01:51, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

@Gronk Oz and TheQ Editor: Thanks for bringing this up! Using the watchlist as a basis for suggestions is something that has been on my mind for a while, but I always end up with the problem that the list is private. If I remember correctly you can create a key for it so you can access it as an RSS feed, but allowing SuggestBot access to that would still expose private information, and I don't see any simple solution to solving that problem. The idea of having a page with links to articles that you want to use as seeds for the suggestions, on the other hand, is perfectly doable. There's old code in SuggestBot for reading links off user pages, so it's not new, but we could perhaps make it a configuration parameter so it doesn't have to be the user page specifically? E.g. a parameter like seedpage=User:Example/suggestbot-seeds?

I'll have to think a little bit about how to handle the situation where the seed page contains lots of links, as that would basically turn it into rather static suggestions. Not sure that's a good idea, but not sure it's a bad idea either. Let me know what you think of this! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 00:35, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

That would be really useful, but you're right. It would only be a one time thing. One would have to investigate so much time in typing the articles. I know the coding might be more difficult but how about if one could write down a couple of categories which SuggestBot analyzes?  ΤheQ Editor  ^Talk? 00:41, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

TheQ Editor, The good news is that you can do that already. Last time I used it, I included this sort of thing:
{{User:SuggestBot/suggest |Category:Astronomy in Australia |Category:Amateur astronomy organizations |Category:Scientific organisations based in Australia}} --Gronk Oz (talk) 04:06, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Documentation suggestion

Hi. I tried SuggestBot, and it did indeed find several pages that I am interested in. Thank you, this is very useful.

One suggestion I have is that the Documentation page is a bit confusing, so I had to kind of guess about the page where I should put the template code. (I added it to User:Margin1522/todo, and it worked fine.)

I think it's confusing because it doesn't explain that "Example" is an example user name. Specifically where it says "a page in your userspace (e.g. "User:Example/Suggestions") ". I think it would be clearer if we give this user a name, say MyName. The following is an example of how I think this might be done.

-------- start example --------

This is the way SuggestBot usually works – it fetches your last few hundred edits and suggests articles that are similar and in need of improvement. To get such a set of suggestions, add the following code to the page where you want to view the suggestions:

{{User:SuggestBot/suggest}}

Normally you will add the code to your user talk page. For example, if your user name is "MyName", add the code to User talk:MyName. If you have other user pages, you can add the code there. For example, you may have created a subpage called "To Do" to save a list of things you want to do on Wikipedia. In that case, you can add the code to User talk:MyName/To Do. Then the suggestions will be posted to your "To Do" page instead of your talk page.

We look for users who have added the template code at regular intervals, so you should get the suggestions fairly quickly, usually within about fifteen minutes.

-------- end example --------

One other thing, I suspect a lot of users who view this page are new and might not know what to make of the BNF explanation at the end. That was prefectly clear to me, but a new user might see that and get scared off. I wonder if it might be better to move that to the main SuggestBot page, where you explain the technical stuff.

Anyway, thanks. This is a really useful tool. --Margin1522 (talk) 09:27, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

@Margin1522: Hi, thanks for trying out SuggestBot! I was happy to hear you found it useful. Thanks also for the great suggestions to improve the documentation! I agree that not explaining the example further could be confusing and I really liked your suggested improvement, so I changed the documentation so it uses it. As you mention, the BNF is likely also confusing, it's on my mind whenever I translate the documentation as I'm not sure it's worth having there or not. I added templates to collapse the section by default for now, but I might simply delete it at some point in the future.

Thanks again for the feedback and the improvements, and I hope SuggestBot continues to be useful in the future! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:06, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

@Nettrom:Hi, I looked at your version and it was better than mine. One other place where I goofed up -- if they add a subpage, most users will add it to their User page, not their talk page, right? So maybe we should change User talk:MyName/To Do to simply User:MyName/To Do. Anyway, thanks again. After I'm done working through this batch, I think I'm going to come back for more suggestions. --Margin1522 (talk) 17:08, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

@Margin1522: Ah, nice catch on the namespace issue, I think you're totally right that they're likely to not have in "User talk". Went ahead and fixed that too. Thanks again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 17:31, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion

You could make the list bigger and you could look at the user's page to see if they have listed things they like. --DangerousJXD (talk) 07:34, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

How do I get it in this style?

I've seen variations of how SuggestBot suggests articles. One of them can be seen at this page: User:Obiwankenobi/suggest#Articles_you_might_like_to_edit.2C_from_SuggestBot_31 (No affiliation with user, just an example, and a big page btw) and the other variation is at User_talk:Tutelary/SuggestBot. How would I switch variations to maybe what Obi's got on that page? It seems it has a nicer border and a quality level and what not. Tutelary (talk) 02:31, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

@Tutelary: Hi, I'm sorry for taking so long to respond to this. The larger variant is sent to users who have subscribed to receive suggestions periodically. We can send you suggestions once a week, every two weeks, or once a month (every four weeks), and here's a link to the instructions on how to subscribe.

Besides the design, there are currently a few other differences between subscribing and using the request feature. As mentioned, subscribing has a limit on how often you get suggestions, while you can request suggestions as often as you like. Secondly the suggestions you get when subscribing are always based on your contribution history, you cannot control it by telling it which articles you are interested in (there's a thread about that above here, and it's a feature I'm interested in working on). Lastly, when you subscribe you can have it replace the suggestions instead of appending them.

I hope that helps, please let me know if you have any questions about this and I'll do my best to help! And thanks for using SuggestBot! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:19, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	Commended for suggesting! The FedExitor.exe (talk) 23:59, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Redirect user talk page to author

Hi, but I suggested that this talk page is redirected to other user talk pages who have controlled this bot account. Can you clarify this section? --Allen ^talk 04:27, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Overflowing pages

It would be good if the bot did not deliver to pages, like User talk:GhostInTheMachine, which were over, say 100,000 bytes in length. It could perhaps, leave a one-off short note explaining that it would resume (or could be asked to manually), once the age size was reduced. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:08, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi Andy, and thanks for the feedback! There are a couple of checks in place already to prevent SuggestBot from posting. It'll not post to a page over 1MB in size, as those tend to result in timeouts or other issues. Secondly, it checks to see if users are still active, and those who have not made an edit in the past 60 days are marked as "retired". There are some active users who rarely archive their talk page, and currently SuggestBot's posts are quite large. Having SuggestBot posting a note suggesting they archive manually (or set up auto-archiving) sounds like a good idea, so I'll look into that. Hopefully I'll also have some time in the near future to look into compressing SuggestBot's post (using a Lua module), which should make it much less bothersome too. Thanks again for the idea! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:34, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Please Help me Unsuscribe

I remember removing the User:SuggestBot template from my User_talk:Nkansahrexford a long time ago, but yet, I still get the messages. Please unsubscribe me. Thanks --Nkansahrexford (talk) 20:28, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

@Nkansahrexford: Sorry about that! I found SuggestBot's configuration template on your user page, which led the bot to continue to post to your talk page. I removed the template, so the bot should stop posting suggestions to you now. Sorry for the trouble, I hope the bot's been useful to you, and that we get to see you again at some point in the future! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:08, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

SuggestBot blues

Nettrom, I so appreciate all you do with SuggestBot. And I've found it so very useful in the past when working on Japanese-related articles.

However, I've changed over to editing on Brazil-related articles, and I get very few suggestions for those. Also, I'm getting a lot of the same suggestions every week (e.g., "Attorney General of Brazil") -- as you can see from my talk page. Should I do something to generate some fresh suggestions that I haven't seen before? Maybe I'm just not making as many edits as I've made in the past.

Again, let me emphasize how thankful I am for the SuggestBot project on all levels. Prburley (talk) 17:21, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

@Prburley: Thanks so much for the positive feedback, I'm happy to hear SuggestBot's been useful to you! I went back and examined our logs to see if there was something in particular going on with your suggestions. While I did not find anything suspicious, I did of course notice what you mentioned, that there are very few Brazil-oriented articles suggested. You mentioned your edits, so I went and also looked at those. SuggestBot uses your last 500 edits in the article namespace. I noticed that in your case, that spans quite a long time, and since it treats all edits equally, your more recent edits to articles about Brazil are not reflected in the suggestions.

One way we can solve this problem is to have the bot treat more recent edits as more important in its recommendations. I've scheduled some time to look into this, because there is a related change I also want to implement. So, hopefully in the not to distant future your suggestions will be more about Brazil. And thanks for bringing this to my attention! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:39, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Triggering SuggestBot...

...is already easy but I think if you change so that to trigger it you click a link on a specific page (here?). That way people don't have to edit anything they just click the button and done. Thanks --DangerousJXD (talk) 05:42, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

@DangerousJXD: Hi, thanks for getting in touch about that! I completely agree, and have been wanting to do something about this for a while. For those users who just want a set of suggestions, we can do it with two clicks (one to click a button, and one to save their talk page with the template on it). Will see if I can get around to doing something about it, thanks! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:42, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Feedback

Just leaving a quick message here that SuggestBot's recommendations were quite helpful and relevant to my edits. Thanks for the great work! StewdioMACK ^{Talk page} 06:49, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Idea

I need help, Honda Click, Honda Blade, Honda Icon wasn't have article. please i sure to make a article. --Firzafp (talk) 13:12, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

This will be very helpful!

Hi. I have seen what this bot has done for other people. I decided to try it because by latest edits are grammar fixes on a random page. It has been a while since I put the template and it has not worked. You can find the link to the page I put it on on my user page. Thanks! Will give love once this works Hungryce (talk) 13:59, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

@Hungryce: Thanks for being interested in SuggestBot! I'm sorry that this did not work as you expected. The template that you use is checked twice a day. That process is starting in a minute (literally), so you should receive your suggestions within the next hour or so. If you want suggestions faster, the template to use is User:SuggestBot/suggest, which is checked every five minutes. While the latter is faster, the format of the suggestions provide less information about each article compared to the subscription service. Again, sorry that this didn't work as you expected. I hope this clears up any confusion, but feel free to ask if you still have questions, I'll happily do my best to help you out. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 23:15, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

@Nettrom: Thanks. I had thought it had said somewhere that it takes 15-20m. I guess I was wrong! Thanks again for the help. I am happy that this bot exists for all to use and is not something that you have to request and have edits like AWB. Thanks Hungryce (talk) 00:36, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Suggestions

Thank you for suggesting articles! I received the first set today! But what should I do to get them regularly?
Any ways, thank you for them!
aGastya  ✉ let's talk about it :) 15:34, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi aGastya, thanks for trying out SuggestBot! To get them periodically you can either use a template or our userbox, and you can get them weekly, every two weeks, or every four weeks. The process is described in more detail on User:SuggestBot/Getting Recommendations Regularly. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll help you out! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 17:50, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Not working

Hey! So SuggestBot is not working for me. This has happened 3 times now but I'll use today's example. I put the template on my talk page and I did some other things here at Wikipedia. I finished those things two hours later and I was going to my talk page to check the suggestions from SuggestBot. But there is none. The last edit was me. I know I did it right because I have done it before. Ping me. –DangerousJXD (talk) 09:21, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

@DangerousJXD: Sorry to hear it's not working, and thanks for reporting that! I've done my best to test the bot and see if there is something that doesn't work, but there didn't seem to be anything I could do to trigger this behaviour (it was happy to post to my sandbox page, and correctly detects the template on your talkpage). Could you try adding the template again? I've set the bot up so I can monitor it more closely and see where it goes wrong, so we can get this problem solved. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:41, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

It worked. No idea why it didn't before. –DangerousJXD (talk) 22:12, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

It has happened two more times. :/ Same way. Check the edit history of my talk page for when I did them. DangerousJXD (talk) 07:44, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@DangerousJXD: Sorry about this! I've noticed that we've been having problems saving edits, they fail with an API Error ("invalid token"). Just updated the Python library we use to communicate with the Wikipedia API (pywikibot), hopefully that'll make things more stable. I'll keep monitoring SuggestBot, and if it fails again I'll start digging into the details to figure out why it happens. Sorry again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:12, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

It has failed again. —DangerousJXD (talk) 09:40, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

@DangerousJXD: Sorry to hear that it's not working, again, and thanks for reporting it! I did make a change to our code last week that I was hoping would fix it, but obviously it didn't. I've restarted the bot, so it should be working again, and I'll get in touch with the pywikibot developers to see how we can get this taken care of. Again, sorry about the outage and thanks for keeping me updated about it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:46, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Suggestion:Copyedit column

Hello, I really like the suggestbot suggestions, and I like the columns indicating what needs fixed (sources, content etc.) However, I really like copyediting work. Would it be possible to add a copyediting column to the suggestbot output? Thanks! Happy Squirrel(Please let me know how to improve!) 14:47, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Happy Squirrel! SuggestBot already does have articles needing copyedit, but they do not have their own task type. Instead, it collects articles from Category:All articles needing copy edit and put them into the "Cleanup" task category, together with articles from a few other categories as well (each task category is documented here). I'd be a little reluctant to make copyediting its own task because every now and then the Guild of Copy Editors go through a whole lot of them fairly quickly. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:27, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Missed Opportunities focus in SuggestBot

Your recent work on "Wasted Effort and Missed Opportunities: Content Production and Reader Interest in Wikipedia". GroupLens Research. May 11, 2015. shows categories of articles that have more readers than quality. It's clear that SuggestBot has something of this feature already, since you include readership counts and quality stars. Do you have any sense from your usership whether people focus their efforts based on those readership/quality columns? Is there a need for more algorithmic focus on "missed opportunities"? Runner1928 (talk) 15:29, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Runner1928, and thanks for asking! The readership/quality information in SuggestBot was part of the motivation for doing the research you're referring to. Right now I don't have a clear sense of how this affects what users do, but I'll be doing some analysis in the near future so I can know more about it. The idea of altering SuggestBot's algorithms so that it focuses more on "missed opportunities" is on the table, we're working on understanding more about those types of articles so we have a good sense of which ones to suggest to users. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 23:31, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Not loading suggestions

I placed {{User:SuggestBot/suggest}} on Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Technology/Edit articles, and almost a day later there is still nothing there. Did I do something wrong? (Pinging Nettrom). Harej (talk) 19:36, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Harej: I'm sorry that it's not working as it should. And no, you did not do anything wrong. We've been having some issues with getting the recommendations posted. I'll be looking into this tomorrow, hoping this get the problem permanently fixed. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:50, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. Just spitballing, but the number of pages where /suggest is transcluded is being overstated since I have it on one page, Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Technology/Edit articles, which is transcluded into two other pages: the main project page, and an experimental user space page. So if the bot is looking for the template on a page and isn't finding it (because it's actually on another page that is being transcluded), and if somehow there is unusually poor exception handling, that would explain it. Harej (talk) 19:06, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

@Harej: Sorry for not catching this the previous time around, but we currently don't check for templates outside of the User and User talk namespaces. It's partly due to the bot request referring to those two, SuggestBot has so far been mainly a user-driven bot (thereby focusing on individual users). Secondly, we've got checks in place to make sure users can't spam each other with suggestions. I could probably rewrite the check so it allows for transclusion of User:SuggestBot/suggest on WikiProject pages, and if said page is a "task template" it'll fall in under the task template BRFA. At the same time, might also want a parameter that'll make SuggestBot wipe existing content in the template so it's an actual update? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:18, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Those updates would be much appreciated. Also, there is no need for a section header or the message copy above or below the recommendations list; just the recommendations will do. Thanks, Harej (talk) 17:19, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Any updates on this? I would make the changes and submit a pull request myself, except I don't think your git repository is up to date (it hasn't been updated since 2013 and makes reference to the Toolserver which no longer exists). Harej (talk) 15:38, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Harej, and sorry about the delays here! It's been busy around here with the end of a semester and travel, I was just at ICWSM presenting the work Runner1928 mentions below. Now that I'm back I'll be picking up this project. Give me a week or two? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 23:27, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, Nettrom! With respect to implementation, can you consider having your bot read configuration settings off of Wikipedia:WikiProject X/wikiproject.json instead of, or addition to, templates? I am trying to unify WikiProject bot configurations so that there is a "one stop shop" for WikiProject tools. The JSON file isn't that user friendly at the moment but I intend on creating a tool for editing the file. Harej (talk) 18:54, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Or if you prefer not reading JSON off a wiki page, I've also created this which is updated every 30 minutes and runs the on-wiki stuff through a validation step. Harej (talk) 19:51, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Third party, series of suggestions, external access

I have three quick questions:

1. Is it possible to generate recommendations for a third party user? For instance, if there were a WikiProject with 3 members, would it be possible to generate a one-time consolidated list by invoking {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|User:member1|User:member2|User:member3}}?
2. Related to the above, is it possible to have multiple series of suggestions on the same User/User_talk page? For instance, is it possible to have one section containing suggestions for {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:WikiProject_Human_Computer_Interaction_articles}} and another section on the same page for {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Seattle|University of Washington|Pike Place Market|Space Needle|Lake Union|Burke-Gilman Trail}}?
3. Lastly, and this may be a long shot, but is there any type of API to access recommendations for a given user/article/category, or a collection of any? It doesn't look like the recurring recommendations currently allow for receiving recommendations based on category or article. The ability to receive one-time requests as a JSON structure could be a neat way to facilitate more access by external tools to generate customized recommendations.

Thank you very much for your time.

Md gilbert (talk) 21:40, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Md gilbert, sorry for dropping the ball on this! June was a busy month and kept adding to my unhappiness with leaving these questions around, so I kept avoiding them, sorry.

1. Currently SuggestBot is very article-oriented, so to make this possible would require some programming. I am, however, currently working on supporting suggestions for WikiProjects for WikiProject X. So if your three users are members of "WikiProject Foo", that project will have a subpage (e.g. "Wikipedia:WikiProject Foo/Edit articles") with a specific SuggestBot template, and the bot will update that periodically. Should be running some tests with that by the end of this week, hopefully.
2. That's currently not possible, I noticed SuggestBot will just happily delete both templates. Shouldn't take too much work to have it accept multiple templates and suggest for both, or take one at a time and delete the correct one. It's on my list of things to fix, thanks for the idea!
3. SuggestBot doesn't currently have an API, but that kind of access is something we've been talking about. We're also talking about moving SuggestBot to Tool Labs, which should facilitate more collaboration on development and easier access to its resources. It's already an XML-RPC based system, which means that making it available through an API is not far-fetched. Not sure when we'll have the resources available to make something like that happen, though :(

Sorry again for the delay, let me know if you have further questions, I'll make sure I get to them sooner than these! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:05, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Suggestbot table

Is there a way in which to get the suggest bot table with the details of requirement of articles on relation to one subject category? My aim here is to improve upon the quality of settlements within the English county of Buckinghamshire, and the system would be useful in aiding with coordination of resources. Thanks Uamaol (talk) 18:45, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Hi Uamaol, and thanks for asking! We previously only sent the big table with details to our subscribers, which also meant that it was impossible to get it with recommendations based on a specific category. This was done because we were at one point running a research experiment with it, but that's no longer necessary. I updated our templates today so everyone gets the full table with information, so you should be able to add {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:Buckinghamshire articles}} to either your talk page or a subpage in your userspace and get what you're looking for. Just make sure the category name is right, I just added that as an example, and you can of course list multiple categories if necessary (separated by "|" as for other templates). Let me know if this doesn't work for you, and I'll investigate! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 17:19, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. It is possible for it to list articles on a subject, not suggestions based around them? Also, will this system be dynamic, or is that asking too much? Uamaol (talk) 23:43, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi again Uamaol! It is currently not possible to create the table based on a given set of articles, unfortunately. But, I think it's a neat idea, and something we might be able to provide sometime in the near future based on Revision scoring as a service and some small pieces of additional programming. I've been collaborating with some of the people working on the revision scoring project, and adding the task suggestions is on the list of things to do. So stay tuned, and we could be able to help you out? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:41, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks :) Uamaol (talk) 03:40, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Suggestion: SuggestBot replacing old tables with a new table

I've noticed that whenever SuggestBot updates, the old Table is left and the new Table is put up. Would it be possible at all to have SuggestBot replace the old table while posting the new table? I admit to have a great lack of coding knowledge, so I'm not sure if that is feasible/possible but thought it was worth suggesting. Dr Crazy 102 (talk) 10:23, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Hi Dr Crazy 102, and thank you for asking! We provide that specific feature for users who have subscribed to get suggestions periodically, since the number of posts can quickly grow a user's talk page. To have SuggestBot replace the table, simply add "|replace" to the template, as described here. As an example, if you want suggestions every two weeks and want the table replaced, the template should look like this:

{{User:SuggestBot/config|frequency = twice a month|replace}}

Hope that helped, let me know if you have any questions! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:28, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for that, Dr Crazy 102 (talk) 00:59, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Hi

Why suggest bot never send me any suggestions?--Human3015^TALK  23:01, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi Human3015! Sorry to hear you haven't received any suggestions. I went and looked at your user and user talk pages, but did not find any trace of SuggestBot there. The bot appears to be running normally. Could you tell me more about how and when you requested suggestions? Then I should be able to help you out more. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 00:27, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for reply. I have never requested suggestions. I don't know if we have to register our name somewhere to get messages from Suggestbot. I saw messages by Legobot regarding Feeadback service on RFCs, they have link there to register our name in that feegback service, I registered there my name and now me too get messages by legobot. But regarding Suggestbot I tried to see link regarding where should I register my name to get messages from this bot but I did not find such link. Can you give me link of place where should I ask for suggestions? Thank you.--Human3015^TALK  00:37, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi again Human3015, I can of course help you with this!

If you just want to try it out once to see how it works, then User:SuggestBot/Requests is the page you want to look at. If you already know that you want to get suggestions based on articles you've recently edited, then all you need to do is add {{User:SuggestBot/suggest}} to your user talk page (or a subpage in your userspace, if you don't want them to clutter up your talk page).

If you want to sign up to get suggestions periodically (weekly, every two weeks, or every four weeks), then User:SuggestBot/Getting Recommendations Regularly explains how to do that. You sign up using either a template or the userbox, depending on what you like and where you want the suggestions posted.

Let me know if you have any questions, and I'll do my best to help you out! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 01:53, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks again for your concern. I have added {{User:SuggestBot/suggest}} to my talk page. It is invisible template I think. Thats nice.--Human3015^TALK  20:16, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

What

Do the red 'x's in the tables mean? Cheers _Fortuna ^{Imperatrix Mundi} 06:19, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

The x's are to denote that the article is in need of help for that particular category of editing. E.g. if there is an "x" in the Content column, then the content is in need of editing; if there is an "x" in the Links column, the links need editing, etc. Hope that helps, Dr Crazy 102 (talk) 06:50, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi Fortuna, as Dr Crazy 102 mentions (thanks for the quick response, btw, Dr!), these X's indicate whether an article is in need of a specific type of improvement or not. These images do have mouse-over information, a longer description of the work needed, but in any case they are also described here. Let me know if there's anything else! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:51, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

@Drcrazy102 and Nettrom: Thanks very much both! Apologies for not replying earlier, I forgot to watch the page so was only pinged with that mention. Pretty silly question, but I wanted to clarify whether it was including or excluding that category. Cheers! _Fortuna ^{Imperatrix Mundi} 15:58, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

A third way: Request SuggestBot via Teahouse

Greetings, Since I started on WP, I visit Teahouse almost every day. While "exploring" I discovered that SuggestBot requests can be made at this Teahouse page. Click on Get suggestions and follow the instructions. IMO this third way is more user friendly versus the other two request methods. Here is my first draft for update to the start of this page (and the User page).

Start of draft

If you're looking for SuggestBot recommendations, you have these options.

• For a one-time request to try it out, please go to User:SuggestBot/Requests.
• At Teahouse, you can direct SuggestBot to choose article categories based on WikiProject(s) you are interested in. For a self-guided request, go to Teahouse SuggestBot Suggestions, click on Get suggestions and follow the instructions.
• If you would like recommendations regularly sent to your talk page, add yourself to the list of SuggestBot Regulars.

Note

I have only used SB a few times (and BTW this last time with the detail columns is Great!) so the above draft may need to be tweaked. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 14:30, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi JoeHebda, sorry to leave this hanging for so long! I wanted to have some solutions built before I responded, but have been tremendously busy with other things (supporting WikiProject X with SuggestBot, for instance).

You're absolutely right that the Teahouse suggestion setup is more user friendly than what we currently have, and I've been wanting to adopt it ever since J-Mo designed it. Basically, I am thinking there should be two or three buttons that users can click to get suggestions. One for those who have made edits and want suggestions based on those, for which the next step is to simply save their talk page. The second button is for those who want to add articles or categories to get specific suggestions. Then the third could be for those who want to refer to specific WikiProjects. Either way, that would make it more straightforward for users to get suggestions since it takes away understanding what a template is and how to edit it. One of these days I hope to have some spare time to get the necessary template pages set up (SuggestBot still supports getting suggestions through the Teahouse suggestion pages). Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:04, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

You get credit for continuing to support that long-abandoned scheme, Nettrom :) JoeHebda, since you mentioned WikiProject X... hey Harej, Isarra: any interest in this feature? I bet we could hack an even easier workflow together, now that we have the FormWizard on enwiki. - J-Mo ^{Talk to Me} _{Email Me} 20:37, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

It would potentially be quite useful for wikiprojects too, but I dunno how we'd work it into things at this point. Either way, though, easier workflows are never a bad thing, wherever they wind up. -— Isarra ༆ 22:03, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

@Nettrom:

Checking on the status of above July 2015 draft please. JoeHebda (talk) 02:54, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi JoeHebda, thanks for pinging me about this! I took your draft and edited it a bit and turned it into a draft of the introduction on User:SuggestBot. You can find the draft here. Let me know what you think, and feel free to edit it if you find ways to improve it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:07, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Greetings Nettrom Y Good draft! It clarifies the request methods. Just now I completed two minor copy-edits. Should be good to go! BTW I've been working at Wikipedia:Tip of the day so once this draft is posted, I will update the TOTD for September 26 and March 26 (it's on the Schedule Queue twice). Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 22:54, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the copyediting, JoeHebda! I've gone ahead and edited User:SuggestBot with the new introduction, found a few other older things to fix as well. And thanks for having it as part of TOTD, that's great! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 23:53, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Asking about SuggestBot status

Greetings @Nettrom:, Many hours ago I submitted a SB request. Wondering if there could be an Icon Button added to the SB page? When clicked it would show if SB is "Up" or "Down". Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 15:30, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: Thanks for reporting this, sorry that the bot isn't working! In this case the issue is quite complicated, so I'm not sure exactly how we would implement a status check for the bot (most of it is running normally, it just can't post to Wikipedia). I've added the idea to my list of things, though, could be useful to have some status checks that can alert me if something goes wrong. Sorry again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:57, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Removal of SB request section

Greetings @Nettrom:, On my Talk page's September request there are two parts:

• Original request, showing the WikiProjects asked for.
• The SB wikitable of responses from SuggestBot.

Today, I noticed that SB is now removing that original request section (which I manually recreated). So I'm wondering if the SuggestBot Request section can NOT be removed?

Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 11:02, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

P.S. This is the SB request via Teahouse - Suggestion & WikiProjects. JoeHebda (talk) 11:19, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi JoeHebda, thanks for getting in touch about this! Yes, as you've noticed, SuggestBot removes the whole section when it posts. While it's been a few years since the Teahouse suggestion system was set up, I think we decided to remove it so that the user's talk page would not get uncluttered, particularly if they decide to ask for suggestions multiple times. As a quick way to get around this, simply change the name of the section (edit the heading), and the bot won't delete it.

I'm not sure I'd want to have the bot leave the whole section, but maybe it could mention what WikiProjects were used when the suggestions were generated? The start of the suggestion message could go something like "here are your suggestion based on WikiProject Foo, WikiProject Bar, and WikiProject Baz." That way, each set of suggestions will reflect what generated them. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:56, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Nettrom, Guess I'm a little confused, because I did (edit the heading) by adding MM-DD-YYYY to the section title. It still was deleted by the bot anyway.

Like the idea of adding the WP names into the SB response. That way there is no need to keep the "Request section".

A final question: if there are parts of the SB response (for example, Add sources) that I know I will not be using, is it okay to delete those outright? Cheers! P.S. Thanks for getting SB running again... JoeHebda (talk) 19:56, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Posting at top of talk page instead of the bottom

I noticed that SuggestBot posted at the top of the talk page in this edit instead of the bottom. Is that something that could be fixed? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:51, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi GoingBatty, thanks for reporting this! I am not sure why this happens, I have taken the bot down and will look into it and fix the bug. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:43, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

And it should be fixed now, thanks again for reporting it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:12, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

SuggestBot tips at Tip-Of-The-Day

Greetings, For tips at

• March 26 - SuggestBot is a fun way to pick pages to edit

and April 17, September 26
I updated to Add: SB option 'specific set of articles or categories of articles'.

Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 00:09, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

SuggestBot in the french wikipédia?

I like the SuggestBot.

How could it work on the french wikipedia?

I can help if needed.

Cheers.

Trace (talk) 08:41, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi Trace, and thanks for asking! I think there is definitely a possibility of bringing SuggestBot to the French Wikipédia. After digging a bit, I see that SuggestBot was mentioned on Le Bistro back in late June 2013, there is this thread. Afterwards, User:ManiacParisien posted to my talk page (archived thread here), but my question about the Village Pump went unanswered.

Maybe you can help me out by making a post to Le Bistro, asking if there are other users interested in using SuggestBot? I am typically looking for a few users who are interested so that I know that the bot will be used, as there is a bit of work needed to get it set up and I don't want to commit to that until I know there's a need. Once I know there is general interest, getting the bot up and running requires a bit of translation work, as there are templates and documentation. I'll also be looking through French categories to look for maintenance work, e.g. categories of articles needing cleanup, sources, etc… I might have questions about those, but we'll see. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 23:30, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

OK, that was not much echo on the french wikipédia.

I have been posting in today's bistrot and also in our newspaper's talk page (this because I contribute to this newspaper).

Wait and see.

Trace (talk) 10:30, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm interested in too. Like tears in rain (talk) 10:28, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Interested too and can help with the translation + config if needed --Scoopfinder (talk) 11:31, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Hey, it sounds good The user Simon Villeneuve has just said he is interested too. Trace (talk) 12:22, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi, I'm interested too and can help with configuration and translation in case of need. Linedwell ^{[talk/@frwiki]} 11:56, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Nettrom? Sorry to intrude. We are now five volunteers on fr.wiki. What shall we do next? Trace (talk) 07:58, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

@Trace: It was great to see the feedback, and I am always pleasantly surprised by Wikipedians willingness to volunteer to help out! Please give me a couple of days to research French Wikipedia's categories. Once I have done that, I know if there are categories I need help with. Then I will also move forward with creating SuggestBot's pages on fr-wiki and let you know what translations I will need help with. Does that sound good? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 03:42, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Sounds good for me. You can always drop me an email or ping my Commons/frwiki talk page if you need help for that. I can also help you to get the bot status if needed. --Scoopfinder (talk) 10:35, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

@Nettrom: It sounds perfect to me. Feel free to ask if you need any help. Thank you. Trace (talk) 11:24, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

@Nettrom: I replied to you on your brand new french Suggestbot talk page. Trace (talk) 20:56, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

I am Saff V.

I would like receive Suggestbot suggestion for editing articles. What should I do?Saff V. (talk) 08:45, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Greetings @Saff V. and Nettrom:, SuggestBot frequently updates the Community portal, Help out section with many ways for editing articles. Thank you for your contributions. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 11:08, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Saff V., thanks for getting in touch! There are various ways you can get suggestions, which one you choose depends on how familiar you are with editing Wikipedia and whether you want suggestions based on articles you've edited, WikiProjects you are interested in, or a specific set of articles. We list all three of these with links to how to proceed towards the top of User:Suggestbot, so have a look there! And of course, let me know if you need help with something and I'll do my best to assist you. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 23:31, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Proposal: additional sentence for SB page?

Greetings, Adding the sentence below (in bold, for this proposal only) will inform editors of another option for finding articles needing improvements. This may be helpful for new editors and those who prefer not to use the other suggestion request options that are listed.

---

SuggestBot is a computer program that tries to help Wikipedia contributors find articles to edit. If you want to get some suggestions from the bot, here's how:

• To get a single set of suggestions:
  • …based on articles you've edited, please follow the instructions at User:SuggestBot/Requests.
  • …using WikiProjects you are interested in, go to the Teahouse's SuggestBot page, click on Get suggestions, and follow the instructions.
  • …based on a specific set of articles or categories of articles, see our instructions for that.
• You can also get suggestions posted periodically to your talk page (or another page of your choosing). How to do that is described here.

Additionally, the SuggestBot program frequently updates the Community Portal Help out section lists of open tasks.

SuggestBot uses a variety of algorithms, including standard information retrieval and collaborative filtering techniques, to make suggestions. ...

---

Rather than being bold, I'm proposing this change here & looking for feedback. Cheers! JoeHebda (talk) 11:40, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: Interesting suggestion, and thanks for discussing it first! Having thought about it, I am not in favour of adding that line with a link to the community portal. While SuggestBot does update the portal's list of open tasks, the articles listed there are not personalised. The research results published when SuggestBot was created (PDF here if you like to read research papers) found that random articles are much less likely to be edited by contributors compared to more personalised ones. Secondly, if contributors are looking for work, I would primarily want them to use SuggestBot, and the link to the Community portal is then arguably a distraction. (SuggestBot's user page already has a link to the Community portal too, although it is slightly hidden in the list of approved tasks.) Thanks again for asking, appreciate it! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 23:51, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

@Nettrom: * Agree Now I understand how it's better to give personal results. Thanks for 'splaining. Cheers! JoeHebda (talk) 00:07, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Not updating

Hey Nettrom, SB isn't updating on my talk page anymore. Can I get some tech assistance? Cheers, Drcrazy102 (talk) 00:51, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Drcrazy102, sorry to hear about that! I did some digging through our logs and found out that the bot last posted to one of your talk page archives (see this diff) yesterday, because the template was moved there in the archiving process. SuggestBot then deleted its configuration template as well, since the "replace" parameter is set. I noticed you used {{dnau}} on your talk page to not archive the section the template is in, I think moving the template to the top of your talk page right below the archiving template should also work.

A side note, you won't get suggestions three times a week, the most we offer is weekly. Since SuggestBot doesn't recognise "3 times a week", it'll instead default to once every four weeks. I suggest changing it to "weekly", if you want suggestions more often you can always request them as described here. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:43, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, had to place the template back in again after Sigma-bot archived the original template; DNAU was more me just being careful about the Sigma-bot archiving and not wanting to put the post above the archive-bot, and "weekly" setting it is. Thanks for the help and I'll probably end up using the manual request. Cheers, Drcrazy102 (talk) 01:18, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

No suggestions for six months

I have SuggestBot set up here, but I haven't received any updates since April. Could you look into it? Thanks. Reach Out to the Truth 01:06, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Reach Out to the Truth, sorry to hear that, and thanks for getting in touch about it! I had a look at the diffs in the edit history of that page and noticed quickly what had happened. We had a bug where SuggestBot would put the suggestions at the start of the page instead of appending them (that bug is now fixed), so the template was pushed to the end of the page. When the bot stopped by the next time, it deleted the template as part of the replacement of the suggestions, thus unsubscribing you. Sorry about that, I've added the template again to the top of the page and you should get suggestions within the next day. Let me know if there's anything else! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 02:39, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Archive Issue

Hello, there's an issue in SB which needs immediate attention. The suggestions get archived by bot. Please modify the suggestion code to prevent archive bot from archiving suggestions. Thanks -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo (talk · contribs · count) 04:37, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Try using the Template:DNAU on the relevant comment section, Capankajsmilyo. Or alternatively, set your archive expiry date (age) to more than the value of the frequency of SB's updates. I had a similar problem a little while back. I'm not the bot-owner. Cheers, Drcrazy102 (talk) 05:28, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for reply, I tried DNAU but suggest bot remove it at every update. Bot will have to include DNAU while updating suggestions. -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo (talk · contribs · count) 05:34, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Capankajsmilyo, thanks for getting in touch about this, sorry about not responding to this faster! I think it should be possible to add DNAU as an option for SuggestBot, although from reading the documentation on Template:Do not archive until, it doesn't seem as straightforward as I'd hoped. Having SuggestBot drop in a DNAU notice with the future date of SuggestBot's next visit seems reasonable to me, and would mean a "yes/no" option, similar to "replace". However, since the archiving won't happen until the next archival cycle after (2 days in your case), there will be at least two set of suggestions for a while (in my case it would mean suggestions stuck around for 56 days). I'm not keen on adding code to SuggestBot that parses the archiving template to fine-tune the math, but I'll think about this, I like the idea.

Perhaps having a subpage in your userspace (e.g. User:Capankajsmilyo/Suggestions, put the config template there) that SuggestBot can post to is a workaround until DNAU support is available? Regards, Nettrom (talk) 02:53, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Messages

Hello. I am wondering why you sent me a message on my talk page. Did I sign up to receive messages from you? Thanks, Thehøtwheelsguy99 | ^Talk?_Sign!! 15:15, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

When you respond, please ping me.

@Thehotwheelsguy99: Comparing some of the revisions to your user talk page, I found that you added it together with the archiving setup on your talk page, ref this diff. If you don't want to receive any more suggestions, just remove the {{User:SuggestBot/config …}} code from your talk page. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 06:20, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Oh, ok. Thehøtwheelsguy99 | ^Talk?_Sign!! 14:48, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

SuggestBot status? Jan. 5, 2016

Greetings, Nettrom Wondering if SB is running since I submitted my request {{User:SuggestBot/suggest}} on my Talk page hours ago. It is requested correctly at (January 5, 2016) Request? Regards, JoeHebda| Talk 15:43, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi JoeHebda, thanks for getting in touch about this! I noticed in our logs this morning that something wasn't working. Looks like SuggestBot needed a restart. It's currently processing your request, hopefully you'll have some suggestions in less than 5 minutes. Thanks again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:08, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Nettrom :-) SB request =  Done Cheers! JoeHebda| Talk 16:15, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I have no idea how I'm receiving suggestions

I'm going through all of my old automated newsletters, and I realized that I have no idea how I'm getting SuggestBot messages. I don't have the template on my page and I can't seem to find whatever list I joined. How am I receiving SuggestBot messages and where can I adjust the settings? --Nathan2055^{talk - contribs} 01:30, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi Nathan2055! I'm sorry to hear about that, and I know it can be confusing to figure these things out. Digging a bit in Wikipedia's database I found that you have the userbox on User:Nathan2055/Old version, which in turn makes SuggestBot post to your talk page. I've edited that page and removed the userbox, so you shouldn't see any more suggestions, but please don't hesitate to get in touch if you still receive them and I'll figure out why. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:32, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Great job !

a suggestion: could you add a parameter to let know to @SuggestBot we'd like a regularly pass (weekly, monthly, etc ...) instead of deleting and re-ask ? thank youSg7438 (talk) 12:25, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

@Sg7438: Happy to hear that you like SuggestBot! To sign up to receive the suggestions periodically you can use either a template or our userbox, and here's a link to the instructions. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:22, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

exactly what i wanted : i hope @SuggestBot, won't delete this parameter, when passing on my page ! T2U Sg7438 (talk) 21:46, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

@Sg7438: Ah, vous parlez Français! Excusez mon Français, je suis un débutant. Un traduction de les instructions de SuggestBot pour souscrire est ici, le robot est aussi utilisable en Wikipedia Francophone. Le nom du modèle est different et les paramètres sont traduits en Français, mais le function du bot est le meme. Nettrom (talk) 00:44, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Where is the weekly suggestions option gone?

I remember there was a way to deliver suggestions on a regular basis to your talk page, I have removed it a while ago, but could not find instructions on how to set it up again. - Champion (talk) (contribs) (Formerly TheChampionMan1234) 23:08, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi Champion, and thanks for being interested in SuggestBot! You can find the instructions for subscribing here. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll be happy to help! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:28, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

How to find why I receive a certain suggestion?

I sometimes get suggestions which are weird (I have not been editing pages on similar topics) from SuggestBot, but I keep wondering why that is, is there a way to know why? - Champion (talk) (contribs) (Formerly TheChampionMan1234) 02:51, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@Champion: Thanks for asking about this! Confusing suggestions show up from time to time. While I can go through our logs to figure out exactly what happened, they are usually the result of how SuggestBot works. All suggested articles have to be tagged with improvement tags (e.g. {{refimprove}}), a requirement that was introduced because the bot early on suggested a lot of articles that didn't need improvement. Because of these tags, the bot cannot always find articles that are very similar, unfortunately. Typically it'll pick an article that is vaguely similar, meaning it isn't really similar, and sometimes it'll just have to pick one randomly. Hope that helps explain what goes on behind the scenes, and don't hesitate to ask if something's confusing. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:04, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

How do I request new page writing

Yeah, the title! The page on it didn't help. 97.123.7.41 (talk) 22:20, 10 March 2016 (UTC) BlockMaster

Question

Hi, is possible to suggesbot suggest me which articles I would can edit? greetings. I hope that you get me propozition. Dawid2009 (talk) 21:07, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi Dawid2009, and thanks for asking! SuggestBot can surely send you some suggestions, there are a list of options available at the top of User:SuggestBot. The easiest way is maybe to go to Wikipedia:Teahouse/Suggestions and click "Get suggestions"? Good luck, let me know if you have further questions! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 23:50, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Wrong Place

Hi, I am no longer getting suggestions on the correct page but getting it on my talk page instead. Any idea why this might happen? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hungryce (talk • contribs) 13:49, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

That's where it's supposed to be??? Leggomygreggo8 (talk) 17:09, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

@Leggomygreggo8: You can get the suggestions posted to sub-pages to keep them away from cluttering your talk page. It's quite useful for our subscribers. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:13, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi Hungryce, and thanks for getting in touch about this! During the last run of processing our subscribers we had a database error which we failed to recover from. In this case what I believe happened is that when we processed your userbox the database was updated such that the bot would post to your talk page, but when we processed the template on your sub-page the database failed to update. SuggestBot then used the incorrect information in the database and posted the suggestions to your talk page, I'm sorry about that! I've rewritten our program that updates the database to be more resilient so this hopefully doesn't happen again in the future (it's the first time it's happened in five years, so I hope it's at least five years to the next one).

By the way, I noticed your sub-page is quite large. SuggestBot doesn't post to pages larger than 1MB to prevent API errors and such. Could you please trim down your page a bit, as otherwise you won't be getting any more suggestions, unfortunately. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:13, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! Hungryce (talk) 20:29, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

SuggestBot - May 5, 2016 - Messed up my Talk page - lots of Edits & Section Deletes

Greetings, Reporting that today I requested a SB update using the Wikipedia:Teahouse/Suggestions for only WikiProject Catholicism. Then I did Log out. When I came back from lunch, SB had completed, however it did major UNwanted changes which I removed with an undo here. Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk) 18:00, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Nettrom – For now, I will stay off of my Talk page so you can see from the View history that I had to UNDO serveral times. I have no idea what caused SB to run multiple times when I only requested once. Going forward I will not do any more SuggestBot requests until I hear back from you. Cheers! — JoeHebda • (talk) 18:39, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Hey JoeHebda, thanks for reporting it, and I'm so sorry to see how it messed up your talk page! I've deactivated the script that handles the request templates and am investigating the problem. Will report back once I know more. By the way, when you reverted SuggestBot's edit, the suggestion template got re-inserted. The program checks for it every five minutes, so it would then find it again and try to suggest more articles to you. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:26, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi again JoeHebda. I dug into this and found that some missing apostrophes confused our parser so that it considered a whole bunch of wikitext as a single part, which we then subsequently deleted. If you look at this diff you'll see what I mean. At the same time I also changed the section heading as I have changed how SuggestBot detects those. If you add anything after "on the way", the match will fail and it won't be deleted, making it an easy way to keep specific sections. I've tested both that the bot now ignores the section you want to keep, and only deletes what it should, so I'll be restarting the bot. Thanks again for reporting this and my apologies for the trouble it caused! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:52, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi Nettrom – Reporting back that SB worked okay, without repeating. I did notice that the Views/Day column is blank, not populated with numbers. — JoeHebda • (talk) 00:31, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: Yeah, I know about the issue with the page views, we've been discussing it above. I'm still working on fixing it, as unfortunately doing that requires some substantial amounts of programming. I'm eager to get it working, as in addition to switching to the page views API for views it'll use ORES for article quality predictions, which is a huge improvement over what we currently have. It should happen pretty soon though, I have code ready for testing. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:08, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

SuggestBot - May 19, 2016 - incorrect results

Greetings, Today I requested via Teahouse / Suggestions for WikiProject Catholicism only articles. The results here contain a mix of not-WP-related articles. I have hilited the incorrect results in yellow. Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk) 19:00, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi JoeHebda! I think how we've described this way of getting suggestions can be improved, as SuggestBot unfortunately at the moment doesn't support limiting suggestions to a specific WikiProject. Instead the WikiProject's articles are used as the seed for the suggestions. As you've noticed the result is that some of the articles may not be covered by a specific project. This is partly because SuggestBot's design is based around the task categories (e.g. "add sources") and doesn't support removing those, something that could happen if a WikiProject doesn't have any articles tagged with a certain task. I'll make a note to have a look at the descriptions on SuggestBot's user page as well as the Teahouse pages. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:42, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi Nettrom – When all else fails Read the instructions, so today I did actually read the SB instructions. Also, I created my talk sub-page for suggestions and did request the specific WP Category that I'm interested in. Great results (except missing the Page Views)! Cheers! — JoeHebda • (talk) 19:37, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi again JoeHebda, happy to hear you got some good suggestions! I've been working on getting the page views back, got it to the point where it seems to be working okay. Have a bit of testing left to do, but hopefully not too long now. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 04:33, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Not very accurate

None of the articles suggested are things that I'm actually interested in. I revert a lot of vandalism and am on WP:FT/N and WP:COIN, that might be the reason. ThePlatypusofDoom (Talk) 18:55, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

Greetings ThePlatypusofDoom – Recently I did find a way to get much better (not perfect) SB results. On my talk page, I added a subpage, suggestions, with code that targets specific WP categories. So if there are certain categories (with a large number of pages) just feed those into the request & you should be good to go. It does allow piping of multiple categories into one request. Cheers! — JoeHebda • (talk) 13:02, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi ThePlatypusofDoom, thanks for trying out SuggestBot and getting in touch about your issue! I went and had a look at your contribution history, as that is what SuggestBot used in your case. You are right to suspect that your anti-vandalism work as well as WP:FT/N and WP:COIN leads to poorer suggestions. It's unfortunately an issue with how SuggestBot's currently designed, but it's something that I'm hoping I am able to change in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, the approach that JoeHebda mentions allows you to control what SuggestBot bases its suggestions on (it's documented here), in which case it won't use your contribution history at all. Thanks again for trying out SuggestBot, let me know if there's anything! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 04:43, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Views/Day

Is there something wrong with the views/day statistic? The last two posts I got from Suggest Bot was blank in that column. FuriouslySerene (talk) 15:47, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi FuriouslySerene, and thanks for getting in touch about that! Yes, there is something wrong with the view statistics, and I'm sorry that they're not working. I was quietly hoping that they would start working again, but it appears to not be the case. I have been wanting to switch SuggestBot over to using the new API for article views, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Since our view statistics appear to be down permanently, I'll move it up my priority list so we can get back to normality. In other words, I'll be working on it and you should have those back on the next update. Thanks again for bringing it to my attention, and again sorry about them not working! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:23, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Interesting. Thanks for the quick reply, and thank you very much for your hard work on this great tool! FuriouslySerene (talk) 20:16, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi, I came to say the same as they've been down for 2 months. They're a good way of prioritizing if there's an article with an easily fixable issue or redundant tag that gets a lot of hits. Thanks for all your hard work Tom B (talk) 09:58, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi Tom B, and thanks for reminding me about this! I was actually working on fixing it yesterday, thinking I had everything ready to go, but I was mistaken. Need to get the task suggestions done as well, but will try to get it done ASAP. It's also great that you mention that the views are useful for prioritizing, it's exactly why we wanted to add them to our suggestions in the first place! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:37, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi again. I had a test version of SuggestBot ready earlier today, but ran into some bugs that cause it to crash. Have started working on fixing that too, but it'll take a little while longer to get everything ready. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 04:30, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

It's taken quite a while to get this fixed as I had to rewrite about half of SuggestBot's back-end functionality. The new code is now running and page views should be back. Since we've also switched to using ORES for quality predictions, those should be a lot more accurate as well. Pinging FuriouslySerene, Tom B, and JoeHebda since you've all been in touch with me about this. Please do let me know if something's broken and I'll get on it ASAP! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:15, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

SuggestBot's messages

I have got a question about work of the SuggestBot. Does suggestbot generate articles also based on my watchlist? Regards. Dawid2009 (talk) 12:57, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi Dawid2009, thanks for asking! SuggestBot does not use your watchlist to generate suggestions. Your watchlist is private, and while there is a way to enable access to it as an RSS feed using the token listed in your preferences, we would have to set up some kind of system where you could share that with us. That's a rather complicated process, so we'd prefer to pursue other approaches. SuggestBot currently uses up to 500 of your edits in the article namespace, and there are plans to improve on that. You can of course also request suggestions at any time and supply your choice of articles (and/or categories) to tailor SuggestBot's suggestions. Hope that answers your question. Feel free to let me know if something was unclear, and thanks for using SuggestBot! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:40, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

No suggestions showing up

Hi! I am Peterye2005. Yesterday, I added a suggestion request to my subpage: User:Peterye2005/suggests, which was under the suggestions which SuggestBot gave me last time, but I can't even see a suggestion today. Did I do something wrong or is there something wrong with the bot?

Thank you. Peterye2005 (talk) 13:15, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi Peterye2005, so sorry to hear that it hasn't been working, and thank you much for getting in touch about it so I could fix it! Found out that the part of SuggestBot that takes care of requests has been down, and once it was restarted it picked up your request like it should. Thanks again for pinging me about it, and thanks also for using SuggestBot. Let me know if there's anything else! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:10, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Size of talk page posts

It looks like a typical SuggestBot post is around 25k - with a rule of thumb that 75k is too large for a talk page, is it worth trying to reduce the footprint of a SuggestBot post, or to have the bot react in some way when a user talk page is getting too large (perhaps by ceasing suggestions and giving them a version of {{uw-archive}} instead)? It's a problem when a user signs up for "regular updates" from SuggestBot and leaves it running - I've just had to fight through a user talk page that had 24 SuggestBot posts, putting it at about 600k. --McGeddon (talk) 12:23, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi McGeddon, thanks for getting in touch about this! I'll take the liberty to respond above the thread below, so the threading makes a little more sense (at least to me). The size of SuggestBot's posts is a concern. We currently do not post if a talk page is above 1MB, and we also check if subscribers have made any contributions in the last 60 days, and will not send them any suggestions if they haven't.

I did not know about the 75k rule of thumb, nor did I know about {{uw-archive}}, thanks for making me aware of those! The size of the posts have been a concern, and the size of people's talk pages has as well. A while ago I did get a Lua-based template setup sketched out (you can see the beginnings of it in this revision), but I've yet to find the time to rewrite the backend code to invoke it. It would drastically reduce the size of the actual wiki code, but still keep the same type of layout. At the moment I don't have a schedule for when it might get implemented, as I unfortunately have to focus on other things, maybe some time later this year? This has been a good reminder that I have that Lua script laying around though, so it won't be forgotten. Sorry that I don't have any better answers at the moment. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:02, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Is it possible to suggest bot send messagesto a page which is titled for example: User talk:XXX/SuggesBot ? Dawid2009 (talk) 12:36, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

How do this is described at User:SuggestBot/Getting Recommendations Regularly. Mkdw^talk 16:53, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

I sometimes edit English wiki so I would like it based on numbers of my edits in main space, not based on frequency. Dawid2009 (talk) 17:16, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

It appears time based and not edit based for interval. In terms of your original inquiry, you can set the target location by placing the template into the target subpage. Mkdw^talk 18:06, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi Dawid2009, thanks for asking about this! As Mkdw mentions, SuggestBot's subscription model is currently time-based. It's been quite a few years since I designed it, at which time most of our users were frequent contributors, and for those the system appears to be reasonably well-suited. If you edit very infrequently, one possibility is to set the bot to send you suggestions monthly. Another possibility is to drop subscribing altogether and instead request suggestions when you're actively looking for something to do. In the latter case you can tailor the suggestions more too, since you can tell it what articles/categories/WikiProjects to base the suggestions on. Maybe one of those solutions fit your situation well? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:02, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

I wonder also that since SuggestBot doesn't leave a signature (with a date), if MiszaBot will have trouble determining if the thread is over 90 days long (the default setting for most editors). Mkdw^talk 16:51, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

SuggestBot signs its posts, we add four "~" characters before saving the page, so page archiving should work just fine. If it doesn't, please do let me know as I'd be interested in figuring out if there's something that needs fixing. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:02, 30 August 2016 (UTC)