Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Bender the Bot 6

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was

Approved.

Bender the Bot 6

Operator: Bender235 (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 15:16, Saturday, December 17, 2016 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): AWB

Source code available: upon request

Function overview: replace http:// with https:// for selected domains.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): WPR: Why we should convert external links to HTTPS wherever possible and WPR: Should we convert existing Google and Internet Archive links to HTTPS?

Edit period(s): one-time run

Estimated number of pages affected: ~~100,000 ± 50,000~~ 20,000 ± 5,000

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): Yes

Function details: The Guardian task is about to be finished, so the next group of links I want to convert are to Yahoo! services (their most recent data breach notwithstanding). This includes converting a whole bunch of sub-domains, like news.yahoo.com, movies.yahoo.com and so on. I will focus on one at a time.

Of course the old links automatically redirect one to the HTTPS version, but as I have explained here (#2) we should still convert. I wanted to start this request early because it might involve some discussion, because Yahoo also changed their URL scheme in some, but not all sub-domains (see below).

Discussion

As mentioned above, Yahoo not only switched to HTTPS, but also changed their URL scheme for some subdomains. For instance from news.yahoo.com/ to www.yahoo.com/news/, for example:

http://news.yahoo.com/500-injured-blasts-meteor-falls-russia-105758757.html to https://www.yahoo.com/news/500-injured-blasts-meteor-falls-russia-105758757.html.

and similarly, from movies.yahoo.com/ to www.yahoo.com/movies/, for example:

http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/21-frozen-facts-us-ready-winter-010505978.html to https://www.yahoo.com/movies/blogs/movie-talk/21-frozen-facts-us-ready-winter-010505978.html

However, there is no such change for sports.yahoo.com/, for example

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/big-league-stew/answer-man-aaron-boone-talks-television-jobs-famous-191729232--mlb.html "only" changed to https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/big-league-stew/answer-man-aaron-boone-talks-television-jobs-famous-191729232--mlb.html

So the question now becomes whether I should include these subdomain changes in the AWB conversion rules. It is a question, because we don't have to, since

https://news.yahoo.com/500-injured-blasts-meteor-falls-russia-105758757.html

(notice I only changed the HTTP→HTTPS) also takes one to

https://www.yahoo.com/news/500-injured-blasts-meteor-falls-russia-105758757.html

(now of course without the loss of HTTP referral information).

If you ask me, I'd say we keep it as simple as possible, i.e. I only convert the protocol and leave the "internal" redirects to Yahoo. --bender235 (talk) 15:16, 17 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Are you anticipating any changes related to country specific subdomains or uri strings? — xaosflux ^Talk 15:39, 17 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Unlike our Google links, our Yahoo links (almost) exclusively point to yahoo.com and no other TLD. The only exception I found were a handful of links to yahoo.co.jp, but I'll leave those untouched. Yahoo! Japan actually is a separate website and does not support HTTPS as of today. So to answer your question: I do not anticipate any changes of that kind. --bender235 (talk) 17:40, 17 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial (100 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Please run these while not also running something else, and post the contribution link for the trial edits. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:32, 17 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. Trial completed, results as always here. It seems also that I've overestimated the number of articles affected; corrected the number above. --bender235 (talk) 17:26, 18 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for extended trial (500 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Bender235, apologies for letting this sit - please run one more run and report back if there were any complaints after a few days, if clean we can get this wrapped up. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:38, 5 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. Second trial completed, results as always here. --bender235 (talk) 18:04, 9 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Approved. Task approved. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:34, 13 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.