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Unsubscribe

I would like to unsubscribe from Suggestbots messages. I thought I had removed my name allready, but it keeps popping up. Please advise. {{SUBST:Bruger:Rodejong/Signatur}} 12:03, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Hi User:Rodejong! I found SuggestBot's userbox was on your user page, and removed it. From what I could find, that's the only place where any subscription info existed. Let me know if there's anything else! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 14:41, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
Ah thanks Nettrom. I've been looking for days Whahahaha. You made my day ;) {{SUBST:Bruger:Rodejong/Signatur}} 15:00, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

SuggestBot posting on Sandbox page

Hi, I don't know why but SuggestBot has been posting on my Sandbox page for some while, I think it should be doing it on my talk page. Thanks.--Sayed Mohammad Faiz Haidertcs 14:51, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Hi Sayed Mohammad Faiz Haider, thanks for getting in touch about this! I noticed you have SuggestBot's userbox on both your user page as well as in your sandbox. The bot is set up so that more specific pages (i.e. sub-pages) will take precedent. It works this way because it'll allow a user to announce they're using SuggestBot by featuring the userbox on their user page while at the same time getting suggestions posted to a sub-page (by putting the config-template on the sub-page). I removed the userbox from your sandbox, that should make the bot start posting to your talk page again. Let me know if there's anything else! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:50, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
Thanks Nettrom.--Sayed Mohammad Faiz Haidertcs 06:31, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

reduce frequency

I like the suggestions, but I would like to receive them less frequent than once a month. Can you please add the option for "once every 2 months" or "4 times per year"? Thanks. -- P 1 9 9  ✉ 13:54, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Hi P199, thanks for using SuggestBot, and thanks for asking about this! I thought about it, and at the moment I'm reluctant to make the necessary code changes to implement that (in other words, I might make our code more flexible and allow for this later), there are other parts of the software I think I should focus on. In the meantime, I'm thinking that those who wish to get suggestions can request them whenever they like. Is that a reasonable workaround? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:56, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
OK thanks. I understand that you have other priorities. Yes, if I want to reduce frequency for now, I will use it on a request basis in the meantime. -- P 1 9 9  ✉ 17:05, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Thanks! I've added your suggestion to my list of ideas, so it won't be forgotten. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 00:01, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

How to Subscribe?

@Nettrom: How do I subscribe to the bot? I tried to subscribe but I instead had a one time suggestion. I would like to have regular intervals of suggestions instead of having to do it manually. If you can, please just add something that I can simply copy+paste into my talk page. Please reply ASAP. Thank you! UNSC Luke 1021 (talk) 17:32, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

@UNSC Luke 1021: Hi, sorry to hear that this isn't working the way you want it to, and thanks for getting in touch about it! We do have two different templates depending on whether you want to get suggestions just a single time, or whether you want to subscribe (we also have a userbox that you can put on your user page, but let's ignore that for now). The whole process of subscribing is described in more detail here. As the examples show, If you want to get them once every two weeks, add this to your talk page: {{User:SuggestBot/config|frequency=twice a month}}
If you instead want them every week, change "twice a month" to "once a week". Similarly you can also get suggestions monthly by changing it to "once a month". When you subscribe, SuggestBot will check when you last got suggestions, so since you got them earlier today it will take the right amount of time until you get them again (e.g. if you subscribe to get them weekly, you should get your next post from SuggestBot in a week).
Please don't hesitate to get in touch if any of this is confusing, I'll do my best to help you out! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 20:53, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
@Nettrom: Thank you! This fixed my problem! UNSC Luke 1021 (talk) 12:08, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Egotistical question

One of my own articles has popped up with an X in every box Rose Maud Young. Now - I've removed the stub and added a photo but I don't know why the article is getting flagged for citations and links and content. It isn't a long one but it has a reasonable amount of content and it has wikilinks and citations. So I'm not certain why it was flagged. I'd like to know as it may help improve my article writing. I don't know what is wrong with the heading for example. Can you explain/help. ☕ Antiqueight haver 11:47, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi ☕ Antiqueight, thanks for getting in touch and asking about this! I went and had a look at Rose Maud Young and understand your confusion, you've done a good job with that article, kudos to you!
The task suggestion feature of SuggestBot is experimental, and was designed back in 2012. At that point my understanding of how articles improve was more limited, and subsequently the bot will flag articles that might not need certain improvements, or add the flags in ways that do not really make much sense. For instance, the number of links to other articles depends on the amount of content in the article, if you add more content you'll likely also add some wikilinks. As you point out, Rose Maud Young appears to have reasonable number of wikilinks. There is likely also a similar relationship between the amount of content and the number of citations. Lastly, when it comes to the amount of content, higher quality articles tend to be longer. In the case of the "content" flag, I believe the bot compares the article to the average size of all Featured Articles, Good Articles, and A-class articles combined, and if it's far enough away from that average it is flagged. At the same time, if the article is labelled "stub", the content flag is implied. While the lofty goal of having all articles reach Good Article quality might be something to aim for, you could also argue that we should instead consider whether the article has a reasonable amount of content for the quality class it is in (in other words, we would only flag Rose Maud Young if it is much shorter than most Start-class articles).
In short: the flags should be taken with a grain of salt. As I'm not too happy about how they work, I've disabled them for now (and made a note to improve them, so they might return in the future). Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:56, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
That's grand. I don't mind if it throws up the occasional wobbly one from time to time - usually the ones I look at I can see the issues and either give up or work to fix them. The only concern I had was that I was getting something wrong and that therefore the article was in fact flawed. Old-volunteer written experimental bots will have bugs. I will continue to use the tool and let you know if I get truly strange results again. Thank you!! ☕ Antiqueight haver 19:32, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

How often does the bot send to subbed users?

@Nettrom: So I subscribed recently, but I haven't been receiving any suggestions. I tried changing the frequency around, but I still didn't, so I have two questions. 1: Does the bot send suggestions when you first subscribe, or a week after? 2: The page for the bot says that it sends to subbed users twice a day. What times does it send? Is it like noon and midnight? UNSC Luke 1021 (talk) 13:06, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

@UNSC Luke 1021: Hi, thanks for asking about this! Let me try to answer your questions, and I'll start with the second one because it feeds into the first. The job that processes our subscribers runs twice a day, and it starts at 6:15am and 6:15pm US central time (UTC -5). What the job does first is go through all the subscription templates to make sure we're up to date with what's on Wikipedia, and mark any contributors who are no longer active. It then figures out who are due to get suggestions and posts to those.
When you add the subscription template we also check if you've recently gotten suggestions, and if so will use that as the time you got your last set of suggestions. In your case you got suggestions on Oct 28, so when you first subscribed and asked to get them every two weeks, they're scheduled to go out Nov 11. I noticed you changed them to weekly, so they should be due today. Unfortunately I also found that we have a bug in our system that makes it think you want them monthly. I'll try to schedule some time today to look into why that happens and correct it so you can get them when you should.
Sorry about the troubles, thanks again for getting in touch about this, otherwise I wouldn't have found that bug. I'll get in touch when I've fixed it. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:42, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
@UNSC Luke 1021: Hi again, just wanted to get in touch to let you know that I'm working on fixing this, so it hasn't been forgotten. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:14, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
OK, thank you UNSC Luke 1021 (talk) 21:19, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
@UNSC Luke 1021: I dug into this today and found out that the bot couldn't find the template on your user page due to some kind of parsing issue. It's difficult to fix it on our end, so I went ahead and moved SuggestBot's template to the top of the page and that alleviated the problem. The template doesn't output any content, so I'm hoping it doesn't bother you to have it there? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 03:24, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Size of talk page posts again

Hello. I've just hit another user talk page that was 600k of mostly SuggestBot posts. From your response on this issue last year, is it perhaps worth dropping your "do not post if a talk page is above 1MB" rule down to somewhere nearer the 75k of WP:TALKCOND? --McGeddon (talk) 11:05, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi McGeddon, and thanks for bringing this up again! I've been wanting to update SuggestBot's code so it can leave a note and/or {{uw-archive}} when it encounters these large pages, but haven't been able to complete that yet (it depends on other updates to the code, unfortunately). In the meantime I've reduced the limit for it not posting to 256k for talk pages that are not sub-pages. I'll be monitoring the situation and see how it affects our users. BTW, the typical size of a SuggestBot post is now quite a bit smaller (about 13.5k) since I altered the template to contain fewer columns in our main table. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:55, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

Reference adding suggestion

I want some football article suggestions for adding references. I would love to add it if you suggest. ZZ47 (talk) 05:04, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi ZZ47, thanks for being interested in SuggestBot, and my apologies for not responding to your request sooner! Adding references is one of the types of work that will be suggested, but the bot can unfortunately not be limited to only suggesting those. Since you're interested in association football, how about asking for some suggestions from Category:History of association football? It has a reasonable number of articles in it, and they should be a good starting point for SuggestBot's suggestions. If you agree, add this your talk page and SuggestBot should stop by with some suggestions shortly:
{{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:History of association football]]
Hope that helps, let me know if there are any questions! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:01, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Original Barnstar
Thanks for your suggestions Prashasti P (talk) 05:23, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
Hi Prashasti P, thanks for the barnstar! Glad to hear you like your suggestions. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:59, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Way too assuming

Hi, it's me again. SuggestBot is great in my opinion, and it helps me find articles that I might want to edit. However, I've noticed it's a little too sensitive with the length of edits correlating to interest in the subject. I made an edit to China-North Korea relations about a week ago, because China placed a sanction on North Korea and stopped buying their coal, right? I wanted to make the edit thorough and informative, so I wrote about a paragraph on this information with like three citations. I recently looked at my (albiet week old) Suggestions and roughly half of them are related to China-XXX relations or North Korea-XXX relations, which is kind of annoying because I don't really have an interest in the subject. I don't know if this is a problem you can fix, but it's happened to me multiple times. Thank you! UNSC Luke 1021 (talk) 13:33, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi UNSC Luke 1021, thanks for getting in touch about this, and my apologies for SuggestBot's lack of high-quality suggestions this case. You are right that single edits like these can dominate the suggestions, it is an issue that we know about but haven't been able to tackle yet. There are three distinct parts of SuggestBot's code that needs to change, and we've only managed to get one of them done, partly because I am busy paying off technical debt in our codebase (I'm doing some bug fixing while writing this). I'm hoping to be able to get around to improving SuggestBot's suggestions some time the foreseeable future, as it's an issue that's been bugging me for years. At the moment I can only ask for your patience. Also, feel free to get in touch again to remind me if nothing's happened. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:17, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

frequency and category

Hello @Nettrom:, I aded following template to my userpage:
{{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:Cities and towns in Maharashtra}}
But after posting one suggestion to my talkpage, SuggestBot is removed itself with explanation: Removed SuggestBot request template to prevent multiple suggestions posts.

Same thing happened when i tried
{{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:Cities and towns in Maharashtra|frequency = twice a month}}
I think i am goofing up with syntax, as the example syntax mentions /congif. Any solution to that problem? Thanks a lot. —usernamekiran (talk) 22:17, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi usernamekiran, thanks for getting in touch about this! I am sorry to hear SuggestBot's been giving you troubles. The two templates you've used ({{User:SuggestBot/suggest}} and {{User:SuggestBot/config}}) behave slightly differently. The former is intended for those who want to get suggestions immediately, whereas the latter are for those who subscribe to get them posted at regular intervals. Because the former is intended for a one-time use, SuggestBot will remove it after it has posted in order to not pick it up again next time it goes looking for them, which is every five minutes or so. Subscriptions are handled once or twice a day (we are currently on a "once a day" schedule so I can do some testing).
There's also a difference between them when it comes to being able to tell SuggestBot what you are interested in. When you subscribe SuggestBot will use your contribution history to determine your interest, so the "Category:Cities and towns in Maharashtra" that you supplied will simply be ignored. The other template lets you list categories or article titles (as described in the documentation), which will make the bot ignore your contribution history.
I hope this clears things up a bit when it comes to how these two templates work. If not, or if you have any other questions, please do ask and I will do my best to help you out! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 23:00, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
  • thanks for the reply @Nettrom: I inserted following two sets of code on one of my userpage:

{{User:SuggestBot/suggest|List of towns in India by population|Category:Cities and towns in Maharashtra|Category:Central Intelligence Agency}}
{{User:SuggestBot/config
|frequency = once a month
}}

if i want to get suggestions for these two categories, and for the pages mention in another page, List of towns in India by population, then what code should i insert in my page? Sorry for the stupid questions, and thanks a lot. :) —usernamekiran (talk) 23:24, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
    • {{User:SuggestBot/config|List of towns in India by population|Category:Cities and towns in Maharashtra|Category:Central Intelligence Agency|frequency = once a month}} —usernamekiran (talk) 23:41, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
Hi again usernamekiran, and thanks for asking! Your questions are definitely not stupid, let me try to help you out.
As mentioned, only {{User:SuggestBot/suggest}} will allow you to specify which articles/categories SuggestBot should base its suggestions on, so this code that you had is the one you're looking for:
{{User:SuggestBot/suggest|List of towns in India by population|Category:Cities and towns in Maharashtra|Category:Central Intelligence Agency}}
You can put the template code on your user talk page, or as I've noticed you've found out since I get notifications when SuggestBot posts, in another page below your user page. Since the template is intended for single requests, SuggestBot removes it afterwards. When you want another set of suggestions, just add it again and you'll get them. We also make sure we don't send you the same suggestions twice in a row, so they'll be slightly different.
I hope this helps, but again, please let me know if it doesn't or if you have other questions about SuggestBot and I'll do my best to help you out! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:36, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
thanks for your polite reply again. I added config (twice a month) template to two different pages below my userpage. One is for cities n towns, and other page is for CIA. Thanks again, for the replies, and for creating SuggestBot too. Best Regards —usernamekiran (talk) 22:49, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Replace is broken?

These comments are in reference to my talk page history: on April 8, SuggestBot gave me a new set of suggestions, replacing the old ones as usual. However, beginning April 22 its new suggestions have not been replacing the existing ones. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for maintaining this great piece of software, by the way! --JBL (talk) 13:27, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi JBL, sorry to hear this isn't working, and thank you for notifying me about it! We recently switched to a new version of Python and made some (minor, I thought) code changes in the process, and with it came apparently a few bugs. I'll take the part that handles SuggestBot's subscribers offline for now and get on with fixing it. Having the suggestions replaced should be working again when you get the next set of suggestions. Thanks again for getting in touch with me, and for using SuggestBot, happy to hear you find it useful! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:44, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for your swift response! All the best, JBL (talk) 21:27, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
Hi again JBL. I've figured out why SuggestBot wasn't working the way it should (it didn't pick up the "replace" parameter, only "replace=yes"), and have patched our code so it works correctly. Your next set of suggestions should therefore be replaced as usual. Thanks again for getting in touch about it so I could fix it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 04:07, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
Wonderful, well done, thank you! --JBL (talk) 11:22, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Hello

Hello, SuggestBot. GermanGamer77 (talk) 16:47, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi GermanGamer77, SuggestBot asked me to stop by and say "Hello" back! Let me know if you have any questions about SuggestBot, I'll be happy to help you out. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:31, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Whaaaaaat!! I didn't know SuggestBot could do that! GermanGamer77 (talk) 00:47, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

fr:Maison (astrologie)

Hello! This article is no longer - by far - a stub, and I reclassified it. However, for SuggestBot, it is still a stub. Maybe SuggestBot is "fixed" into the past? Sincerely, Live and let die (talk) 08:32, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi Live and let die, thank you so much for bringing this to my attention! I am sorry that I have not responded more quickly to this. You are right that SuggestBot should not have claimed this article is still a stub. We update its database once a week, and this particular article was labelled to be deleted, but somehow that did not happen. I am currently rebuilding the database to see if that solves the problem, and will follow up on it to make sure this bug can get fixed if it happens again. Thanks again for letting me know about this! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:59, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for your effort! Live and let die (talk) 06:00, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

SuggestBot posted on my user page

Greetings. I noticed that SuggestBot posted on my user page instead of my talk page. The section it made cannot be removed at the moment. Can anything be done about this? Thank you! Arius1998 (talk) 02:06, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Hi Arius1998, sorry about that and thanks for getting in touch about it! We had a bug in our code that made SuggestBot not correctly handle the specific case where its userbox is put on a subpage. The result was, as you unfortunately have experienced, that the suggestions got posted to the subpage where the userbox was on instead of the user's talk page. A user on the Swedish Wikipedia notified me about this and I fixed it in early May, and I have not seen it happen again. Sorry again about this happening, and thanks again for contacting me about it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:22, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks

For the suggestions! I know you are a bot, but even robots deserve a thanks ‡ Єl Cid, Єl Caɱ̩peador ᐁT₳LKᐃ 16:54, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Hi ‡ Єl Cid, Єl Caɱ̩peador, you're most welcome, thanks for using SuggestBot and getting in touch! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:44, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Lists inside spans

Hi, I noticed that WP:Community Portal/Opentask attempts to nest every list inside a span. This is non-conforming to HTML5 spec, and MediaWiki gets weird with it. The result is the spans get cloned and moved inside the line items, causing non-validating HTML output due to duplicate HTML id's.

This wikitext: 

<span id="copyedit">
* [[...]]
* [[...]]
* [[...]]
* [[...]]
* [[...]]</span>

Generates this HTML: 

<ul>
<li><span id="copyedit"><a href="...">...</a></span></li>
<li><span id="copyedit"><a href="...">...</a></span></li>
<li><span id="copyedit"><a href="...">...</a></span></li>
<li><span id="copyedit"><a href="...">...</a></span></li>
<li><span id="copyedit"><a href="...">...</a></span></li>
</ul>

This is an easy fix for the page itself — replace the spans with an element that allows lists inside, such as div. SuggestBot would need an update, though. Would it be possible, in opentasks.py, to edit these regular expressions to work with any tag and not just span? Or, if that's not possible, just swap span for div? 

		for (taskId, pageList) in self.foundTasks.iteritems():
			tasktext = re.sub(ur'<span id="{taskid}">(.*?)</span>'.format(taskid=taskId),
					  ur'<span id="{taskid}">{pagelist}</span>'.format(taskid=taskId, pagelist=pageList),
					  tasktext);

Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 05:52, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi Matt Fitzpatrick, thanks for bringing this to my attention! I should've known better than to put a block level element (ul) inside an inline element (span) like that, and I'm not surprised the end result is some horrible HTML. Both of your suggestions should be possible, but I'm not sure which one I prefer. Allowing any HTML element makes for a slightly incomprehensible regular expression (see below), whereas using div is similar to the one we already have. But, I can also see that specifying that div has to be used makes future updates more difficult since they'll require a code update as well. If you have a preference, feel free to let me know.
I'll have to do some testing, but I think this is what the regular expression will look like if we allow any element (I'll make sure it's case-insensitive matching as well):
<([a-z][a-z0-9]*) id="{taskid}">(.*?)</\1>
Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 02:41, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
The regex any tag and backreference is a neat idea. Still, I'm starting to lean toward the simple <div> version. The tag could change someday, but so could the attributes. It seems hard to try to predict the future, but easy to change to a known tag when the time comes. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 04:31, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
Matt Fitzpatrick: I'm also in favor of keeping it simple for now. If things change in the future, we can revisit and adapt. The change has been implemented and code updated and seems to be working fine. The HTML is much better, thanks again for bringing this up so I could fix it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:27, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Make shorter

Make less suggestions, like ten suggestions. i forget which ones i did and it takes up space. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ilovemathtothe6power (talk • contribs) 21:27, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Missing regular suggestion(s)

Hi,
My last new message with new suggestions was two weeks ago. I was wondering if I'd somehow 'unsubscribed' or is this down to the 'move' noted here. Thanks. Eagleash (talk) 10:07, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi Eagleash, thanks for getting in touch about this! Our lack of sending out suggestions is related to the move we did. I've had some chaotic weeks here and not gotten around to setting SuggestBot up to send them out as it should. In the meantime it's been serving up one-time requests just fine, so everything seems to be working. I had a bit of time today to get things set up correctly and you should get the next set of suggestions in a few hours!
BTW, I had a look at your user page, enjoy the Malaysian GP tomorrow! Thanks again for nudging me to get SuggestBot working properly, and for using the bot, appreciate it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:44, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks; look froward to some new suggestions. Not so much Malaysian GP, although one of the main protagonists starting from the back may make it a bit more interesting than usual! Best regards, Eagleash (talk) 23:10, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

More than 500

The main issue I have with this is that it only bases it off my last 500 edits. My last 500 edits are never representative of my patterns. This time it overrepresented articles relating to India. It should include far more than 500 edits in the calculation.  — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  00:41, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Customizations

I also encourage you to have more customizations. — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  00:43, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject Suggestions

I used the Wikipedia:Teahouse/Suggestions/SuggestBot template on my talk page with category1=WikiProject_Databases, in hopes of getting a list of suggested edits for pages within that WikiProject. The results include many pages that aren't tagged with the WikiProject Database template. Was this intended, or a bug? Linearizable (talk) 20:12, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

Promission Active Request

Hello,sir can you please allow me to create an article about about television show name, Detective Didi on Zee TV the show will started on 9 November 2017 at 800 pm from sat-sun Thank You. — Preceding unsigned comment added by We 3344 (talk • contribs) 18:27, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

How can I stop Suggest Bot?

I've removed the template many times but the suggestions keep coming. Help! -- — Keithbob • Talk • 23:53, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Hi Keithbob, sorry to hear about this! I dug around a bit and found a copy of the template on your user page, which I've now removed. That should do the trick, but please let me know if SuggestBot magically stops by in two weeks and posts again. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:16, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
That's odd I couldn't find/see it. But many thanks for helping me out! -- — Keithbob • Talk • 22:36, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Teahouse Suggestions - changes needed

Having just discovered the joy of SuggestBot, may I make a number of recommendations , especially relating to its use at the Teahouse?:

  • An update is needed to the instructions given at Wikipedia:Teahouse/Suggestions, following the wiki-wide name change from Save changes/Save page to Publish changes/Publish page. At present the text states: That's it! Now click "Save page." You don't need to edit any of the other stuff.
  • The inclusion of quote marks in the demo script section seems unhelpful. As a result, I included them in my first attempt, which failed. Deleting the quote marks resolved the issue. At present the demo text is as follows:
{{subst:Wikipedia:Teahouse/Suggestions/SuggestBot
|category1="WikiProject_Biography"
}}
  • Why are there are only 11 Projects listed at the point a user is prompted to enter the categories? There are actually 6 major themes listed at Wikipedia:Teahouse/WikiProjects#WikiProjects, covering over 100 of the main WikiProjects, and there's no link for a user to see them listed, and they'll probably have missed seem them all on the previous page. This is probably an issue for the Teahouse itself to address, but it appeared to me that there are only 11 Projects I can choose from. We occasionally get asked by visitors to the Teahouse for suggestions of things they could work on. I think I can see why I've not yet seen this tool being recommended. Sorry if I've posted some suggestions in the wrong place. I will put a link to this post from the Teahouse Talk page. Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 13:05, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
Hi Nick Moyes, thanks for getting in touch about this! Just wanted to respond quickly to let you know that I'll get a more thorough answer to you over the weekend, as otherwise it would seem like I'm ignoring this. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:11, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Missing suggestions

Hi,
Has SuggestBot gone for a lie down again? My last group of recommendations was 31 January. Thanks. Eagleash (talk) 11:56, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Hi Eagleash, thanks for noticing and reporting it! Yes, it looks like SuggestBot hasn't taken care of our subscribers for a while, sorry about that! I've done one manual run and noticed the bot crashed before it got to you. Am working on fixing the problem and will make sure it stops by before the day is over. Thanks again for getting in touch about this so I could look into it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:29, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
Thanks. Best regards. Eagleash (talk) 17:31, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

tsakane

What is the impact of employment in tsakane? K.lokuhle.lee (talk) 15:32, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Overemphasized Peru

I'm informing you that the last group of article suggestions overemphasized Peru. Just saying. — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  21:52, 29 March 2018 (UTC)  — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  21:52, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Not receiving suggestions

Hello there! First of all, I'd like to thank everyone involved in this wonderful project: it's a very useful tool! Secondly, unfortunately SuggestBot doesn't seem to want to give me new suggestions. I have a page dedicated to the suggestions, and I was subscribed to get them weekly, but I then wanted to see if I could get them twice a week, so I fiddled around, but eventually concluded that probably wasn't possible on one page, so I created another. I put in just the normal suggest code, {{User:SuggestBot/suggest}}, but it didn't seem to work. I then blanked my original To Do page, thinking maybe the subscription was causing issues, but that didn't help. So, I'm lost at this point.

On another note, is there a way to get suggestions with only one type, such as 'Merge' or 'Stub'? I feel like that could be a useful feature for some. Thanks! –Daybeers (talk) 06:15, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

@Nettrom: Any thoughts on this? –Daybeers (talk) 21:36, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
Hi Daybeers, thanks for following up on this! I am so sorry that I didn't respond to you sooner! Your idea for getting suggestions more often that once a week should work, unless SuggestBot isn't taking care of the requests, which has been the case this time around. I've restarted it and it's currently processing the queue, should stop by your page in a few minutes. From what I know about the bot, you should be able to do get your setup working on a single page, but you can of course also have one page for your subscriptions and one for your requests.
At the moment we don't allow changes to the types of articles that are suggested, but that idea is on the drawing board. I want to switch our suggestions to a Lua-based template, which should allow more flexibility, e.g. that you can get less or more of a specific category. There's currently not an ETA on that, unfortunately, my time to work on the bot tends to be limited.
Thanks again for following up on this, and for using SuggestBot! I'll work on keeping an keener eye on the talk page and what the bot is doing, apologies again for the tardiness and the lack of suggestions. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 14:22, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject improvements

Any way that SuggestBot can be automatically used for Wikiproject improvements? We used to use it on WikiProject Hampshire here but we've recently removed it since it stopped updating. @Nettrom: – Craig Davison (talk) 17:26, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Question?

Can SuggestBot send suggestions daily? Kpgjhpjm (talk) 02:19, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Articles

I've pasted the Suggestbot code to my user talk page so I that can get suggestions for articles to improve upon and I haven't received those suggestions yet?? Please help JC7V-constructive zone 17:11, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Never mind, got my first suggestions from SuggestBot. JC7V-constructive zone 17:17, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Questions, 1 WikiProject requested; limit of 3 requests?

Greetings, I had requested WikiProject Catholicism articles & on my talk page, it shows articles from WikiProject Biograpy articles instead. Is there a way to "force" SuggestBot to find only articles from that 1 WP? I requested via Teahouse.

Can more than 3 WP be added in 1 request?

Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk) 12:47, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

@JoeHebda: It's currently not possible to restrict suggestions to a specific WikiProject, unfortunately. I have ideas for how to do WikiProject-specific suggestions as it's a feature request that comes up fairly quickly as soon as WikiProjects are mentioned, but haven't yet had the time to implement them. So the way the bot currently works is that it'll use the WikiProjects as seeds for the suggestions, but there is no guarantee that the suggested articles will match the project.
You can add as many WikiProjects as you like, the only technical requirement is that they have a category named "WikiProject Foo articles" so the bot can find them (it uses the titles of the articles/talk pages from that category). I would suspect there's a practical limit, in that you might find it useful to go from three to six WikiProjects, but adding another three or six won't improve the suggestions.
Hope that's helpful, and sorry that we still can't do WikiProject-specific suggestions! Cheers, 15:38, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Suggestions added on incorrect page

Cool bot! I think I have found a bug. I've subscribed to SuggestBot on a subpage. However, the suggestions were added on my talk page: Special:Diff/859340586. This contradicts this statement from template documentation:

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:MyName/To Do. Then the suggestions will be posted to your "To Do" page instead of your talk page.

—⁠andrybak (talk) 07:03, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi andrybak, thanks for asking about this! I'm not sure this is a bug. The documentation you quote refers to the one-time request template, whereas the userbox you put on your subpage is for subscriptions. This was a good opportunity to improve the subscription documentation, though, so it's clearer how SuggestBot behaves when the userbox is put on a subpage. The bot will in that case post on your user talk page, because when I developed this I found some of our users put all their user boxes on a subpage to keep their user page clean. If SuggestBot then posts to the subpage, that content would get transcluded on the user page and probably make them rather upset.
I've updated our documentation to describe the userbox behaviour in this case. I also went ahead and added the config template to your subpage so the suggestions start showing up there. Thanks again for getting in touch so I could improve our documentation. Happy to answer other questions about SuggestBot as well, of course! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:48, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
Looks like adding "config" template did not help: Special:Diff/863533584, suggestion appeared on talk page again. Maybe I should remove the userbox? —⁠andrybak (talk) 12:55, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
Hi andrybak, I am sorry to hear that they once again showed up on your talk page! Thanks for letting me know about it. I haven't had time to fully resolve the problem yet, but I did look into what is stored in our database and it has your subpage there. Next I'll have to figure out why it thinks it shouldn't post to that page, which I'm aiming to look into this coming weekend.
I did look at SuggestBot's contributions and noticed it does post correctly to some other subscribers subpages, so if I can't figure this out it looks like removing the userbox will solve the problem. Hopefully, that won't be necessary. I'll get back to you with more information once I've had the opportunity to look at what's going on here. And again, apologies for this happening, and thanks for getting in touch! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:41, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
No problem, I don't mind the suggestions on my talk page. Thanks for looking into the issue. —⁠andrybak (talk) 17:22, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Question about config template

Is there a way to request the SuggestBot to suggest topic specific pages or pages from curtain categories using the User:SuggestBot/config template? I see that this can be done with the User:SuggestBot/suggest template. - ZLEA Talk\Contribs 00:12, 5 January 2019 (UTC) (User:Suggestbot/suggest -> User:SuggestBot/suggest --DannyS712 (talk) 00:19, 5 January 2019 (UTC))

Hi ZLEA, sorry about not getting around to responding to this sooner! Unfortunately the subscription template does not allow you to specify pages or categories like the other template does. However, you can use the User:SuggestBot/suggest template to request pages at any point in time, without it affecting when you get the subscription-based suggestions. I'm not sure why I didn't make it so that subscriptions can also be based on specific pages/categories when I was working on making the one-time requests support that, but it's likely because it would require a lot of changes in how SuggestBot handles subscriptions. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:00, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Original Barnstar
Thanks, the information provided was of great help to me! Fideldoe (talk) 13:32, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
Hi Fideldoe, thanks for the kind words, and for using SuggestBot! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:00, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Confused

After getting what I consider to be offensive suggestions form SuggestBot, twice in a row, I have finally decided to stop getting suggestions. Frankly, what part of my editing history suggests that I am fascinated with explicit articles? Puzzledvegetable (talk) 00:08, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Looks like some sort of bug, or some of the articles you edited are in the same (very broad) categories. - ZLEA Talk\Contribs 16:03, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
Hi Puzzledvegetable and ZLEA, and thanks for your patience with me in getting to respond to this. I looked into the recommendation logs, and from what I can tell this is a feature that can easily end up looking like a bug. It also results in recommendations that do not look meaningful.
What's going on is that the recommendations were made by SuggestBot's co-edit recommender. That recommender finds other users who edited the same articles as you, and then looks for articles that they edited that you haven't edited. While this approach works, it also has the drawback that sometimes the suggested article appears disconnected from what the user is interested in (this might happen often, but we don't have a straightforward way of getting feedback about the bot's suggestions). I am fairly certain that when it comes to the "why the heck was I suggested this?" question, the co-edit recommender is the most likely answer.
I'm sorry that you got these suggestions, Puzzledvegetable! I completely understand that these are not articles you're interested in, and that getting them suggested by SuggestBot is offensive. Improving SuggestBot's recommendations has been on my agenda for years, and I see this problem as renewed motivation to go fix it. I opened up a ticket over on GitHub to track this so it doesn't continue to be an idea stuck in my head. Thanks for reporting it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:07, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Missing suggest bot?

Hello, my last list of suggestion was received on 29 October. Is the bot broken again? Cheers. Eagleash (talk) 19:46, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Just about to ask that as well. I should get suggestions twice a month but my last was also 29 October. TheDoctorWho (talk) 04:16, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
@Eagleash and TheDoctorWho: Oh darn! Sorry that the suggestions have been missing, but thanks so much for letting me know about it! The bot was broken and I've restarted it, and it looks like it's posting suggestions as it should again now. Am currently doing maintenance work, and one part of the process will make it easier for me to keep an eye on what's going on so this doesn't happen again. So sorry to that they've been missing for over a month, and thanks again for notifying me! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:42, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
Thanks. Eagleash (talk) 20:50, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
@Nettrom: - Sounds similar to issues with enwp10 tool failing about monthly here. I had suggested some kind of Restart button there. To make it easier to get it running again. Specifically for Suggestbot could there be a "daily test job" setup? To see if SB is running & if it fails, send error message to you. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 14:39, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
Hey @Nettrom, I haven't had a post since 27 September. Not sure if this is related to the above issue. I see that others are receiving suggestions. Nzd (talk) 23:56, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
Hi @Nzd, sorry to hear that! I looked into it, and you've run into an undocumented limitation of the bot. It doesn't post to pages larger than 250kB because those tend to time out, or it's often the (talk) page of a user who left Wikipedia without unsubscribing. However, it also becomes an issue when you get suggestions weekly and the user is an active Wikipedian. As in your case, it takes a few months and the bot runs into its size limitation all by itself.
I've added a note to the "limitations/issues" section of SuggestBot's talk page so that is documented somewhere. Additionally, I've opened several tasks around this on GitHub so I can remember to look into it. I'm working on switching from template substitution to using a Lua module for the suggestions to reduce the amount of wikitext used, and I'll be looking into having the bot leave a short message about why it'll stop posting suggestions if the page is large. Again, sorry about this! Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help you out. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:33, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
@Nettrom: That makes total sense, thanks for the explanation. I'll set up an archive for that page (my main talk gets archived but I receive SuggestBot posts on a subpage). Might be worth suggesting others do the same in your note. Thanks, Nzd (talk) 22:53, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
@Nzd: Ah yes, that's a great suggestion, thanks! I've added a bit to the note and linked to the help page about automatic archiving. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 03:39, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Frequency parameter?

Hey there! Thank you for this awesome resource. I don't know how to find a list of all parameters that can be specified and their valid values. Specifically, following the examples I did find, I set my personal bot to |frequency=once a day |replace=yes. I don't think it's delivering that way. Also, I wanted it's suggestion to always appear on the top of the page, so I copied the template to the top. But, it's suggestions were published at the bottom in a new section. Is there a way to tell it to publish at the top?TIA Usedtobecool (talk) 17:01, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi Usedtobecool, thanks for using SuggestBot, happy to hear you find it useful! Hopefully I can help you out. You can find a list of the two parameters the bot currently supports on this page, in the "parameters" section. You already know about both of them, by the way.
When it comes to subscribing to get recommendations once a day, the bot interprets that as "once a week". There used to be technical reasons for why we didn't allow more frequent suggestions, whereas nowadays it's mainly that the bot isn't written to support it (e.g. there's code in place to make sure you don't get repeat suggestions, which would have to be modified so you don't see the same things every day). If you do want more frequent suggestions, you can at any time ask for a single set of suggestions and get those. They won't affect your subscription, so the subscribed ones will still arrive once a week. The caveat is that you might see some repeat suggestions if you do this a lot, and the bot won't replace suggestions, it'll just append them to the page (if you don't want to have a lot of suggestions on your talk page, you can create a subpage and put the template there).
Great question about how to get the suggestions to show up at the top of the page! You can do that, just move the section with the suggestions to where you want it, and SuggestBot will replace it there when it posts the next set of suggestions. The bot only appends a new set of suggestions to the page if it can't find a previous set. Your idea about looking for where the template is makes sense. One of the reasons why we don't do that is that a lot of Wikipedia users put a fair number of templates on their talk pages (e.g. SuggestBot, automatic archiving, various messages) and they usually go together at the top.
I hope this was helpful! Please let me know what further questions you have and I'll do my best to respond. And thanks again for using SuggestBot, appreciate it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:20, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, dude/ette. Very helpful. No more questions. I'm just gonna marvel at the quality of your reply for a moment, then, go about my business. Usedtobecool (talk) 15:01, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Community portal: Help out

Seems SuggestBot is not updating the "Add an image" section in Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask. Could the maintainers please investigate? Thanks: Bhunacat10 (talk), 18:26, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Reverts included in suggestion?

Long story short I used to have Korean-topic articles in my suggestions but after a bunch of mass revert on corporations vandalism I got a suggestbot message full of corp. related suggestions. I'm not that interested in that topic — countetvandalism works are not always within my interest, so maybe something tagged as rollback can be excluded from suggestion? — regards, Revi 00:33, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Filed issue #32 as I saw the GitHub link above. — regards, Revi 00:38, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Weird selection by SuggestBot

I tried to get suggested articles by including the following on the Teahouse/Suggestions page:

{{subst:Wikipedia:Teahouse/Suggestions/SuggestBot
|category1=WikiProject_Linguistics
|category2=WikiProject_Western_New_York
}}

What I got was the following list, which doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with either linguistics or Western New York.

This is not very high priority, but it makes me wonder how SuggestBot makes its selections when I specifically gave two categories I was interested in.

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. Have fun!

Views/Day Quality Title Tagged with…
29 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: Start Knight High School (talk) Add sources
200 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: C Antelope Valley (talk) Add sources
51 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: NA, Predicted class: C The Songs of Distant Earth (album) (talk) Add sources
12 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: NA, Predicted class: C Dry Town Water Park (talk) Add sources
26 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Start Antelope Valley Mall (talk) Add sources
65 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: Start Creek mythology (talk) Add sources
25 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: C Merger guidelines (talk) Cleanup
179 Quality: High, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: GA Criticism of the Bible (talk) Cleanup
13 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Start Highland High School (Palmdale, California) (talk) Cleanup
359 Quality: High, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: GA Christology (talk) Expand
6 Quality: Low, Assessed class: NA, Predicted class: Stub Victor Valley Union High School District (talk) Expand
15 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: Start Episcopal Conference of Czech Republic (talk) Expand
28 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: Start Khaybar (TV series) (talk) Unencyclopaedic
793 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: C Jesus H. Christ (talk) Unencyclopaedic
2,286 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: B Trinity (talk) Unencyclopaedic
33 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: B Diversity in early Christian theology (talk) Merge
45 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: NA, Predicted class: B Tobacco in the American colonies (talk) Merge
129 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: C Scythian religion (talk) Merge
109 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: C Mahanubhava (talk) Wikify
2 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: B Peniel Missionary Society (talk) Wikify
19 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: NA, Predicted class: C Grand Rapids Public Schools (talk) Wikify
13 Quality: Low, Assessed class: NA, Predicted class: Start Narasapur – Nidadavolu Express (talk) Orphan
6 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Start Act of Congress (music group) (talk) Orphan
2 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Babeque secundaria (talk) Orphan
16 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: Start Palmdale Transportation Center (talk) Stub
18 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Lancaster High School (Lancaster, California) (talk) Stub
5 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Novato Unified School District (talk) Stub
7 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Eastside Union School District (talk) Stub
6 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Start Adelanto Elementary School District (talk) Stub
5 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Start SOAR High School (talk) Stub

Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. Your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping.

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please tell me on SuggestBot's talk page. Thanks from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 16:28, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Jkgree (talk) 19:35, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi Jkgree, thanks for getting in touch about this! You're absolutely correct that this behavior is unexpected since you did supply the bot with some categories of interest. My first thought was that the categories didn't have articles (or article talk pages) in them, but that's not the case, there's plenty of them there. So somehow SuggestBot didn't pick those up. I've filed it as an issue on GitHub so this is documented, and I'll investigate and see what I can do to not make this happen again. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:30, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

suggesting my own articles to me

In the most recent lucky dip https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AStuartyeates&type=revision&diff=906605905&oldid=906310011 many of the biographies are ones I've created. That seems a little off to me. Stuartyeates (talk) 00:25, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi Stuartyeates, thanks for bringing this up! I hear your concern about this, I'm sure it's annoying to see a list of articles that perhaps mainly consists of ones you've created.
Let me sketch out how I'm thinking about this, and then I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts as well. I'm not sure it's inherently bad that SuggestBot recommends articles you've created, it's instead a question of how recently you created them. If it's been a couple of years, then it might be useful to get a message that indicates that they're in need of improvement, potentially motivating you to take another look and see if something can be done. However, if they were created more recently, then it's probably just bothersome. So I see it mainly as related to temporality, meaning that if SuggestBot can look further back into your edit history and exclude things you've edited (which means it also excludes creations) then we're doing okay. At the moment there are plans to do just that (it's also related to the thread above about better handling of reverts), and this thread can help me make better decisions about how to do that well.
What are your thoughts about this? Let me know. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:18, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
I've been working on a project for ~3 years, writing bios for every female professor in the country. It's a little depressing to get prompts that they're not good enough when I'm still half through. Stuartyeates (talk) 21:46, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Question

Dear manager of this bot, thank you very much, i use this bot and helped me a little to find ideas, as i am a new user. I would like to ask if it can be operated in the greek wikipedia, because i am a greek and i have nearly no edits there, so i would like some suggestions to start. Best regards, Enivak (talk) 09:47, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi Enivak and thanks for the kind words! There are possibilities of bringing SuggestBot to the Greek Wikipedia, but the process takes a bit of time since I want to make sure there are a group of users in the community that are interested in having the bot there. It also usually needs categories of articles in need of improvement for it to work (e.g. Category:All pages needing cleanup here on English Wikipedia). I'm not sure if those types of categories are in use on Greek Wikipedia.
Another user recently asked me a similar question but for Albanian Wikipedia (see this thread on my talk page). As you can see there, the process usually starts with a discussion on the given wiki (Greek in your case). Hope this was helpful, and let me know what follow-up questions you might have. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:58, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
@Nettrom: Thanks for your response! I saw the discussion you linked. I will raise this in the Greek wikipedia, you may get an response from an admin there. Hope this works in the Albanian wiki also! Best regards, Enivak (talk) 16:17, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
As I can see, there is some willingness there, I will wait to learn about their categories. Enivak (talk) 12:48, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Hello!

Greetings to the user of this bot! Sam'kelo Mpungoseh (talk) 01:05, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

A question about the proposal list

...does the bot consider people's AFD closes when creating its suggestions? Because I don't know whether it should ... because of the involvement rules, I suspect a lot of admins do not choose the AFDs to close on the basis of how interested they are in its topic. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:55, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Filter out edits that are part of PCR

Ever since I started reviewing pending changes, SuggestBot's suggestions have become less helpful, since my list of edits now includes edits to articles that I have no interest in, but I edited anyway to review a pending change. As a result, my suggestions from SuggestBot resemble what SuggestBot would pick based on what new users are interested in, but not based on what I'm interested in. Is there anyway to get SuggestBot to filter out those edits and only make suggestions based on my other edits? If not, I recommend adding that feature. --PuzzledvegetableIs it teatime already? 18:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Hello

My name is Stella.. Can you please approve my page Thank you Tindylan (talk) 15:10, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

Hi Tindylan, and welcome to Wikipedia! Unfortunately, I cannot approve your draft because I'm not familiar with that process, sorry. SuggestBot is good at helping you find articles to edit, in case you're interested in helping improve some existing articles, though, and I'd be happy to help you get that working. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:15, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

I don't understand Wikipedia well.can you please publish it for me. Thanks Tindylan (talk) 16:22, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

A goat for you!

Wikipedia rocks

Sharunk07 (talk) 09:30, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Sharunk07, goats rock too! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:50, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Refresh

Hi, Nettrom. First of all, thank you for managing the SuggestBot tool. The suggestions are very helpful to me. I have a question, however, about the list. Is there a way to manually refresh it? For instance, I have edited most of the suggestions or the results are not relevant to what I want to edit at the moment. Thanks! Darwin Naz (talk) 22:19, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Hi Darwin Naz, thanks for using SuggestBot! One way to get a new list of suggestions is to delete the old one and replace it with the template you used last time ({{User:SuggestBot/suggest}}). What'll happen then is that SuggestBot stops by and posts a new set of suggestions, but it'll add it to the bottom of the page.
Another option is to subscribe to get suggestions periodically, where you use a different template that allows you to define how often you want them: weekly, twice a month (every two weeks), or monthly (every four weeks). That template also allows you to tell SuggestBot to replace the set of suggestions, rather than just add them.
I hope that helps you out, but let me know if it didn't and I'll be happy to help you further! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:50, 11 April 2020 (UTC)
Hi, Nettrom. I have just set the template to suggest articles weekly. So far, it has already shown a list. I will just get back to you if I encounter any problems. Thanks very much! Regards, Darwin Naz (talk) 23:00, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Opentasks

Greetings, SuggestBot. You have not been updating {{Opentask}} for a month now. Coming back soon, I hope? --PFHLai (talk) 14:14, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Hi PFHLai, thanks for letting me know about this! I'll follow up on it and make sure this part of the bot starts running again. And by the way, thanks again for the work you do with keeping that page updated! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:12, 28 December 2019 (UTC)
Hello, Nettrom. Thank you for running the bot and taking care of the opentasks template. I'll be glad to keep refreshing the template every now and then till your bot takes over. No rush. Hope you're having a happy holiday season. Cheers! --PFHLai (talk) 20:00, 28 December 2019 (UTC)
Hi, just wanted to check on the status of this? I've noticed PFHLai doing a great job of keeping it updated manually, but it looks like a lot of work! the wub "?!" 19:04, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for your kind words, the wub. Just a few edits here and there. Nothing major. Peace! --PFHLai (talk) 05:35, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
@Nettrom: Please update? EllenCT (talk) 02:31, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
EllenCT thanks for the ping on this, and apologies to the wub for not seeing the previous one! I'll be working on getting this part of SuggestBot running again over the next few days, so it should be up and running before the weekend is over. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:39, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
EllenCT and the wub: this should now be fixed. Please do let me know if you see something out of the ordinary with what SuggestBot does on the Opentask page, and I'll look into it. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:35, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, Nettrom. Looking good at {{Opentask}}. Have a wonderful weekend! Cheers! --PFHLai (talk) 05:35, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
Oh PFHLai, you are most welcome! More importantly: thank you for your patience and tireless updating of {{Opentask}} while the bot was down. I'm sorry it's taken so long to get things running again, and your work in the meantime has been much appreciated! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:18, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Chichester High School

An edit has been made to the Chichester High School for Girls page to change it to Chichester High School. Chichester High School for GIRLS and Chichester High School for BOYS merged to create CHICHESTER HIGH SCHOOL.

Sadly the edit has deleted all of the GIRLS School history.

When the schools merged one school DfE number had to be used so the CHSG number was used and the new name and new school was devised.

The CHSB page and CHSG pages needed to be closed with a NEW CHS page created. I tried to do this but have limited knowledge of Wikipedia.

Can you help with this?

Thank you TJW713 (talk) 21:03, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Collapsed

I'd like to suggest that the table delivered by the bot be collapsible and collapsed by default. This would really help in perusing a user's talk page looking for things other than the suggestion tables. Thanks. —[AlanM1 (talk)]— 19:26, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Removing

Hi, is there a way to stop the bot posting on my talkpage? I wanted to try it once but now I can't figure out how to get rid of it. — Yours, Berrely • Talk∕Contribs 11:11, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi Berrely, thanks for trying out the bot, and I'm sorry that it's been difficult to stop it. All that should be required is to remove the subscription template. From what I could figure out by digging into this is that it had ended up on this archived talk page, which is also where the bot has posted the most recent suggestions on May 1 (it's because we support getting suggestions on any user subpage so people can get them without cluttering their talk page). I removed it from that archive with this edit, so the bot shouldn't send you any more suggestions. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:15, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Hi, Nettrom. I have the same question but for a slightly different case. I have the bot on a sub-page but, recently, it posted suggestions on my Talk page. How do I remove it in my Talk page if there is no SuggestBot/config installed? Regards, Darwin Naz (talk) 00:39, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Hi Darwin Naz, thanks for using SuggestBot and thanks for reporting this issue! What happened here is that when you cleaned up your sub-page with this edit, you removed the SuggestBot template from that page. Since you're kind enough to also have the userbox on your user page the bot still counts you as subscribed, but as it no longer knew about the sub-page it posted to your user talk page instead. I went ahead and re-added the template to your sub-page in this edit, and SuggestBot should pick that up and should post next week's suggestions there. Please do let me know if that doesn't happen, though, as then there's clearly something wrong. Thanks again for reaching out and for using SuggestBot, much appreciated! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:54, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
I removed it in that subpage because it was posting two entries. I thought I was removing only one code. Thanks for your help! Darwin Naz (talk) 22:49, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Darwin Naz You're welcome, I'm happy to help! Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you see the bot misbehaving, it's supposed to be able to handle your setup without any glitches. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:38, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

Quite a nice bot you have there!

𝕱𝖑𝖔𝖜𝖊𝖗𝕻𝖊𝖙𝖆𝖑𝖘 (talk) 01:18, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Original Barnstar
Thanks for the great work! AltruisticHomoSapien (talk) 07:49, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Original Barnstar
Thank you for your article suggestions. I'll be busy for a while! Dswitz10734 (talk) 23:17, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Dates in section title

At the moment I have two entries from Suggest bot on my talk. When I got one just now I clicked on it from my watchlist and it brought me to the first, since they have the same section name I guess it defaults to the earlier one. A minor thing, but perhaps the section name generation could include the date so this doesn't happen. Obviously not a big deal at all (and I certainly have no real issue here), but perhaps it could help. Best - Aza24 (talk) 23:56, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Technical Barnstar
This is super epic! Education-over-easy (talk) 20:49, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

how to get medical articles to improve

I would like to improve medical articles. Any suggestions?OodFloo (talk) 16:07, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

OodFloo, please see User:SuggestBot/Requests#Suggestions based on specific pages. (please Reply to icon mention me on reply; thanks!) -- Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 20:41, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

How to change subscriptions?

I was wondering how to change SuggestBot settings?

Also, can you make more than 3 subscriptions possible? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Education-over-easy (talk • contribs) 20:50, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

Education-over-easy, in what way do you want to change the settings? (please Reply to icon mention me on reply; thanks!) -- Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 20:42, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

enjoy the fur baby

Googleguy007 (talk) 14:34, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Not getting suggestions

I asked for suggestions from Wikiproject spaceflight. I didn't get any. 64.121.103.144 (talk) 22:05, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this! We've been having issues with one part of SuggestBot that handles requests on English Wikipedia, it kept crashing. I found one user talk page that it was having troubles with, and it looks like that solved it. Thanks again for letting me know about this issue! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 04:57, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

accuracy

Hi, i am a frequent user of the Bot and i love it. However, i have the impression it has become increasingly inaccurate and sometimes 1 in 3 suggestions on the list do not require the kind of edit suggested. This is meant to be an encouraging and constructive comment. All the best Wikirictor talk • contribs 14:11, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

@Wikirictor: Hey, first of all, thanks for using SuggestBot! Secondly, thanks for getting in touch about this, and your patience with me as I've been not getting back to you with a response here! I've been wanting to write you a fairly long answer, but haven't found the time yet. In the meantime, I wanted to reply so that you know that I've seen it, and also that I take this problem seriously and see it as good motivation to keep improving the bot. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:00, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Suggestions on non-en wikis

Hello. I'm from dag wiki

  • I currently receive en articles suggestions here. Is it possible to have them delivered at my dag user talk page?
  • It is possible to get article suggestions from dag Wikipedia?

--Masssly (talk) 16:19, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Disagree with Suggestbot

I disagree with a suggestion given by suggestbot. I think a merger would be too clunky and a redirect is more appropriate. I have left notes on the talk pages of source and destination pages, but can I take this disagreement to the general page on proposed mergers? If so, can I have a date for the suggestion to find the proposed merger? The list of proposed merges is long. Thank you. Nellas Galadhon (talk) 17:50, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Can't stop getting suggestions

SuggestBot keeps putting suggestions on my page and I don't have any templates on my page. I would have set this up around ten years ago, so I don't know if the process would have been different back then and therefore needs a different way to stop. Can someone help me with this?  Ryan Vesey 00:20, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

@Ryan Vesey: Yes, I'm happy to help you out with this! Sorry that this has been happening, I can totally understand that this must be confusing. It took me a few minutes to figure it out too. The userbox was on this page with your userboxes. Because the bot expects folks to be able to have these collections of userboxes on a subpage (for transcluding it on their user page) it's not supposed to put the suggestions there (we did have a problem with that for a little while, though) so they just show up on your talk page instead, seemingly out of nowhere. I went ahead and deleted it there, and now no longer find any reference to SuggestBot's templates from any of your pages. Please do let me know if it somehow shows up again, and I'll look further into it. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 02:38, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
@Nettrom: Thank you so much! I was guessing it was on a subpage somewhere, but couldn't even remember what subpages I had, it's been so long and I've only recently returned for minor corrections here and there. I went ahead and deleted all of those userboxes as I'm not transcluding it onto my user page anymore. Thanks! Ryan Vesey 16:38, 8 May 2021 (UTC)
@Ryan Vesey: I often use the "all pages with prefix" search tool for this. It can be found by following the "Special pages" link on the left sidebar of any Wikipedia page. To the issue of your subpages, I prefilled this search query in user space with your username followed by a slash. Hopefully that will help. Happy editing! – voidxor 18:55, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Opentask

Greetings, SuggestBot. You haven't updated {{Opentask}} the past few days. Is everything okay? Coming back soon? Hope all is well. Take care. --PFHLai (talk) 00:55, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Hey PFHLai, great to hear from you! Thanks for letting me know that SuggestBot wasn't feeling well. I try to keep an eye on it, but somehow lost track of its updates. Since you got in touch I was able to go check out what was happening and get the bot back to making its normal updates. Thanks again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 04:11, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Thank you very much, Nettrom. Glad to see that SuggestBot is back to its old self again. Excellent! Thanks, again. Cheers! --PFHLai (talk) 11:43, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Bot Help

Hi Nettrom and your wonderful bot. I had received SB suggestions for some time before removing it from my Talk while I was going to be offline for a while and didn't need the suggestions. When I came back, I re-added the code, but the Bot hasn't come back. Is there something new I should change? I don't think anything else about the page has changed since the Bot's last visit. Thanks! Star Mississippi 18:04, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi @Star Mississippi, thank you for the kind words and for using SuggestBot! I'm sorry that the bot hasn't been working the way you'd expected. Looking into the issue I noticed that the configuration template was also on User talk:Star Mississippi/Archive 2, so the bot's been dutifully posting suggestions there every month over the past year. I removed it in this edit and verified that there aren't any other archived talk pages it's on, so the template on your talk page should now be the only one. SuggestBot should stop by again in 3 days and post them to your talk page, in the meantime there's a reasonably fresh set of suggestions at the bottom of that talk page archive. I hope this helps, let me know if things aren't working and I'll do my best to figure out why it isn't! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:42, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
Thank you! On top of my lost suggestions, I also learned an important lesson: archives don't get auto watched. I'll work through the ones the Bot left, and it look forward to its return to my Talk. Thanks again for solution and quick response. Star Mississippi 19:30, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
Thanks again Nettrom. Happy to confirm the Bot returned. Star Mississippi 23:28, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Suggestions have stopped

Hi @Nettrom:, How are you doing? The bot is not suggesting pages anymore to me since last month. I have set my frequency to two weeks. I should have been suggested 2-3 times in that period. Would you be able to look into that? Regards--Chanaka L (talk) 11:34, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi @Chanakal: I'm doing well, thanks! Sorry to hear SuggestBot hasn't been sending you suggestions as you expected. I looked into it, and what's happening is that we stop sending them because SuggestBot's suggestion post is fairly substantial, and your talk page is large (more than 256kB). We put this in place to not keep posting and create very large pages. If you archive or delete some of the old SuggestBot posts to your talk page, the bot should stop by again a few hours later.
Thanks for bringing this up, because I've previously been working on using a different approach that doesn't result in such a large post on people's pages. This is a good motivator to spend some time on that again to make it happen! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:39, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply @Nettrom:. I archived my talk page and added the autoarchiving template. Hope the bot will resume the suggestions now. I will let you know if there is any problem. Cheers!--Chanaka L (talk) 05:08, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

not working

Hi, I put the template on my User Talk page. And nothing happens. My User Talk page is showing nothing. Did I do something wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Stanj1992

--Stanj1992 (talk) 17:54, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi @Stanj1992, thanks for trying out SuggestBot! Looks like you did everything right, it just took a few minutes for the suggestions to arrive? There might be some cleanup needed on our end, so I'll look into that next time I do some maintenance work. Thanks again for trying it out, and let me know if you have other questions. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:49, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
Thank you! You were right, the list showed up. What a great tool! Thank again. --Stanj1992 (talk) 15:21, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Can't get suggestions

I put the text on my talk page a week ago with no luck. Then took it out today and put it back in a separate edit; still nothing. Am I doing something wrong? Tisnec (talk) 00:08, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

@Tisnec: Hi and thanks for wanting to use SuggestBot! I'm sorry to hear it's not working, I'm investigating what's going on here as from a first glance things should've been working just fine. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:17, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
Let me know if you have any luck. Tisnec (talk) 05:31, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
I just fixed another issue, and will keep an eye on the bot over the next few days. Hopefully you'll have some suggestions before I'm able to come back and take a look at things, or I'll have more work to do. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:01, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
It worked, thanks! Tisnec (talk) 05:48, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
Wonderful! Thanks again for getting in touch about it so I could dig into the problem and get it fixed, and for your patience as it took me a while to get it resolved! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:14, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Change code per closed RM

Hi. I closed the RM at Wikipedia talk:Community portal/Opentask § Requested move 18 March 2022 as "move proposal succeeded". Pinging @EpicPupper and Nettrom: Please feel free to change any code as required, and to move the page accordingly. Thanks! ---CX Zoom(he/him) (let's talk|contribs) 06:13, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

PR opened. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 06:18, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for the PR, @EpicPupper! I've paused SuggestBot for now while I get this taken care of. Will start by moving the page. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 12:20, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
I moved the page, then merged the PR and did a test run of the bot that was successful. Reinstated the twice-hourly cron job updating the page and it looks like things are working just fine. Let me know if you see something broken so I can go fix it. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:17, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
Great to hear! 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 16:24, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

What's up with the "Quality' ratings?

I'm not sure what the star ratings are supposed to mean. Is there any page that explains them? If not, can one be created? (Maybe it could be switched to use the Stub-Start-C-B-GA-A-FA system.. that's arguably less intuitive but it's definitely more Wikipedia. The bot appears to predate that system, however.) casualdejekyll 21:46, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Casualdejekyll, thanks for reaching out about this, and thanks for your patience as well! I did look this up so I could reply to you, but then left it and suddenly a week went by. The quality ratings are explained here. One star is Stub or Start, two stars is C or B, three stars is GA or FA. We also check if an article is labelled GA/FA/A on the talk page, and that overrides any predictions from ORES. We don't use A-class because there's too few of those articles to get good predictions for them. I see that the documentation for this can be improved, so I'm making a note to work on that during the upcoming Hackathon. Hope this helps! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:50, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Not getting proper suggestions

I'm trying to get suggestion from SugesstBot, but not getting any proper suggestions despite my request. Recently I used 

 {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:Jihadist groups in India|Category:Kashmiri militants}}

and it gave me a table of nonrelevant topics. --NeverTry4Me - TT Page 05:42, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi @NeverTry4Me, thanks for wanting to use SuggestBot, and also for letting me know about this! I can confirm that the categories aren't picked up as we'd expect so the bot instead reverts back to using your edit history as the basis for the suggestions. I'll investigate further and report back when I've gotten it working again. Thanks again for reporting it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:56, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
Sure thing. I am loving the SuggestBot as it is helping me to edit. :) Regards- NeverTry4Me - TT Page 03:43, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
Hi again @NeverTry4Me! I wanted to let you know that I did some work yesterday to fix this issue. Based on this test edit, it looks like these categories get picked up and the suggested articles are more relevant? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:04, 21 May 2022 (UTC)
@Nettrom My bad luck again. Not in User:NeverTry4Me/To Do page. Also, it is suggesting the well sourced articles as Add sources. - Signed by NeverTry4Me Talk 02:01, 22 May 2022 (UTC)
@NeverTry4Me: Thank you for going through them and noticing the Add sources issues! I took a look at the bot's configuration, and I think this comes from it using Category:All articles lacking reliable references as a way to find articles "lacking sources". After checking a handful of articles in that category, I noticed that many use inline templates that are hard to find (e.g. citation needed). I also checked the six articles suggested to you and saw that only one of them had a source-related template at the top, which is the kind of articles we prefer suggesting because then it's obvious what the article needs. I've removed that category from the configuration now.
I also took at look at the previews for the articles you were suggested and examined our logs to see how the suggested articles were found. From what I can tell, this is a good test case for us because the things that are relevant appear to be found through matching text, whereas the things that aren't were found by the other algorithms we have. I've been interested in properly merging our suggestions rather than pick ones from a single algorithm for a long time, so this might further motivate me to dig into that and then rerun this. Thanks again for bringing up these issues! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:44, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Some user experience feedback

Hi, thanks for this great bot. I have been trying it a couple of times and I wanted to provide some suggestions:

  • I didn't realize exactly how the bot would be working, i.e. that I would receive a message from the bot a few moments after publishing the request template. Maybe this can be explained in the documentation, which is otherwise clear and simple.
  • It would be nice if the request template could visualize a message like: "This is a SuggestBot request, it will be processed shortly."
  • I think it would be useful if the original parameters of the requested could be reported in he response, e.g. "SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. It was called with these parameters {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Arcade video games|Nintendo Entertainment System games}} Have fun!"

Thanks for the bot, which is very nice. --CristianCantoro (talk) 10:18, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi @CristianCantoro, thanks for trying out the bot, and thanks for these excellent suggestions for improving the user experience! I've made notes of all of these and agree that they'd all make the user experience better. The first one should be relatively straightforward. I'll look into the second one to make sure it'll work with our setup. I definitely agree that having the template just be empty space isn't helpful to the user, and I want to double check that it also works with our Teahouse template setup. The last one might be a little trickier, but I also want to look into that since it'll make it obvious if something's broken and the suggestions don't make sense based on those parameters. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:29, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

Hi, SuggestBot. May I ask why you keep returning the same red link to The Internal Market onto {{Open task}}, please? It seems a little strange to have a link to a deleted page posted there again and again. Hmmm.... --PFHLai (talk) 01:27, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

SuggestBot, you have posted the same red link five edits in a row at OpenTask. This is very odd. Non-existent wikiarticles don't need wikifying. I am beginning to wonder if you are drawing links from a small and outdated pool of candidate articles to wikifying. @Nettrom:. --PFHLai (talk) 13:48, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
@PFHLai: Thanks so much for reporting this! I'll pause the bot and investigate. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:49, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
@PFHLai: The replicated English Wikipedia databases on Toolforge are lagging behind the actual wiki, so on them the article you mentioned hasn't yet been moved to the Draft namespace. I've found the phab task that discusses it and it sounds like it'll most likely catch up during the weekend. Until then, I'll keep the bot off so this problem doesn't keep happening. Thanks again for reporting it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:00, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
Thank you, Nettrom, for looking into this issue. It seems that this issue will vanish soon. That's good. Thanks, again. Cheers! --PFHLai (talk) 17:34, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

De-emphasize stubs suggestion (or emphasize important stubs)

I feel that SuggestBot should suggest fewer stubs to improve. 3,760,959 out of 6,613,850 articles are assessed as stubs. This is 57% of the articles on Wikipedia. Instead of just recommending stubs in a user's areas of interest, the bot should not recommend stubs with 9 or fewer pageviews per day. This will focus the users on neglected articles that would be dissatisfying to lots of readers. Alternately, the bot could not recommend stubs marked as Low-Importance on their talk pages. Abductive (reasoning) 12:39, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

But, the Delta invariant that was in the list suggested by SuggestBot, such that, it is stub with 9 or fewer pageviews per day, and it needed to be merged. --SilverMatsu (talk) 17:09, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
I see what you are saying, but the exception proves the rule. One would really need to ask, what proportion of each category of SuggestBot suggestions are acted upon by editors? Taking the example you linked to, seeing Quadratic equation marked as Unencyclopaedic, or Environmentalism marked as Merge, would get more interest from editors. Why? For the same reasons as the orders of magnitude differences in pageviews between those articles. In other words, articles with 1500 pageviews per day, such as Cucumber, manifestly deserve more timely editor oversight than Delta invariant, which got 1500 pageviews every two years. Abductive (reasoning) 01:08, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Is there a way to increase "temperature"

I signed up for this bot in part because my editing patterns naturally are fairly restrictive. I found my week 1 suggestions fairly perfect, and acted on a few of them, including one gigantic bundle of interconnected articles.

I *think* this might have resulted in me ruining my future SuggestBot predictions. A full half of my articles are very similar to my articles from Week 1, when I'M looking for a bit different.

So I guess my feature request/question is.. Is there a way to adjust the "temperature" for your own suggestion request? (I believe I'm using the term correctly, have last heard of it in AI-LLVM contexts). As in, for me, I'd like to see more "dissimilar articles" than the ones I already edit, so I'd put a "high temperature" and let the bot go wild(er). Some of which will be terrible fits and others would be great. And other editors could use default or "cold temperatures" which would give them more similar articles to what they have. Less randomness, more good fits.

I feel like SuggestBot should inherently have these numbers or something similar as part of the codebase already, but I am not aware how hard the implementation would be Soni (talk) 02:26, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Suggestion: Time stamp sections

My talk page is mostly posts from SuggestBot, but the section headers are all the same. Could you add time stamps to them, so they're easier to tell apart? Moonreach (talk) 20:10, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Another open task for the open task pile

Some years ago, I rescued Template:Expert needed from the flames of TfD, with the promise that all of the (basically useless) invocations of the template that didn't specify subject areas would be appropriately categorized. It turns out there were a thousand and change of these, so afterwards, I had a very unexciting couple of days clearing them out. Anyway, this brings us to the present: Category:Articles needing unspecified expert attention. This currently has 18 pages in it, and they don't accumulate that fast (because of how categories work, I don't have a good way of looking at its state in the last few months, or how many people are helping clear it out). I think it might be helpful to put them in {{Open task}} or something. What do you think? jp×g 08:00, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

No longer working?

Hello! I have the bot set up to run on User:RTao/SuggestBot once a week, but it hasn't updated in two weeks now. Any idea what might be going on? Thanks in advance.  — RTao (talk • contribs) 04:57, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping on this, @RTao! Something had broken a while back and made subscribers no longer get the suggestions. Things should be back up and running now. If you haven’t received the suggestions, please let me know and I’ll look into it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:32, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
It's working now! Thanks again.  — RTao (talk • contribs) 18:54, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Not working?

Hello. I have tried using SuggestBot on my talk page, but for whatever reason, nothing happened. I have not had any issues in the past. Is the bot down right now or are there any issues? Aoba47 (talk) 04:57, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

@Aoba47 I'm having a similar issue. It's been over 15 minutes since I request a one-time list of recommended article. @Nettrom, is there a solution to this soon? I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 00:26, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
@I dream of horses and @Aoba47: thank you so much for bringing this to my attention, and also for your patience while I got this running again! Something caused the bot to go down and unfortunately that happened while I was busy elsewhere so I didn’t have an opportunity to fix it sooner. I’ve restarted the bot, and one of you have already got their suggestions and I suspect the other one to get theirs shortly. I’ll make sure to check in again in a few hours to make sure things are working right. Thanks again for reporting this, and apologies for the delay in fixing this! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:32, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
@Nettrom: mind checking if something's up with this request? Cheers --Treetear (talk) 19:27, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
@Treetear: Thanks for the ping! I've restarted the bot and will keep an eye on it to make sure the request goes through. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:09, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
there is no problem for me dudes.😊👌 Lilitha Sqokwana (talk) 11:58, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

SuggestBot

Suggestbot repeatedly suggesting same articles again and again. Is there anything to do to fix it? Okoslavia (talk) 05:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Broken?

Suggestbot should have been suggesting me edits once a month, but it just doesn't, ever since I added the userbox. Clone commando sev (talk) 04:50, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Bot Hiccup

It hasn't come to me in about a month and it looks like it hasn't left user talk notes in a bit. Any ideas? Thanks! Star Mississippi 03:06, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

@Star Mississippi: Thanks for reporting this! The bot did indeed have a little hiccup, which I’ve taken care of. I’ll keep a close eye on it over the weekend, hopefully you’ll have some more suggestions within the next day. Thanks again, Nettrom (talk) 15:28, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, as always, for the quick response. Star Mississippi 15:47, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
Hi again @Star Mississippi! Looks like there are more issues with SuggestBot at the moment, so what I hoped was an easy fix requires more investigation. I’m unsure when I’ll be able to get that work done, but it’ll be on the top of my mind, and so I hope it’ll be relatively soon. Wanted to at least let you know that I’m aware that it’s not working like it should. Sorry about the delays! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 20:48, 17 October 2023 (UTC)
Thanks so much for this update @Nettrom. Best of luck troubleshooting but absolutely no rush. Plenty of content to keep us all busy. :D Have a good evening. Star Mississippi 01:33, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
The Bot Came Back! Thanks as always for all your work @Nettrom Star Mississippi 02:24, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
@Star Mississippi: You’re welcome, and thanks again for reporting it so I could look into the problem and find a way to fix it! Looks like there are some changes coming on the server side so there might be some more hiccups before the year is over, but they should hopefully be more short lived. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:36, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Enhancement suggestion: suppressing articles by project or category

Hello, Morten. I have an enhancement request that has grown out of a specific use case I became aware of recently: a productive 20-year editor managed to get T-banned on a contentious topic, and is frazzled and tempted to disengage entirely. I'd like to provide some positive feedback, along with very specific suggestions on what to do now, and that's where Suggestbot comes in, but I need an enhancement to make it work in this case. I thought I was going to have to propose "suggest by category or project", but I see that you already have that, which makes this proposal easier to describe, and, I hope, easy to implement.

It is this: you've already got the Project and Category access and parsing done, so I propose to add the inverse of that: specify (only) the projects and categories you want to exclude. A simple UX that occurs to me is this:

  • {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|-World War I|-World War II}}
  • {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|-Category:World War I|-Category:World War II}}

That UX is just the first thing I thought of; maybe you'll think of a better one. A possible downside of this approach, is that the + and - values probably can't be mixed; what would be the interpretation of this, for example:

  • {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|-World War I|Spanish–American War}} ?

Perhaps there would have to be a param-combo restriction of: "use either positive or negative param values, but not both".

While pondering this, my first thought was actually a more complex system of "weights", where you could either maximize or minimize topics by category or project, something like this:

  • {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|World War I:-10|World War II:+3}}

where this would mean: suppress 100% of WW1 articles, and weight WW2 articles by an additional 30% over baseline. This is kind of an "extra credit" option and it's maybe more work than it's worth, but would be a nice way to turn the binary param values that are there now, into a set of dials instead. I'd skip this, unless it's particularly easy to do.

All I really need for my use case is a way to negatively target a topic area by Project/Category in order to keep a valuable editor around who is T-banned in one topic. I have a feeling this could be super useful to any T-banned editor, and if it were made available, ought to be linked right in the notice template that advises an editor of their T-ban. I look forward to your thoughts on this. Mathglot (talk) 04:04, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

P.S. If you need a live user test bed for any changes, feel free to use my User talk page, or create a subpage in my space if you need to run it a lot. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 04:10, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Broken Announcement

SuggestBot is broken, again. The first and last suggestion I got from them was 6 days ago. Roasted (talk) 23:54, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this! I took a look and restarted it so one-time requests should work correctly, and I also checked our logs and saw that subscribers get them as they should. It looks like things are working at the moment. I’ll keep monitoring it, but please let me know if you ask for suggestions and don’t get them. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:59, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
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