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Hi ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ! I noticed your contributions and wanted to welcome you to the Wikipedia community. I hope you like it here and decide to stay.

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Happy editing! Adakiko (talk) 08:16, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Your link redirects internally and has a "[table “” not found /]" message. Might be a temporary problem with the website.
Please avoid wp:BAREURLS (reasoning given on that page). It is best (in my opinion) to use the wp:template template:cite web. See help:referencing for beginners and wp:citing sources. Cheers Adakiko (talk) 08:21, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

The word you're looking for is Deprecated, not "Bogus", while fixing the LinT errors. It once was a thing, now it's not. Happy editing! GenQuest ^"scribble" 08:04, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. I was using bogus since that's what they are listed as, in the Lint errors page. Will use the word deprecated in edit summary from now on.--ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 08:35, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

No problem. I just haven't seen anyone use that word besides me in the last generation, so it caught my eye. I also wasn't even aware of that list existing. 😊 Thanks for your work here. GenQuest ^"scribble" 15:39, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Hello and best wishes for 2021. You recently made an edit to the page Loggetta del Sansovino. As a result, the two galleries are no longer centred (nor are they flush left). Can you please take a look at the coding and make whatever adjustments are necessary so that the galleries are centred on the page? Thank you.Venicescapes (talk) 11:38, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks @Venicescapes: The galleries are displaying centered in android mobile for me. I had replaced the now obsolete center html tags with CSS, as explained here - Wikipedia:HTML_5#Parser_tags. Looks like the present solution is inconsistent across different devices. I will discuss this them. Meanwhile I have reversed my changes in Loggetta del Sansovino to the previous version. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 12:24, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. Please let me know if you find a solution. Kind regards.Venicescapes (talk) 11:05, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

		The Technology Barnstar
		Thanks for the repetitive and often overlooked gnomish-type of edits you do. The work is much appreciated! GenQuest "scribble" 23:24, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

You're welcome @GenQuest:! I am happy that my gnomish work isn't entirely unnoticed. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 06:06, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.

• The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
• The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
• The Teahouse new editor help space
• Wikipedia Help pages

-- 06:05, Friday, January 15, 2021 (UTC)

Hi ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ, I invite you to engage in a discussion at Talk:Calvin Coolidge#"Served as" vs. "was" to avoid further ping-pong on this choice of language. Let's see if we can develop a consensus through discussion. Cheers, HopsonRoad (talk) 22:29, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Hello. I created account now!. so please don't delete my account. I want to read about Wikipedia English. so please wait. and I'm active in a Persian Wikipedia. and please don't delete my account. thank you. If you can help me, please help me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MasoudMalekzadeh (talk • contribs) 16:49, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

@MasoudMalekzadeh: I am not trying to have your account deleted. You posted your entire Curriculum vitae in your sandbox, which is not how it is supposed to be used. So I nominated it for speedy deletion and it was carried out by an Administrator. Please read WP:RESUME and WP:UPNOT. Thanks. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (chat) 17:07, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

so now what i must do to register my account? can u take your delete account? — Preceding unsigned comment added by MasoudMalekzadeh (talk • contribs) 17:18, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

@MasoudMalekzadeh: your account is already registered. You are not in any trouble over the sandbox deletion, so don't worry :-) Just continue normal editing of articles like you would in Persian Wikipedia and you will be fine. If you need any help with English Wikipedia, please ask at Wikipedia:Teahouse. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 17:38, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello MR ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ. How are you? I join now to English Wikipedia. And I cant do my works good. I'm active in Persian Wikipedia. someone told you that delete my account. He/She said true. I know but I join now and I don't know anything. Please don't my account. I will try to know it. Please don't delete my account. If you can help me, please help me to growing in Wikipedia. Thank you very much. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MasoudMalekzadeh (talk • contribs) 19:07, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello and with regards. you told admin that he delete my sand box or my account? and when you said my account what I must do to come back my account? please help me. what I must do? I'm a new user. thank you very much. sincerely yours. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MasoudMalekzadeh (talk • contribs) 19:22, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

MasoudMalekzadeh I told Admin to delete your sandbox, not your account. You can recreate the sandbox anytime for test editing (read WP:UPGOOD). It is common for new users to make some mistakes since they are not familiar with all the rules. So you will be treated leniently since you are new. Your account is not in danger of deletion. You don't have to do anything to "come back" since you are not blocked. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 02:42, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

OK. Thank you very much for guidance me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MasoudMalekzadeh (talk • contribs) 11:55, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello — Preceding unsigned comment added by Soumili Ghosh (talk • contribs) 05:09, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Hello @Soumili Ghosh: is there anything specific you want to discuss? ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 05:12, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

This edit is from 13 April, so you may have fixed it by now, but you might need to check your script. It left a bunch of errors. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:16, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Jonesey95 for bringing this to my attention. Yes, it was an error in my script. I had forgotten to replace the closing font with span. I have fixed it now. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 16:00, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

If you have a regex pattern for User:1111tomica's signature, please add this change. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:30, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

I had done this manually while using desktop mode in mobile phone. It is a bit hard to check for other errors in small screen. If I was using laptop I might have noticed misnesting and fixed it too. I type <font in the "search in page" option of Opera browser. It takes me to the relevant part. I run the script if I notice that it is one of signatures present in it, otherwise I do it manually. If I see a signature 5-6 times, I add it to my script.

For curiosity, do you always check for all type of Linter errors in a page? I just look for the ones that I see in a Lint error list. I fix others if they catch my eye, but do not actively look for them. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 16:24, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

After my initial edits, I use LintHint to check for all Linter errors on a page, and I usually fix as many as I can. I can't always fix them all, but if I'm fixing font tags and there is one unclosed <p> tag left, I'll fix it. Some of the font tags are too complex for my scripts, so I leave them for a second round (or for you!). – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:01, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Here's another one in which your edit created a new error. I don't always fix all of the errors present, but I do try to use LintHint before saving to see if I have created new errors. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:41, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

I will start using LintHint too. I use preview when not sure but it is not always useful for catching these. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 16:56, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

I fixed many hundreds of Linter errors in userboxes way back in mid-2018 by looking through lists of userboxes, but there are many that are not listed anywhere. I just stumbled across a page that had a hundred or so userboxes on it, and there were a few dozen Linter errors. By opening all of the transcluded userboxes, I was able to fix the Linter errors on that page and on any other page that trancludes those boxes. If you look at User:Nutcracker100, for example, you will see 27 errors from userboxes.

We know that Template space is clean now, so you only have to look at userboxes that live in User space. As a place to start, there are 8,700 userboxes listed on this page.

One tip: to center the text in |info= in a userbox, use |info-op=text-align: center – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:17, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Jonesey95, I found a better way to narrow down the search. This search shows that currently there are 193 pages in user namespace that has "/ubx" in the title and that use center tags. Similarly 299 pages with "/userbox" and 2,221 pages with "/userboxes" in the title. Some that show up in the /userbox and /userboxes search aren't actually userboxes, though they can help locate more. Other obsolete tags can also be searched this way. I have largely avoided Linting in userspace, though will help with this whenever I can since they are transcluded. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 04:47, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

If you want to continue to make bulk changes to user signatures, you should probably use a bot account and request a bot flag at WP:BRFA. There are also already several bots that already do this, or are working on doing it that you may be able to just give the parameters too (for example see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DoggoBot in progress). — xaosflux ^Talk 11:07, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Xaosflux, I already have a bot account MalnadachBot to make bulk signature Lint fixes. It is currently authorised to fix 8 signatures in over 100k pages. About 20k is done and it will take me a month to finish the rest. I am using my main account for lesser used signatures that cannot individually be submitted for BRFA. Currently I am aiming to eliminate "Tidy font link bug" errors in File talk, Portal talk, Category talk and Mediawiki talk namespaces per Firefly Linter count. I figured it won't cause much disruption since they are less watched namespaces and I do about 100-150 edits per day. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 12:23, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Especially if limited in scope, you could ask for a more general BRFA (e.g. Fix Tidy font link bug in editor signatures on these 4 ns's) - if there is any significant volume left to do that is. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:30, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Xaosflux, the 4 ns combined have 2,500 errors, which are spread across approximately 1,500 pages. I welcome your advice whether a bot task is necessary for this or I can continue with main account. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 14:06, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

It's borderline enough, so really depends on how quick you want to resolve it, and if you think it may be needed recurring in the future. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:12, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

New errors of this type is rare, so it won't recur in future. I think it is sufficient if I spread this over a month by doing 50 pages per day to prevent any watchlist problems. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 15:29, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

	The Original Barnstar
	Thank you for fixing obsolete center tags. Grimes2 (talk) 12:45, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

My pleasure Grimes2 :) --ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 13:04, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Hey ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ. Thanks for the editing assists at American Revolutionary War. Last post you mentioned a "Lint Report"? I understand from its Wiki page write up that the report includes who does what wrong how often. I'd like to a) lend a hand making some corrections, and b) figure out what my errors may be so I can stop heedlessly proliferating them across the Encyclopedia in my contributions -- several candidates at Norman K. Risjord, lately. Thanks for any assist in advance. s/TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 19:34, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

TheVirginiaHistorian, thanks for your interest. Both American Revolutionary War and Norman K. Risjord pages showed up in error reports because they used <center>...</center> for centering image captions. Center tags are obsolete in HTML5, which means popular web browsers are going to drop support for it in future. Replacing them now will make sure pages continue to display properly when that happens. So everytime center tags are added to an article, it shows up in Special:LintErrors/obsolete-tag. To prevent that, you can center captions using {{center}}. {{center|caption}} instead of <center>caption</center>.

To get started on helping fix Lint errors, I would recommend obsolete tags as the easiest one. You can see WP:HTML5 for search links and instructions on how to replace them. There are many other types of Lint errors which can be seen in Special:LintErrors. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 03:46, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi, ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ, thanks for fixing the < center > tags on the articles about Canadian appeals to the JCPC. When I did those tables, I knew it was an obsolete code, but no matter how many times I tried using the new codes, the formatting for the tables went wonky. (I am not a computer-literate person, if that wasn't already obvious.) So I used the obsolete code, hoping someone who knew coding better would come along at some point and fix it. Sorry to put you to the trouble; much appreciated! Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 22:25, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

I see your bot has nearly finished task 3. I was just having a look at the html5-misnesting lint issues and spotted a few that you might want to consider for your next bot task. -- WOSlinker (talk) 11:26, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Text	Search
<sub><span style="text-shadow:#ffd700 0.14em 0.14em 0.14em"><font color="black">[[User talk:Sven Manguard|'''Talk''']]</font></sub></span>	999 items
<center><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt"><font size="18">'''[[WP:IND|WikiProject India]]'''</center></font></span>	668 items
<center><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt"><font size="18">'''[[Mole Day|Happy Mole Day]]'''</center></font></span>	80 items
<sub>[[User talk:You Can Act Like A Man|<span style="color:orange">'''Feudalist''' </span></sub>]]	195 items

Thanks WOSlinker, I will do this after task 3 is complete. I have bot approval from Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MalnadachBot 2 to fix any signature giving high priority errors. So I can fix these signatures without filing new BRFAs for individual signatures. I have completed 10 of the 50 signatures for which I had originally filed task 2. Once the remaining 40 are over, it is open season on all signatures giving tidy font-link bug error. You can add any signatures you find to User:MalnadachBot/Signature submissions. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 12:15, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

The bot edited Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Discoveries/Log/2007/October to remove a single error. With a few more regular expressions already suggested at User:MalnadachBot/Signature submissions, it could have fixed the rest of the errors in a single edit. Please consider this possibility so that the bot does not have to revisit these pages. Thanks for running the bot! – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:21, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

You mean the general purpose regexes? They cant be used in fully automated bot runs. They work fine most of the time, but a few cases aren't handled correctly and need manual review. For example when there are nested font tags or when there are font tags both inside and outside a link. Besides false positives, there is no easy way of using general regexes to account for font tag combinations that use size attribute. So they will have to be ignored and a signature may get partially replaced as a result. That said, I load up 5 specific signatures to replace at a time in AWB and make list for them. So if any of them are present in a page, they get replaced at the same time (chances of this happening is low though). I tried once by including 10 signatures, it slowed the bot by increasing processing time. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 06:17, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

No, I mean something like User:Jonesey95/AutoEd/doi.js, line 404 and following. To fully avoid false positives, the first color specification should probably be something like \<font colou*r\=\"\#[a-fA-F0-9]+\"\>. You could also replace named colors with the patterns listed at "font color starting with g–z" and "all-alpha font color where second letter is not a–f". Those should not result in any false positives, if I have the logic right. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:36, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Jonesey95, you have to be careful as <font color="#abcde"> and <font color="#abcd"> are valid but <span style="color:#abcde"> and <span style="color:#abcd"> are not. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:47, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough. I think you can check for exactly six characters with the regex. That won't get everything, but it will get a lot. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:49, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

I will test them in sandbox against a variety of cases in a few days and see if any issues arise. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 15:09, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Jonesey95: I checked the regexes in User:Jonesey95/AutoEd/doi.js without any modification here. As noted above, hex codes with 4, 5 and 8 digits cause false positives. Other false positives with colors are hex codes without # symbol, color names like jade that aren't valid in CSS.

For nested font tags like [[User:Abc|<font color="green">A<font color"green">b</font>c</font>]], only the inner font tag was replaced. For font tag both inside and outside a link such as <font color="green">[[User:Abc|<font face="Arial">Abc</font>]]</font>, only the tag inside the link was replaced. Misnested tags such as [[User:Abc|<font face="Arial">'''Abc</font>''']] which was replaced with [[User:Abc|<span style="font-family:'Arial';">'''Abc</span>''']]. These do not cause new errors but would need a further fix.

Then there are many cases that are skipped. I am not worried about whole signatures that are skipped, my concern is when individual signatures are partially replaced. For example <font color="green">[[User:Abc|Abc]]</font> <font color="green"><sup>[[User talk:Abc|talk]]</sup></font> would get replaced with [[User:Abc|<span style="color:green;">Abc</span>]] <font color="green"><sup>[[User talk:Abc|talk]]</sup></font>. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 16:03, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Editors sure are creative, aren't they? I know that my regexes are not optimal; when I am fixing signatures, I often skip changes that my script proposes but that I know are wrong or woefully incomplete. It seems like we are going to have to build sets of regexes, in specific orders, to be able to fix problems like those above if we want to use scripts. I don't want to fix these problems by hand, because it's far too much work, and I don't trust that I will make error-free mass edits. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:12, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

We can use insource search to locate known signature patterns that aren't handled correctly, extract individual signatures from it and have the bot replace them. This way would be better since there are too may even for script assisted edits. So far the bot has made 200k edits and fixed ~ 480k errors. This is already in a far larger scale than ever done before, so I am happy with the progress. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 05:39, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

If you ever run out of things for your bot to fix, I've got a lint error on quite a few "Articles for deletion" pages, where they are missing the closing italics from the footer. Doing a search for this gave over 300k results. So, only really a task to consider when you've got nothing better for your bot to do. -- WOSlinker (talk) 14:03, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Ahecht had tried to do this in Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Ahechtbot 4 and got stalled. I won't run out of things anytime soon. Currently there are just under 1.9 million tidy font link bug errors left. Then there are medium priority errors of which there are 700k misnested tags. So there are still plenty of more important errors for the bot left. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 15:31, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Please see Maile66/RFA. This was my user sub page from my 2016 RFA. And the bot says it "Fixed Lint errors in signatures". This is not the first time I noticed this bot reaching back years to correct something on my user sub pages. Why does the bot need to fix what it sees as signature errors that happened years ago? This seems like a non-productive use of the bot's reach. Also, I'm wondering why the bot needs to be concerning itself with any user's sub page, other than perhaps the current user talk page. — Maile (talk) 18:19, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) The bot has been approved to fix high-priority Linter errors in all namespaces. Compare the following example code, typical of many old signatures:

<font color="green">[[User:Maile66|— Maile ]]</font>

[[User:Maile66|<span style="color:green;">— Maile </span>]]

You can copy the code to your sandbox and preview to see the difference. The first rendering uses font tags to attempt to color the text, which used to work in Tidy but no longer works with the new Remex renderer. The bot is fixing the syntax so that editors' signatures render as they were originally intended. Because of changes to the underlying MediaWiki code, deletion of templates, and other changes, old pages sometimes need to be tidied up, regardless of what namespace they reside in. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:01, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Most of the bot's edits are in User talk, Talk, Wikipedia and Wikipedia talk namespaces. Those in User namespace tend to be lesser in number because there aren't many signatures there. Lint errors, especially those marked as high priority in Special:LintErrors, are fixed sitewide because they cause pages to render differently from what was intended. Some of them make pages unreadable (see a particularly bad example here) and are an accessibility problem for older devices and screen readers. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 05:27, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

If someone's signature stops looking the way it was intended because that "no longer works with the new Remex renderer", the problem is with the renderer failing to faithfully produce the original author's intent. It's a loss of fidelity. Having your bot blunder around like this in ancient pages is "fixing" the problem by mangling the historic record. Fixing markup errors that prevent a page from being readable at all is reasonable, but swapping font tags for styles en masse is not.

You should exclude it from trying to edit anything in my user space, because if it touches my old user talk pages I will revert it every time, as I have several times already.  — Scott • talk 22:37, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

My bot isn't mangling history, it is preserving it. Anyway, placing {{nobots}} in your user talk archives will cause the bot to skip it. There are some other bots that fix Lint errors like this, the nobots template will cause them to ignore it too. I can add this to all your archives, if you are ok? ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 01:56, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

		The Technology Barnstar
		Brilliant job fixing the table codes and lint errors at List of K-pop songs on the Billboard charts. Makes editing a lot easier!--Bonnielou2013 (talk) 23:50, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

• And a question. For the color correction for "-style="background:palegreen;" (a space was added at the beginning of each affected row).......should the space be there? The rest of the rows in the table do not have a space at the beginning, nor does the row where you made lint error corrections for the "red" color. Again, either way it was a great improvement.--Bonnielou2013 (talk) 23:57, 18 August 2021 (UTC) Correction, for the rows where you corrected lint errors for the "red color" (a space was added there, too).--Bonnielou2013 (talk) 00:19, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

  Bonnielou2013, thanks for the kind feedback :)

  Regarding space at the beginning of a row, it is purely optional and make no difference to the rendered page. I add it because it makes the wikitext easier to read. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 08:06, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer, keep up the good work!--Bonnielou2013 (talk) 08:28, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Hello, thanks for getting the bot to fix my signature ... it did interesting things to my watchlist but that's OK. Is there a reason you leave behind a few instances of the bad signatures? Like my search result list and NuclearWarfare's? Is it about the "roughly 100 instances" limit, or something else? Graham87 13:34, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Graham87, thanks for the message. The remaining are leftovers from pages the bot skipped. The bot fixes signatures in 98-99% of pages. I know of 4 cases where it skips a page -

1. The signature is wrapped in nowiki, pre or syntaxhighlight tags
2. The page has {{nobots}} template
3. The page has characters from unicode private area, because AWB cannot process such pages
4. When the page is under full protection

For the first case, the signature usually should not be replaced. Second and third cases need to be replaced manually. Fourth case needs to be handled an Adminbot or an Admin to do it manually. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 14:18, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Hmmm. Looking more closely at the results for my signature, a lot of the pages with characters in the private use area contain filelakeshoe's old signature (e.g. the bit inside the webdings font in this edit). Should those perhaps be replaced with the hex equivalent (F0F6), or something, in some process that obviously doesn't use AWB (perhaps JWB)? Graham87 11:51, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

My device is unable to display that character. This search shows the signature is present in 456 pages. It has obsolete font tag which gives a Lint error, so that can be replaced in the edit too. This is a small enough bot task that it may be speedy approved. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 12:22, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Checking in my sandbox, it seems  will replace the character (I can't know for sure since it doesn't display in my device). ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 12:42, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

There's 787 with a slightly different search. -- WOSlinker (talk) 14:03, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Will you take this bot task? Javascript should be able to handle it. It is worth considering a task to replace all signatures having private use area characters, assuming there is a way to search for them. Fewer pages will be skipped then. I just checked, AWB is able to process pages when the hex equivalent is present. Wikipedia:CHECKWIKI/016 dump tracks these characters but only in mainspace. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 14:38, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I can do those listed, but I haven't got anything to search for others. Just doing a search for that single character ends with a timed out error. I'll raise a bot request soon. -- WOSlinker (talk) 15:00, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

I have asked a question about searching them in VPT [1]. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 15:56, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

My bot account has updated about 780 pages now. So you could try Graham87's left over pages again if you wanted to. -- WOSlinker (talk) 08:41, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

The bot fixed 11 more of Graham's signature. 88 pages left now. Checking one of the remaining pages, I found another signature with PUA character that is present in 496 pages. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 09:34, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

I'll get those done soon. With a different search, I can find 1080. -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:25, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Once the existing run is complete, I think you'll need some further runs with different regexs for pages such as User talk:Erfankhan. -- WOSlinker (talk) 20:17, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

This pattern is giving 65,000 results. Along with task 5, fixing this will reduce the number of table tag errors in User talk namespace to about 17k. I will file a BRFA soon. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 06:46, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

BRFA filed ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 10:57, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

I was looking at what was going to be left after your bot finishes task 6 and I found another 700 which are similar to the previous tasks but without the <!-- Bug --> tag. -- WOSlinker (talk) 12:07, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

I will just bundle this with task 6. Bot policy does allow operators to make minor tweaks to improve a task, which this is. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 14:55, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

There are more welcome welcomes that could do with looking at. For example:570 with #99CC00 for a background color. Also 211 with #f9f9f9 and 175 with #ffffbd -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:56, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Will submit a BRFA after few days along with some newsletters and invitation templates that have deletable table tag. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 05:18, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

There's a number of pages with class="MainPageBG". I've listed a few examples at User:WOSlinker/MainPageBG but there's probably more. -- WOSlinker (talk) 06:54, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, will include them too. While searching for welcome templates, found 104k pages having '''<tt>{&#123;helpme&#125;}</tt>''', which can be replaced with {{tlc|helpme|bold=on}}. This would be a task for after higher priority errors are fixed. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 14:05, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Flexible-fuel vehicle has been nominated for an individual good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Chidgk1 (talk) 09:25, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

... at Talk:Mario Andretti/Archive 1? I've just created it out of the old page history and there are probably quite a few Lint errors there. Thanks! Graham87 10:15, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Sure. This page has a signature giving high priority Lint error. I will add it to the bot task queue, should be fixed in 3 days. There are some other signatures in the page with low priority Lint errors which are outside the scope of my bot. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 11:12, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ, hope all is well with you. Thanks for your work on MalnadachBot. The arbitration clerk team has a system that reports all edits to arbitration-related pages to certain clerks and arbitrators, including me. While MalnadachBot does important work by removing lint errors, every edit that it makes on arbitration-related pages is reported in real time to a number of people, and it can drown out others' edits. One possible solution: would it be possible to "batch" all of the bot's edits on pages starting with "Wikipedia:Arbitration" or their associated talk pages, so we only have one day where the bot floods the feed (and then it's over)? As it is now, every day for weeks the bot has been flooding the tracking feed. KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 17:33, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

@L235: thanks for the message. I was not aware that there is a system that reports edits to Arbitration pages and bot edits were causing inconvenience with it. For now I will have the bot skip Arbitration pages.

As for fixing all errors in one go, it is possible but not with my bot. As can be seen in the #Suggestion to include more regular expressions so that the bot does not have to revisit pages section above, there are too many variations and unique scenarios for this to be done with in a fully automated bot task. So this will have to be a manual bot task; script assisted editing with the help of LintHint so that everything can be fixed in a single edit. This search shows there are 1,611 Arbitration subpages and their talk pages. Considering that lots of old Arbitration pages are under full protection, this will have to be an Adminbot task. Perhaps WOSlinker is interested to take this up? ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 03:33, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Actually searching only for high-priority Lint errors, there are 294 pages. If a Adminbot task for all pages is not possible, this is something I can fix in one go with some preparation. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 11:26, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks very much for looking into this. Whatever you decide, the pause has been helpful so far. Best, KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 21:54, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Hello! I'm an admin on SqWiki and lately was trying to lower a bit the number of lint errors we have on our community. I asked around and was told that your bot was one of the bots helping in that aspect here. Would your bot be able to help in our community? If yes, would you consider making a request there so it gets flagged and starts working? (I can help with the process.) Thanks in advance! :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:53, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: I will take a look at sqwiki and see what can be done by bots. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 03:26, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Regarding your edit of 14:39, 1 October 2021 of MediaWiki talk:Ipboptions/Archive 1, the <tt> and <samp> tags are not equivalent. As explained at mw:Help:Lint errors/obsolete-tag, <samp> is for computer output. For general use, use the template {{mono}}. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:41, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

I agree samp isn't the best option semantically, but isn't it against signature policy to use templates? I suppose it is better to use <span style="font-family: monospace, monospace;">...</span> instead. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 03:21, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

If you are interested, User:UzEE/db-welcome has a lot of lint errors and has been used on about 150 user talk pages. -- WOSlinker (talk) 11:00, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Sure. There are some other welcome templates I found while scouring the font-link bug list in User talk namespace. Will include them in a BRFA. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 11:32, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I spotted another example of a welcome template at User talk:Bodine30 with the table tag should be deleted error. There's 1272 occurences of that. -- WOSlinker (talk) 23:41, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

 Done under the scope of task 10. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 08:28, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

Hello! Voting in the 2021 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 6 December 2021. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate in the 2021 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:43, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, December 2021

BRFA activity by month Welcome to the eighth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Maintainers disappeared to parts unknown... bots awakening from the slumber of æons... hundreds of thousands of short descriptions... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots. Our last issue was in August 2019, so there's quite a bit of catching up to do. Due to the vast quantity of things that have happened, the next few issues will only cover a few months at a time. This month, we'll go from September 2019 through the end of the year. I won't bore you with further introductions — instead, I'll bore you with a newsletter about bots. Overall Between September and December 2019, there were 33 BRFAs. Of these, Y 25 were approved, and 8 were unsuccessful (N2 3 denied, ? 3 withdrawn, and 2 expired). September 2019 Y Monkbot 16, DannyS712 bot 60, Ahechtbot 6, PearBOT 3, Qbugbot 3 · N2 DannyS712 bot 5, PkbwcgsBot 24 · ? DannyS712 bot 61, TheSandBot 4 TParis goes away, UTRSBot goes kaput: Beeblebrox noted that the bot for maintaining on-wiki records of UTRS appeals stopped working a while ago. TParis, the semi-retired user who had previously run it, said they were "unlikely to return to actively editing Wikipedia", and the bot had been vanquished by trolls submitting bogus UTRS requests on behalf of real blocked users. While OAuth was a potential fix, neither maintainer had time to implement it. TParis offered to access to the UTRS WMFLabs account to any admin identified with the WMF: "I miss you guys a whole lot [...] but I've also moved on with my life. Good luck, let me know how I can help". Ultimately, SQL ended up in charge. Some progress was made, and the bot continued to work another couple months — but as of press time, UTRSBot has not edited since November 2019. Article-measuring contest resumed: The list of Wikipedians by article count, which had lain dead for several years, was triumphantly resurrected by GreenC following a bot request. October 2019 Y OAbot 3, DannyS712 bot 47, Pathbot 2, PearBOT 2, DannyS712 bot 59, DannyS712 bot 62, HasteurBot 14, PearBOT 4, WOSlinkerBot 4, MilHistBot 5 Curb Safe Charmer adopts reFill: TAnthony pointed out that reFill 2's bug reports were going unanswered; creator Zhaofeng Li had retired from Wikipedia, and a maintainer was needed. As of June 2021, Curb Safe Charmer had taken up the mantle, saying: "Not that I have all the skills needed but better me than nobody! 'Maintainer' might be too strong a term though. Volunteers welcome!" November 2019 Y BHGbot 4, YiFeiBot 2, DannyS712 bot III 64 · ? PearBOT Old bots do new tricks: DannyS712 bot III 64 prowled redirects, YiFeiBot 2 archived GoCE requests, and BHGbot 4 removed links to portals deleted at MfD (until its authorization was revoked in January at operator BrownHairedGirl's request). December 2019 Y DemonDays64 Bot, DannyS712 bot III 66, Bot1058 6, Monkbot 15, MilHistBot 6, PearBOT 5, DannyS712 bot IV 65 · N2 SportsStatsBot · Xinbenlv bot, SteveBot 8 Redirects to be autopatrolled: A RfC took place at WP:NPP, closing with unanimous consensus that new redirects should be automatically marked as patrolled by bot. DannyS712 wasted no time, and submitted DannyS712 bot III 66 the next day; it passed two days after that. 200,000 bios get short descs: Along a similar vein, Bot1058 6 was approved to remove disambiguation pages from Category:Monitored short pages and a new bot (DemonDays64 Bot) changed lots of http links to https using JavaScript Wiki Browser. One particularly neat task, PearBOT 5, automatically generated short descriptions for more than 200,000 biographies. In the next issue of Bots Newsletter: What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers? What happens when two bots want to clerk the same page? What happens when an adminbot goes hog wild? Will reFill ever get fixed? What's up with ListeriaBot, anyway? Python 3.4 deprecation? In my PyWikiBot? (It's more likely than you think!) These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the January 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out! Signing off... jp×g 04:29, 10 December 2021 (UTC) (You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Please update Wikipedia 2601:647:8001:5C00:E0E3:8196:B8B3:856B (talk) 21:31, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

I just saw a whole lot of edits like https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_deletion%2FList_of_suicide_crisis_lines&type=revision&diff=1067835592&oldid=791938938 This is on a page which has "The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. " Please don't modify closed AfD debates. Stuartyeates (talk) 09:55, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

@Stuartyeates: it is true we must not make content edits to closed discussion. However these are technical edits which do not change the meaning of the closed discussion. Editing archives is allowed for fixing Lint errors, which will make sure the original page rendering is preserved despite changes to mediawiki software over the years. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 10:08, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

It is a modification. The page clearly says not to modify it. Stuartyeates (talk) 09:13, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Gnomes and bots have been fixing Lint errors and making other technical edits to closed discussions for a long time. They are supported by policy (WP:BOTPOL and WP:TPO) and I have bot approval for it. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 09:25, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

What future change to Mediawiki software will make <font> tags no longer renderable? Surely the Mediawiki software (whose developers know that there are WP pages that haven't been updated in over a decade) is smart enough to know that <font color="orange">Hi there</font> is equivalent to <span style="color:orange;">Hi there</span>. What problem are you fixing that is so important that you need to go back to AfDs that were closed 15 years ago to edit people's signatures? —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 07:27, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Scottywong, then why to the devs even create these lint error pages? If there was never going to be a need to fix them then there wouldn't be a need for lint error lists either. -- WOSlinker (talk) 08:53, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Scottywong, your question is better addressed to the people who write the MediaWiki software. They are the ones who chose to mark these articles with Lint errors due to the deprecation of the font tag in HTML 5. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:58, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Just because developers created a way to track and count the use of deprecated HTML tags doesn't necessarily mean that they want or need someone to fix them. This page shows 16.7 million outstanding errors. Is it your intention to make millions of automated edits to fix them? Isn't this the definition of WP:COSMETICBOT? —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 15:41, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, yes, hence the BRFAs. Consensus for a bot to make any particular cosmetic change must be formalized in an approved request for approval. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:07, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

The BRFA was speedily approved less than 3 hours after it was proposed, with no opportunity for discussion. I have opened a discussion at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard#Review of Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MalnadachBot 12 to determine if there actually is community consensus for this bot to operate in violation of WP:COSMETICBOT. I have also paused the bot while this discussion takes place. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 16:50, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Regarding edits like this where a redundant table param is removed; what are these edits giving us? Are those redundant params hurting anything (i.e., WP:NOTBROKEN)? I ask because suddenly my Watchlist is full of these edits, which makes it a little challenging to check to see if the previous edit to an article was unconstructive. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 14:34, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

border, cellpadding and cellspacing table attributes are obsolete in WP:HTML5. If there are valid uses, I would replace them. However I have been removing them when they are used with wikitable class, which cause them to have no effect on page rendering. Replacing / removing these will make pages more compliant with HTML 5, which improves accessibility. So they do have positive effect. (By the way WP:NOTBROKEN is about redirects, which is unrelated to this) ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 15:05, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, you're correct about NOTBROKEN; I was thinking of the WP:BROKE essay. I'm not convinced that removing obsolete params "improves accessibility"; any half-decent HTML5 interpreter will simply ignore them. It would be good if there was some sort of comnunity discussion and consensus before proceeding with large-scale bot(-like) edits. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 15:40, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, January 2022

BRFA activity by month Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Vicious bot-on-bot edit warring... superseded tasks... policy proposals... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots. After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. Due to the vastness, I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. Some people thought this was a good idea, since covering an entire year in a single issue would make it unmanageably large. Others thought this was stupid, since they were getting talk page messages about crap from almost three years ago. Ultimately, the question of whether each issue covers six months or a year is only relevant for a couple more of them, and then the problem will be behind us forever. Of course, you can also look on the bright side – we are making progress, and this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020. Overall In the first half of 2020, there were 71 BRFAs. Of these, Y 59 were approved, and 12 were unsuccessful (with N2 8 denied, ? 2 withdrawn, and 2 expired). January 2020 Yeah, you're not gonna be able to get away with this anymore. Y ST47Bot, Seppi333Bot, Qbugbot 4 · N2 PkbwcgsBot 25, PkbwcgsBot 26 A new Pywikibot release dropped support for Python 3.4, and it was expected that support for Python 2.7 would be removed in coming updates. Toolforge itself planned to drop Python 2 support in 2022. Two new bots dropped in January 2020: ST47Bot, the successor to STBot, and Seppi333Bot, whose task was to perform a weekly update of four "massive" wikitables for WikiProject Molecular Biology. Cydebot, an adminbot operated by Cyde since 2006, was blocked after going berserk on categories that hadn't yet been CfD'd. February 2020 Y AnomieBOT 78, Cewbot 2, DannyS712 bot 67, DannyS712 bot III 63, PearBOT 6, DemonDays64 Bot 2 · N2 PearBOT On February 1, some concerns were raised about ListeriaBot performing "nonsense" edits. Semi-active operator Magnus Manske (who originally coded the Phase II software|precursor of MediaWiki) was pinged. Meanwhile, the bot was temporarily blocked for several hours until the issue was diagnosed and resolved. On February 18, ST47Bot got into a tussle with Amalthea (bot), and had to be partially-blocked from Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cases/Overview. March 2020 Y MajavahBot, SDZeroBot, TheSandBot 6, TheSandBot 7, Bitbotje, FACBot 6, TheSandBot 8, Qbugbot 5, Cewbot 3, SDZeroBot 2, PrimeBOT 31, WikiCleanerBot 12 · AntiCompositeBot In March, a long discussion was started at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy by Skdb about the troubling trend of bots "expiring" without explanation after their owners became inactive. This can happen for a variety of reasons -- API changes break code, hosting providers' software updates break code, hosting accounts lapse, software changes make bots' edits unnecessary, and policy changes make bots' edits unwanted. The most promising solution seemed to be Toolforge hosting (although it has some problems of its own, like the occasional necessity of refactoring code). Some of the twelve bot tasks approved this month were TheSandBot 6 (removing blocked users from Category:Wikipedia usernames with possible policy issues), and TheSandBot 7 (removing unblocked users from Category:Wikipedians who are indefinitely blocked for promotional user names). SDZeroBot 2 was approved to refine geographic stub tags. New bots approved this month were MajavahBot (to patrol WP:EFFPR), SDZeroBot (to merge stub tags), and Bitbotje (fixing DISPLAYTITLE modifications, DEFAULTSORT errors and broken behavior switches in draftspace). April 2020 Y TheSandBot 9, BHGbot 5, DannyS712 bot 69, SDZeroBot 3, ST47ProxyBot, WugBot 4, SDZeroBot 4, DatBot 10, WikiCleanerBot 11, WikiCleanerBot 13, WikiCleanerBot 14, AntiCompositeBot 2, Cewbot 4 · N2 DaedanBot 1 · Creffbot A discussion on the bot noticeboard, "Re-examination of ListeriaBot", was started by Barkeep49, who pointed out repeated operation outside the scope of its BRFA (i.e. editing pages in mainspace, and adding non-free images to others). Some said it was doing good work, and others said it was operating beyond its remit. It was blocked on April 10; the next day it was unblocked, reblocked from article space, reblocked "for specified non-editing actions", unblocked, and indeffed. The next week, several safeguards were implemented in its code by Magnus; the bot was allowed to roam free once more on April 18. ST47ProxyBot joined the stable in April, after a BRFA started in December was finally completed. As an adminbot, it was authorized to block IP addresses belonging to open proxies, public VPN services, and web hosts. New tasks approved for existing bots included BHGbot 5 (diffusing categories), TheSandBot 9 (taking over some tasks from the inactive RonBot), and WugBot 4 (updating data at {{Interactive COVID-19 maps}}). Also, DatBot 10 was approved to scale down non-free SVGs — I didn't even know that was a thing. A discussion at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy was started by Thryduulf about whether WP:BOTCOMM should explicitly specify that bot operators must be responsive to concerns raised on English Wikipedia specifically (as opposed to Phabricator, SourceForge, Toolforge, et cetera). Eventually, the policy was amended to its current form: Issues and enquiries are typically expected to be handled on the English Wikipedia. Pages reachable via unified login, like a talk page at Commons or at Italian Wikipedia could also be acceptable [...] External sites like Phabricator or GitHub (which require separate registration or do not allow for IP comments) and email (which can compromise anonymity) can supplement on-wiki communication, but do not replace it. May 2020 Y MajavahBot 3, DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, Dreamy Jazz Bot 4, QEDKbot, William Avery Bot 2, DannyS712 bot 68, PrimeBOT 32, TheSandBot 10, Bot1058 7, BHGbot 6, EaglesBot 2, Cewbot 5, WikiCleanerBot 17 · N2 MDanielsBot, PhuzBot 3, Gedimon · ? PearBOT 7 MajavahBot 3, an impressively meta bot task, was approved this month for maintaining a list of bots running on the English Wikipedia. The page, located at User:MajavahBot/Bot status report, is updated every 24 hours; it contains a list of all accounts with the bot flag, as well as their operator, edit count, last activity date, last edit date, last logged action date, user groups and block status. Other approvals for this month were William Avery Bot 2 (processing redirects in {{R from scientific name}}), DannyS712 bot 68 (allowing users to schedule bot reminders for themselves), TheSandBot 10 (removing blocked/locked users from Category:User talk pages with conflict of interest notices), Bot1058 7 (updating Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests/Permalink), Dreamy Jazz Bot 4 (adding {{WikiProject Biography|living=no}} to talk pages where their associated article is in a year of death category), and QEDKbot (deleting and nominating empty categories). General syntax fixing tasks were approved for DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, PrimeBOT 32, BHGbot 6, Cewbot 5, and EaglesBot 2, as well as WikiCleanerBot 15, 16, and 17. Seven bots who fell below activity requirements (with neither the bots nor their operators having any edits or logged actions in two years) had their bot flags removed. They were NekoBot, Robert SkyBot, DASHBotAV, VoxelBot, JackieBot, ReferenceBot, and CensusBot. On May 12, EmausBot was blocked. June 2020 Y QEDKbot 2, AnomieBOT 79, WOSlinkerBot 6, Yapperbot 2, Yapperbot, AnomieBOT 80, Dreamy Jazz Bot 5, WikiCleanerBot 18, HasteurBot 15, MusikBot II 4, NoSandboxesHere · N2 RedWarn · ? Seppi333Bot 2 In July 2017, Headbomb made a proposal that a section of the Wikipedia:Dashboard be devoted to bots and technical issues. In November 2019, Lua code was written superseding Legobot's tasks on that page, and operator Legoktm was asked to stop them so that the new code could be deployed. After no response to pings, a partial-block of Legobot for the dashboard was proposed. Some months later, on June 16, Headbomb said: "A full block serves nothing. A partial block solves all current issues [...] Just fucking do it. It's been 3 years now." The next day, however, Legoktm disabled the task, and the dashboard was successfully refactored. On June 7, RexxS blocked Citation bot for disruptive editing, saying it was "still removing links after request to stop". A couple weeks later, a discussion on the bots noticeboard was opened, saying "it is a widely-used and useful bot, but it has one of the longest block logs for any recently-operating bot on Wikipedia". While its last BRFA approval was in 2011, its code and functionality had changed dramatically since then, and AntiCompositeNumber requested that BAG require a new BRFA. Maintainer AManWithNoPlan responded that most blocks were from years ago (when it lacked a proper test suite), and problems since then had mostly been one-off errors (like a June 2019 incident in which a LTA had "weaponized" the bot to harass editors). David Tornheim opened a discussion about whether bots based on closed-source code should be permitted, and proposed that they not. He cited a recent case in which a maintainer had said "I can only suppose that the code that is available on GitHub is not the actual code that was running on [the bot]". Some disagreed: Naypta said that "I like free software as much as the next person, and I strongly believe that bot operators should make their bot code public, but I don't think it should be that they must do so". Two new bots had their first BRFAs approved: Yapperbot, to replace Legobot for handling the Feedback Request Service, and NoSandboxesHere, to remove {{user sandbox}} from articles in draftspace using Category:Non-userspace pages using User sandbox. Conclusion What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers? Will Citation bot ever be set free to roam the project? What's the deal with all those book links that InternetArchiveBot is adding to articles? Should we keep using Gerrit for MediaWiki? What if we had a day for bots to make cosmetic edits? These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the February 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out! Signing off... jp×g 23:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC) (You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)