Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/GeneralBotability 2

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

Approved.

GeneralBotability 2

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

Time filed: 01:21, Monday, October 11, 2021 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic

Programming language(s): python

Source code available: Not written yet, will be a basic pywikibot script.

Function overview: Mass removal of old IPSock templates

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): one time run

Estimated number of pages affected: estimate 20k-30k. quarry has an upper bound of 44k, but there may be false positives in that query.

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

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

Function details: I would like to do a bot run to mass-remove old {{IPsock}} and {{Ipsock-self}} templates. For the purposes of this bot run, I define "old" as "IP has not made any edits in 2+ years." Wearing my SPI clerk hat, I will say that those templates provide very little value to start with, and there is basically no value in keeping them if the IP has not edited recently. I've removed a handful manually today - every transclusion I've checked has been on an IP that hasn't edited in years, and some of the taggings date back to 2007. If you would like consensus among SPI personnel before approving this, I can start a discussion, but I highly doubt it will be controversial.

Discussion

{{IPSock-self}} doesn't exist. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:59, 11 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Pppery, sorry, mis-capitalized. Fixed. GeneralNotability (talk) 02:08, 11 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Clerks clerking their clerk work makes perfect sense. Primefac (talk) 14:43, 11 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest a username that has "bot" at a word ending. This one doesn't really make it clear that it's a bot. Also some tools like Twinkle use /bot\b/i as the regex check for a bot username (which probably means if someone blocks the bot with twinkle, twinkle wouldn't automatically disable autoblock as it would for other bots). – SD0001 (talk) 16:05, 11 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's clear enough (when I renamed it last year a renamer objected saying "the name indicates it's a bot," to which I had to reply "yes, that's because it is a bot"), and the bot does have a nice userpage indicating it's a bot. With that said, if there's a BAG consensus that it needs a rename, I'll rename it.

Separately,

Trial complete. - all of the bot's recent contribs are part of this trial, examples include Special:Diff/1049557018 and Special:Diff/1049557010. Besides a couple of hiccups in my code, the only anomaly was Special:Diff/1049557951, where it removed the ipsock tag from a user page. Technically, it's not wrong (it is an ipsock tag on something that hasn't edited in 2+ years), but I hadn't considered that there might be registered accounts with ipsock tags. The tags themselves are outright wrong, but there shouldn't be too many (I hope), I'm going to see about making a list of them and fixing them by hand. GeneralNotability (talk) 16:47, 12 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Approved. I only found one potentially problematic change here, but this is a GIGO situation and I suspect rather unlikely to be a recurring issue. On the name front, I see this username and immediately think "oh, this is GN's bot", and do not think it requires a change. Primefac (talk) 07:14, 20 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]