User talk:Tawkerbot2/mar2006

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Archives @ User talk:Tawkerbot2/archives

**** → See WP:AN (Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Tawkerbot2_bug_fix) for what I'm fairly certain is the explanation of the glitch with Tawkerbot2. -- Curps 16:02, 13 March 2006 (UTC)


Current Status: The recent problems with the Wikipedia database seem to have negatively affected Tawkerbot2. The bot has been temporarily disabled until the problems are solved. - A patch was applied to the bot and it is now operating again. If you've come here because the bot has reverted one or more of your edits or left a warning on your talk page, please restore your edit(s) and ignore the warning message (remove them from your talk page if you wish).

Contents

Dude

The bpt deleted a very large entry I made, it took at least half an hour to type up, it was all legit, it was about sleep disorders. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.93.117.67 (talk • contribs).

Ignore this guy. He did nothing but vandalize, and the bot successfully reverted 6 different edits of his. Great work. (But if you could get the bot to do successive warnings it'd be awesome... the anon's talk page right now almost entirely consists of identical warnings from Tawkerbot2.) Hbackman 01:36, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually, yeah. Looking at the page now that it's been cleaned up to be more readable/understandable, this anon was given two separate final warnings, after which Naconkantari gave him a third-level warning, and my guess is that this happened partly because it wasn't clear what stage of being warned the anon was at because of all the bot messages on the page. Successive warnings from the bot would be useful (even if you can't get it to read warnings that other users give, if you could figure out how many warnings the bot has already put on the user page and have new messages from the bot say "This is the second/third/fourth/etc. time that you have received this message") to avoid this sort of situation, I think. Hbackman 01:41, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Fix your bot

Please fix your bot - see these edits: [1] [2]. I will block it if it continues to revert legitimate edits. Is this completely automated? I'm skeptical that reverting vandalism can ever be performed by a bot. There are many legitimate reasons for removing large amounts of content from an article. Rhobite 16:20, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Please see reply on your talk page -- Tawker 19:31, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Your bot does not work properly, fix it! There is a bug on Wikipedia, that does not show text even when there is content... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.119.105.208 (talk • contribs).

Bug has been fixed and the above IP was reverted by another user not the bot although their edit was page blanking according to the diff. -- Tawker 23:16, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Edit summaries

You should use an edit summary like "reverting probable vandalism", rather than referring to a large blanking, as clearly some edits that the bot reverts are not large blankings. JesseW, the juggling janitor 19:46, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

I was actually suggesting you use a non-specific edit summary; large blankings is more specific than "reverting probable vandalism"... JesseW, the juggling janitor 02:56, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

How does this Current Events blurb come up as vandalism?

This diff: [3]

Not my edit and PFHLai put it back in, but I'm scratching my head as to why it saw that as vandalism. TransUtopian 04:23, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

see my reply on your talk page -- Tawker 09:14, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
That's quite all right. And I see it reverted 2 instances of definite blanking + profanity vandalism on CE too in less than a minute, so that's good. Btw, is the bot configured to recognize the mostly blanking that will happen when the events get archived at the end of the month? I assume so, but just thought I'd ask. TransUtopian 16:59, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Accusation of Vandalism and Plaigarism

My apologies are given for my errors. Must I say dear sir that as a new user I haven't had the time to manage to decode the rules and regulation, for I understand what you are accussing me of in relativity to the section Of Geography in the article India.--ishu 19:25, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for looking after the Typeface page

Dear Tawkerbot, thanks so much for reverting the recent vandalism to the typeface article. I'm trying to bring that and related typography articles up to a much higher standard and am very grateful for your intervention. —Arbo 13:41, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the bot was blocked by Jimbo (so you can cut the gossip)

The IRC log shows

<jwales> tawker: I'm with ZoFreX on that one -- it's a good thing I had a reason to push the big red button, because even if I didn't, it was soooooo tempting.

The bot has since been fixed, it now ignores admin edits. :) -- Tawker 04:32, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Yay I'm famous. Loving the big red button, also nice to hear some details about the bot generally, fascinating stuff. Making the button bigger wouldn't hurt tho :P ZoFreX 16:50, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for reverting vandalism on Electric current and Bandwidth. I'm glad someone's finally gotten around to an automated method of dealing with simple, obvious vandalism. Some suggestions:

  1. Err on the side of caution. It's much better to miss some vandalism than revert good edits.
  2. Don't mark reversions as minor if you're not watching them
  3. Change the edit summary to something like "Suspected vandalism automatically reverted", so people realize at a glance that no human is observing the revert. As you can see on this talk page, some people don't even realize it's a bot after coming here.
  4. It would be really nice if the edit summaries were specific. Instead of a generic message, use
    • reverting page blanking by 1.1.1.1
    • reverting addition of "Wikipedia sucks"
    • reverting addition of "'''Bold text'''[[Link title]]"
    That would reduce the number of bot edits that people have to check up on
  5. Could it add {{test}} templates to the user talks of people who vandalize? Is it worth it?

Reverting "X is gay" and "can I really edit this?" wastes way too much of our valuable time, even with vandal fighting software and the rollback tool. Thanks for saving us all some work, so we can focus on writing an encyclopedia.

(Not enough praise on this page.)  :-) — Omegatron 16:35, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Good work

  • Good work reverting page blanking of Hashish within the same minute it was blanked. HighInBC 18:17, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Tawkerbot warnings

Hi. Is it possible to have the warning that Tawkerbot leaves on a talk page to specify the page to which the warning relates? - ie. like the 'testx-n' warning templates do. That would make it much easier to see what a vandal has been up to. Take for example user:194.80.21.10 who I have been keeping an eye on - they got 3 things reverted but it takes a bit of figuring out what each warning related to. It would make it much easier to follow what was happening if it stated the page that had been reverted. Kcordina 15:28, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I just dropped by to ask the very same thing. The bot seems great, and a definite time saver providing the number of false positives is kept low. I would have thought it would be relatively easy to add the article which has been reverted to the message posted on a user's talk page, and it would make things easier for admins to follow up on. └ UkPaolo/talk┐ 16:03, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Please proof-read the userpage!

I would copyedit if I had a clue about what you're trying to say. - Samsara (talk • contribs) 18:07, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Inaccurate Revert (Bot has not touched page)

Please look at the history of this. The bot finds the vandalism by 195.231.50.126, but it reverts to the version which had already been vandalized by 67.180.240.37. If the vandalism is carried out by multipler persons successively or a single person who changes its IP, the bot fails to revert to the original version before the vandalism, doesn't it? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lifetime (talk • contribs).

Upon checking page histories, the bot hasn't touched the page, not sure where your example is coming from. It will revert to the last version that doesn't get matched as vandalism according to its filter sets. -- Tawker 09:47, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
The page in question was not Ethanol, it was Ethanol fuel. See Special:Contributions/195.231.50.126. The bot did revert to a vandalized version, but looking at the diff views, a regular contributor probably would have done the same thing. I don't think it was a bot fault, just a common RC patrol mistake. Essjay Talk • Contact 10:00, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Accuracy 99.9% good, .1% bad

This ratio seems very reasonable, as reverting a false positive back to the proper version is as easy as reverting vandalism. Since your bot only reverts once(in it's normal mode) the 1 part increase in human work is a fair price to pay for a 999 part decrease in human work. But good luck on .1%! HighInBC 22:48, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

A good revert, but a false positive....?

check out this one: [4] The guy should have said what he said on the talk page, not the article page, so I think it was reasonable to revert it, but it's not *strictly* vandalism...... so I'm in two minds about recommending that you try to make the bot avoid it or not... --Alvestrand 07:05, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

It was a full-caps addition to the middle of the page that served no function whatsoever; it doesn't even qualify as a talk page post. This sort of edit is a very common style of vandalism, and most certainly should be reverted by the bot. Essjay Talk • Contact 09:12, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
After discussion, I'm now of the opinion that the revert was reasonable, and the rule doesn't need changing based on this incident. Good work! --Alvestrand 09:35, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Good work!

I've seen the bot in action, and I think it will make life better for all wikipedians. I also agree with all of Omegatron's suggestions above. --PeR 10:22, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Even if you don't want to include specific reasons in the edit summaries, it would be nice with some general categorization, for example into:

  • Blanking, or blanking-like vandalism. (This could include false redirects, etc.)
  • Adding unrelated content. (This could include anything from profanity to nonsense.)
  • Linkspam.
  • Other vandalism.

Something that would be even more useful is if the bot could detect identical instances of vandalism, and comment on that in the edit summaries. This would make it much faster to check the bot's actions, as well as help identifying sockpupets.

I think it would be a good idea to let the bot operate in "calm" mode versus users who have the right to edit semiprotected pages, and in "angry" mode towards the rest (anonymous and new accounts).

Minor detail: There's no reason to include a link to the talk page of the previous editor in the edit summary. --PeR 11:30, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

False positive on Jerry Hadley

  • [5] --PeR 13:02, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
Gracefully handled, though. After I reverted the bot's edit it did not persist, even though the user page says it's in "angry" mode. --PeR 13:05, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

A little more commentary on the Jerry Hadley revert:

  • The bot undid a copyvio revert. I put "rv copyvio" in the edit summary but, as per Wikipedia:Copyright problems#Instructions, I didn't add a copyvio tag, since the tag is supposedly only for complete removals where there's nothing legal to revert to.
  • The bot added a "reply" to the unrelated User talk:Closeapple#Contradiction in Peoria article instead of making a new subcategory like a normal comment would.
  • Is there any way for the bot to tell a registered user with an established edit history from the usual vandals? (Not that "established" Wikipedians don't sometimes go rotten suddenly. Hopefully it's rare though.)

--Closeapple 13:26, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Award

The RickK Anti-Vandalism Barnstar
I award you and your bot this barnstar (perhaps we should rename it to "The Tawker Anit-Vandalism Barnstar? :)) →AzaToth 13:26, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Allow intentional vandalism!

One more thought: I think you should build in a publicly documented mechanism for avoiding reverts even to obvious vanalism. For example, adding the phrase "NO BOTREVERT" to the edit summary could ensure that the bot never reverts that edit. Documentation on this should be included in the message that is left on the vandal's talk page.

The rationale are as follows:

  1. Determied vandals will always be able to find a way to get around the bot, anyway.
  2. Forcing vandals to use more sneaky forms of vandalism may actually generate more work than would be the case otherwise.
  3. Non-vandals (false positives) will be less bothered by the bot.
  4. RC-patrollers can use the "NO BOTREVERT" marker as a red flag, to quickly revert vandalism manually.
  5. If the marker becomes excessively used by vandals, then Wikipedia could adopt policies to deal with that (such as "new users who use the marker for vandalism can be banned without warning.")

--PeR 13:30, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

User:12.177.48.66

Good work on Bobby Brown. —Viriditas | Talk 13:43, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

User:218.103.140.114 warnings

Hi, first of all to congratulate the creators of the bot some more, hopefully it should allow more encyclopaedia writing.

Regarding this vandal, User talk:218.103.140.114, you can see from their talk page a mess of warnings 4 from Tawkerbot2 and 4 from humans. It appears the user should have been banned after User:Tawker gave a final warning, but unfortunately was not. This resulted in recurrent bot warnings. Is this a malfunction?

I feel in this case the warnings have not been productive, does the bot recognise pages it has already warned on recently? Does it have escalating warning messages?

Just wanted to bring this case to your attention, as I assume it is not what the bot is supposed to do. Thanks, and keep up the good work, |→ Spaully°τ 18:10, 10 March 2006 (GMT)

Sounds promising, I hope I run into the bot reverting lots of vandals in the future. Thanks, |→ Spaully°τ 19:35, 10 March 2006 (GMT)

Data collection

As I came across the work or your bot today, I became curious. It seems to me that you could generate some interesting data about vandalism of Wikipedia from the amount of vandalism that is caught by Tawkerbot2 at different times. You could learn about what time of day, or day of the week, most vandalism occurs. And you could monitor how the amount of vandalism changes over time: is Wikipedia more or less vandalized now than it was six months ago? Just some thoughts... Edgar181 19:09, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

This might be what you are looking for. Contribution history of this bot could give the data you wanted, what time of day, or day of the week, most vandalism occurs etc. - Ganeshk (talk) 23:00, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Tawkerbot2 reverts copyvio notices

revert of a copyvio notice. Bot should be more polite. All the best. Mozzerati 21:51, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

No idea why bot reverted me?

Just merging NonBP into Borderline personality disorder I was originally going to just suggest it but after realising the merge had already been suggested before Christmas (so there was no need to seek further discussion after all) and no objections had been raised.

The whole topic of NonBP is POV, contentious, agenda driven and not well validated or proven. It is more balanced to present it as an aspect of, and viewpoint on Borderline personality disorder. --Zeraeph 00:37, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

The reason your redirect failed was because you didn't quite do it correctly. Please take a look at the history, I corrected it. Zeraeph, you don't know what you're talking about. joshbuddytalk 00:42, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Barnstar

A barnstar for doing gr8 job! Bot constantly shows up on my watchlist. Great idea and good implementation. Thanks, Ganeshk (talk) 00:54, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

I award Tawkerbot2 the RickK Anti-Vandalism barnstar for working strenously in keeping Wikipedia vandalism-free. Keep up the good work. -- Ganeshk (talk) 00:54, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
I award Tawkerbot2 the RickK Anti-Vandalism barnstar for working strenously in keeping Wikipedia vandalism-free. Keep up the good work. -- Ganeshk (talk) 00:54, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Good job, but...

See User talk:Acid Zombie. Clearly a vandal, but the repeated identical warnings on his talk page look a little odd. Perhaps the bot should use incremental warnings when returning to the same talk page within a moderately short time for an anon, and when returning at all for a logged in user.-gadfium 04:25, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Quibble on spelling

Great job on the bot--but please correct the spelling of the word "received" in the text it leaves on the user page. -- PKtm 06:30, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, what's this about?

I got this message recently:

Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks. Tawkerbot2 11:12, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

What's it about? I think it may be due to an article whose text ("haha my willy" or the like) I deleted completely (I had previously put a delete tag on it). I have pur articles through propose for deletion before, but had thought that the delete tag would get this one killed without going through the procedure.

Added later. Now clear. Article was "Nick Lee Martin"; I see it has been reverted to the original nonsense.

11:31, 11 March 2006 (UTC) - —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pol098 (talk • contribs).

Question

How were these edits to John Ratzenberger vandalism? I shortened the lead and added a second image... Staxringold 16:55, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

See reply on your talk page -- Tawker 18:42, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Reference

Could you please include a reference to the actual problem noted? Itdoesn't help us improve or fix a mistake if we don't know the problem. --Aegwyn 09:50, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

See your talk page, sorry, I forgot to post the cause :) -- Tawker 09:54, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
Ah, thanks, especially for the quick reply. --Aegwyn 11:10, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Whitelist

{{Subst:test}}

Keep a whitelist please. I am not a vandal and you know that. --Cool CatTalk|@ 20:20, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Manually done until I can figure out why the adminlist isn't working -- Tawker 22:34, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Batman

your bot blanked the Batman article. [6] Steve block talk 14:15, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Database problems

kill it for a second (this should work). — Mar. 13, '06 [14:23] <freakofnurxture|talk>


I don't know if anybody can read this, but

The problem is obviously due to database errors. I click to edit this page using the normal method and it shows me a blank box. So I'm using "section=new" instead. The bot was loading diffs and finding that pages appear to be completely blanked, when they weren't. — Mar. 13, '06 [14:39] <freakofnurxture|talk>

Errors look like this for example

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found, named "User talk:Tawkerbot2,oldid=43591780".

This might be because no page has yet been created with this name, in which case you can start it by clicking the "edit this page" link.

If it is a recently changed page, trying again in a minute or two will usually work. Alternatively, you may have followed an outdated diff or history link to a page that has been deleted.

If this is not the case, you may have found a bug in the software. Please report this using the procedure given at Wikipedia:Bug_reports, making note of the URL.

— Mar. 13, '06 [14:41] <freakofnurxture|talk>

**** → See WP:AN (Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Tawkerbot2_bug_fix) for what I'm fairly certain is the explanation of the glitch with Tawkerbot2. -- Curps 16:02, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

not to get all elementary-school-grammar-teacher on you, but

the first sentence here that explains what the bot is, what it does, how it does it, the 99% certainty and stuff, reads super messy to me. my knowledge of bot warfare on 'pedia is nominal. I was gonn clean it up and I realized.. that sentence is hella. skizznologic3.3 22:17, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

odd edit summary

The bot seems to have worked here: [7] but the edit summary seems wrong. Just thought you might like to know.--W.marsh 22:30, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism stat

Here is an interesting stat. Per the link, Guinness, Wikipedia and Current events are most vandalized articles. - Ganeshk (talk) 22:48, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Mistaken reversion

[8] —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:24, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Now it's reverted my revert. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:25, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, that was caught my the upercase filter but shouldn't have been big enough to trigger it, I'll have a look into it, sorry -- Tawker 04:25, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Reply

Hello, I think I got jumped on unnecessarily. I am attempting to merge two articles, after responsible discussion, and when I deleted some text, including the NPOV tag, I got your bot message. This is the first time I have tried to merge anything, so your help would be appreciated. The articles are English as a second language and English as an additional language. BrainyBabe 10:24, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Bot Status

Ok, my tmp dir just filled to capacity, the database got massive (it was logging non reverts) and it basically froze the system and my database server. I've cut logging non-reverts and it should lower the bots db bloat, v3.0 of the bot is coming soon, its basically a bit of optomization no new filters -- Tawker 05:57, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

High-definition television

Hi, first of all thank you for Tawkerbot, what it does it great. However, I came across your bot on High-definition television, where it reverted an IP edit incorrectly (it reverted to a vandalised version, perhaps because the vandal was using two IPs and had two edits, one after the other). [9] Perhaps you could get the bot to treat IP addresses in the same subnet the same, or improve checks in other ways. Well anyway, great job and hope you refine your bot even more. - Tangotango 13:06, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

As I mention below, this is a weakness in the bot. (Do note that I'm speaking without seeing the actual bot code, but as I'm a programmer, I know how these things generally have to work) Since the bot runs automatically, and the desire is to have as few false positives as possible, the bot's definitions of vandalism have to be very strict, and very specific. And either something matches it's definitions of vandalism or it does not. The bot will thus catch many of the most obvious cases of vandalism, but if a vandalism falls just outside those definitions, the bot cannot consider it as vandalism, and has to leave it to be dealt with by a human. In the specific case, we appear to have had an edit that fell outside the definitions followed at once by an edit that fell within the definitions. So the bot saw a non-vandalism followed by a vandalism, and reverted the second. Unfortunately, the first really was vandalism, so the bot reverted back to the first vandalism.
I have no idea how feasible your idea about grouping IP subnets. Sounds a bit dangerous to me, and I could see cases where that would cause just as much trouble. If a vandal and a non vandal happen to be in the same subnet (in the same computer lab, for instance) editing the same article (say, as a class assignment), then vandals and good editors would get all lumped together. - TexasAndroid 17:14, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Cherokee

False positive. [10]. — Mar. 15, '06 [13:55] <freakofnurxture|talk>

Two things going on here. The bot's admin whitelisting does not seem to have worked, and this is a total false positive, quite possibly of the type that Curps was describing after things went haywire earlier this week. - TexasAndroid 17:04, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
Actually, the whitelist worked properly, the bot was reverting and it was freak freak timing (no pun intended) revert, looking at a fix -- Tawker 02:24, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Photography

And another false poitive. [11] --Cactus.man ✍ 15:40, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

This one is not as much a false positive, as a weakness in the vandalism detection. The first vandalism was not detected. The blanking that followed was detected and reverted. However, since the blanking was blanking out the vandalism from the previous edit, the vandalism was restored. Not sure that anything could be done about this type of situation, except expanding what the bot detects as vandalism in the first place, and that has to be done carefully. - TexasAndroid 17:03, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

False attribution

In this revert, talkerbot2 reverts blanking, but blames Polinator rather than the anon vandal. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 15:55, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually it reverted Polinator's edit too. TimBentley 17:21, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
I suspect this is caused by another wiki software problem that I've seen several times in recent days. I've seen cases where I know revisions have been made to a page recently, but when I look at the page's history, the most recent edits are missing. Very annoying. But I can easily see how this would get the bot all mixed up. It detects a vandalism, then grabs the history to try to figure out how far back to revert and what names to use in it's attributions. But it is served up a version of the history with the most recent edits, including the vandalism, missing. But the bot cannot know that, and builds it's attributions based on what it's been given. One solution would be, if the bot can get the name of the vandal from the same place it got the original vandalistic edit, then validate it against the history it retrieves in order to make sure it is attributing the correct users. - TexasAndroid 17:26, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Reverting to last user is not good enough

This revert was not complete. The bot undid one vandal's work, reverting the another vandal's work. - UtherSRG (talk) 17:37, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Several reverts today on Tony Blair article revert to a vandalized version--farsee50 19:55, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Common errors that lead to an autorevert

  • Not formatting redirects properly, # REDIRECT is not #REDIRECT only the latter will work as a redirect, the former will trigger the bot.
Let the robot ignore all near-blankings that leave the word "redirect" early in the text. The person who created the ill-formated redirect will probably fix it. Better yet: Let the robot fix the faulty redirects! (Of coure, an entry that would constitute vandalism after fixing, such as redirecting to an unrelated article, should still be reverted.)
  • Not using a copyvio tag on a copyright violation, I have no idea how we can make that one work properly
Then don't revert anything that leaves the word copyvio (or variations thereof) in the edit summary. If this leaves a back-door for vandals, fine. It's still preferrable to insulting innocent editors. (See also my previous comment in the archives of this talk page [12]. I think there should be a publicly documented way for vandals to bypass the bot.)

--PeR 18:32, 15 March 2006 (UTC)


What on earth?

Copied from [[Talk:Pollinator Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed undone by an automated bot. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks. If you feel you have received this notice in error, please contact the bot owner // Tawkerbot2 15:52, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

What are you talking about? Pollinator 03:23, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Apparently it confused your legitimate edit here with the twelve-day-later vandalism on the same page here. I'm wondering about that 99% figure. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:37, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

This is discussed under "false attribution" above [13]. --PeR 06:57, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Reverted

I was working on Juno Awards of 2006 nominees list and eventually got fed up with the size of the list. I deleted all my work. Your bot has reverted my blanking assuming that I blanked a page as vandalism... Tutmosis 00:29, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

False positive (sort of)

This looks like the same thing you were blocked for before, see the history of the Internet (pun intended). Some anon vandalized, but it said it was the one before. --Rory096 00:38, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Yea, apparently my last workaround didn't work, time to work on another fix -- Tawker 00:48, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Good revert, dodgy edit summary.

[14]. Switches around vandal's name and good revision's creator's name. Werdna648T/C\@ 13:58, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Its a fairly rare known bug that I'm working on that causes it to switch the last two contributors when someone edits the page when the bots doing its revert cycle, it seems to happen extremely rarely but I'm working on a fix, sorry about that -- Tawker 16:29, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

DV8 2XL

Got your bots standard warning out of the blue on my talk page. Thought you'd like to know. --DV8 2XL 14:19, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Saw that one too, this is what brought me here. False positives aside, could the warning be modified so that it actually includes a link to the reverted page? This would make things a lot more transparent, you know. Femto 14:49, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for letting me know what was happening. In the end the odd false positive, (even if I'm on the wet end of it) is a small price to pay for sticking to the blanking-vandals. Thanks for your efforts in this regard. --DV8 2XL 16:35, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Tawkerbot needs a greater time lapse

I was just editing the Dianetics article and for some reason the page came out blank when I hit save. Evidently I forgot to cut and paste the text for the revert I was doing. It would have only taken me five seconds to hit "back", cut and paste the text, and correct my mistake, but already in those five seconds the Tawkerbot had intervened and left a "vandalism from Wikipediatrix" edit summary in the history, which is really, really not cool and not fair. The bot needs to wait at least 60 seconds to see if the blanking-out is intentional, or if the user catches their mistake and quickly corrects it! wikipediatrix 15:39, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

I've thought about this and cases such as yours are really really in the rarity, half of the purpose of the bot is to "demoralize" vandals letting them know that their vandalism will be reverted within 10 seconds, I will however change the edit summary to something slightly more neuteral, I think thats a fair compromise. -- Tawker 17:11, 18 March 2006 (UTC)


sup yo whats up man good work keep it goin man yo jc

thaxs

Huh?

Excuse me?—Ëzhiki (ërinacëus amurënsis) 19:53, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Seems that he is in wrong namespace... If I where an admin, I would block. →AzaToth 19:55, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
The bot made an error (see here) but I don't think it's a namespace problem. It got confused about who had vandalized and where to revert to. Unless this is happening a lot, I think the proper thing to do is notify the bot's owner rather than block it. -- SCZenz 20:06, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
It's happening less than 1% of the time, its not a massive occurance but enough that I want to try and figure out why its doing it. -- Tawker 20:43, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

If Tawkerbot2 mistakenly puts you in the edit summary

First of all, this is a bot and it is automated, and please accept our apologies. I think whats happening is Wikipedia isn't keeping up to the bot, like when you create a page and go back to it and see a "this page does not exist" message, its a slow replication lag in the database which causes Tawkerbot2 to grab the wrong editor in its warning list (it grabs the current-1 after it reverts) and if the database doesn't show the bots edit, it screws up (this happens pretty rarely, Wikipedia is pretty good but its happening more often than I'd like.) I'm talking to the Tawkerbot2 team about the proposed fix and it should be coming soon. -- Tawker 21:18, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Blazer Boulevard

I was trying to remove an article Blazer Boulevard that was recommended to be removed until there was more sources. The bot undid what I was trying to do. How can I delete the page? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Willshepherdson (talk • contribs).

A CSD (speedy delete) would probally be the best option, it looks like thats already happened -- Tawker 22:19, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Your bot said I was vandalizing and made me sad.  :(

I edited Scientology to add a category, and then some other guy vandalized. I got blamed as well. What the heck. —This unsigned comment was added by 64.136.49.229 (talk • contribs) .

See above a couple posts, its a rare bug that I'm still trying to debug. -- Tawker 22:39, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

What's going on here?

I just got a message that I was vandalizing. What's going on? I was simply trying to clean up WXYZ-TV, if that's what brought it on. Would appreciate an explanation. Blueboy96 23:10, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I have no idea what brought this on--was just referring to the last article I'd heavily edited (KOLN-TV was just a minor edit), so this was the only article I could think of. Blueboy96 23:16, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Redirect syntax error, you forgot wikilinks on the redirect and it caused the bot to think you were blanking -- Tawker 23:19, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Similarly, said I had vandalized on List of Stadium Terraces, which is untrue. You need to either fix that "bot" or stop using it. Wahkeenah 23:47, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Tawkerbot2 Warning the wrong people

The diffs the IRC was feeding to the bot were screwed up there, I think it caused some problems with Tawkerbot2's blame system, please revert any messages in error -- Tawker 23:37, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi, my bot got a message saying it had vandalised, not only had it not vandalised, but non of it's edits had even been reverted in error, otherwise good work! Martin 23:35, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

That's because of a problem during a Squidward attack earlier today that made all the diffs not show the most recent one, but the one before, and so tawkerbot was accidentally reverting 2 edits instead of 1. --Rory096 00:07, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Sounds like you've got some bugs in your bot. Wahkeenah 00:13, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Ditto. Also it would be nice if the bot included the page of concern in its vandalism accusations - that would save some time doing a search and rescue mission to find which page I'm accused of vandalising. Dl2000 00:37, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
It's MediaWiki's fault in this particular case, not Tawkerbot2's. --Rory096 00:37, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't care whose fault it is, but somebody who knows what's going on needs to fix it. Wahkeenah 00:42, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
It appears to be fixed now, sorry for any issues anyone may have, there really was nothing I could do about it and due to the nature of the vandal, by the time I noticed it was over -- Tawker 00:47, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Nothing's going on to fix it, because it wasn't Tawkerbot2 in the first place. --Rory096 00:47, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism

I am not vandalizing. Please be precise if you have any issue. --Spasage 07:14, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, I see no edit summary, a 100% page blanking, I have no idea what your intent was (it was most likely good) but far as the bot can tell it was textbook page blanking. -- Tawker 07:23, 20 March 2006 (UTC)


Would you explain why this was added to D6's talk page: [15] ? -- User:Docu

It was a WP giving the bot the wrong data bug (I think) - I thought I had removed the warning but apparently I didn't, sorry about that -- Tawker 08:18, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Ok no problem. Besides, your bot's recent edits seem to work well. Congrats! -- User:Docu
BTW here is the edit that may have triggered the notice on D6's talk page: Brian_Callison. -- User:Docu
Yes, that was exactly when the messed up RC feed was coming in, it had the wrong info and reverted too far -- Tawker 14:52, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Why was I labelled a tester? Seems a certain "bot" needs testing. --64.222.109.153 00:58, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

odd edit summary at Current events

08:47, 20 March 2006 Tawkerbot2 m (BOT - Reverted edit by User talk:The usta (44634012) - reverted to User talk:64.229.222.156 (44633788))

Why "User talk" ? --64.229.222.156 08:58, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Mostly because the link points to User Talk anyways that people want to go to and I don't want to make it look exactly like admin rollback, but I'm open to suggestions on formatting -- Tawker 14:49, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Maybe you could link to the talk page but just say user. You know, like, "User:OneGyT" or even "OneGyT". Just a suggestion. OneGyT/T|C 20:35, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
I agree, it's weird. Either above suggestion would be preferable. I think it would be better to indicate the fact it's a bot by linking to the bot's user page. Something like "BOT-automated reversion of edit by...". BigBlueFish 16:25, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
That's a good idea. OneGyT/T|C 01:56, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Do not leave "Vandalism" messages on the wrong page

As a result, I presume, of this edit: [16], your "clever" bot left a standard Wikipedia vandalism warning on MY Talk page, and not the Talk page of the vandal. I expect an apology to be posted to my Talk page. --Mais oui! 09:10, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Again, those happened during the Squidward attack and the promblem seemed to lie in the IRC RC feed from WikiMedia, it was causing basically everyone to screw up reverts. If you check the bots history now, it's running perfectly in the last little while. The bot may have made a tiny bit of work to clean up but it also fixed a lot of the vandalism all by itself, you can't blame it for the RC feed going wonky. -- Tawker 14:43, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Sorry. Here's another one. Until this is fixed, the bot is blocked. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 20:50, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Second mis-blame I've seen today. [17] So this is definitely not yet fixed. Much as it pains me to turn the bot off, I'm going to have to do so until you can get ti worked on some more. Sorry. - TexasAndroid 17:14, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Same complaint. I am not a vandal

I think your bot needs a revision. --Koppedia 11:05, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Sorry about that message, during a vandalbot attack the WikiMedia recent changes IRC feed started reporting some misinformation and it had caused Tawkerbot2 (and for that matter basically anyone using a script) to go back 2 instead of 1 edit, I think that was a one time only occurance, its fixed now, sorry about that -- Tawker 14:46, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

great bot

Extremely useful. Thank you so much for letting it loose, it's a joy watching it whack the vandals. If you improve it any further, I'll put it on RFA :) dab (ᛏ) 11:28, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

I concur. --Ghirla -трёп- 12:03, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Warnings in error

Hi Tawker, I got one too. I've read all the comments here today but I can't tell whether I was genuinely reverted or not! Do I need to look back through my edits from yesterday and re-do one? Or did the bot only warn me in error? Thanks for any info! Oh, and thanks for all the good work your bot does. I am saddened to see harsh comments on this page over what was a relatively tiny inconvenience, and one whose cause could not have been foreseen ~ Veledan • Talk 12:20, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

  • Ah, found it (by looking through the bot's contribs). For anyone else with the same question: I did have to redo the edit, and it was one from last month, not yesterday ~ Veledan • Talk 12:47, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Please desist

Please desist your vandalism of Wikipedia. What on earth is this about: [18]. I will ask for your bot to be banned if you continue with these cock-ups. You are making work for others to clean up after you.--Mais oui! 13:15, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Again, those happened during the Squidward attack and the promblem seemed to lie in the IRC RC feed from WikiMedia, it was causing basically everyone to screw up reverts. If you check the bots history now, it's running perfectly in the last little while. The bot may have made a tiny bit of work to clean up but it also fixed a lot of the vandalism all by itself, you can't blame it for the RC feed going wonky. -- Tawker 14:43, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Incorrect detection

Your bot has reverted my work to split an article about two (totally unrelated) "Bradley method"s into separate articles. I recognize that large content deletions are -often- malicious, but this one surely wasn't! - Csari 20:08, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

The reason he reverted you there was because you just blanked the page, rather than making Bradley Method into a redirect to Bradley method (disambiguation) (which should probably be at Bradley Method anyway, I'm moving it now), which you made into a disambig. In the future, you should create a redirect. Thanks, Rory096 20:17, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for clarifying. A redirect was the eventual intent, but I cut out one half of the page and the bot decided it was a deletion before I got back to the second section to delete it and add the redirect. No biggie. And thanks for the move!

The Issue with Tawkerbot2

The reason Tawkerbot2 is screwing up is the IRC RC feed is giving older diffs, thats where the bot is getting it's page to check info, and if its reporting the wrong version, the bot is reverting one revision back from the revision in question. I'm talking to the devs and I hope to have the feed stabalized and the bot back on the job pretty soon. -- Tawker 00:14, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Tawkerbot2 should be fixed

Tim Starling slightly changed the IRC RC feed to make it more compatible with Tawkerbot2 code. We've been running it for a bit very closely monitored and it hasn't false warned once so far, it seems perfect but if it makes a mistake please let us know and we'll take another look. Sorry for any problems people had, we finally figured what it was and now all seems well. -- Tawker 07:46, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Great job

Fine job, all those involved. Wizzy…☎ 11:38, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Tawkerbot2 apparently not fixed (totally)

Ok, apparently it just screwed up on the database lag, its unblocked (mostly so I could write this) but the bot application is not running on the server until I can have a look / try some fixes, I think we had 2 issues leading to the misblame, different diff numbers and flat out db lag, the one issue is fixed, the second one isn't, I think I might try an "if last edit is 30s older than current time go to history page and grab last editor) - that might cut the calls whilst providing the safety. -- Tawker 18:08, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Another Tawkerbot Complaint

I'm in the middle of merging two pages, and you restore the one I'm getting rid of. Argh. UrbanTerrorist 23:48, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Minor Barnstar

The Minor Barnstar
Great bot, very nice to have around!
Admrb♉ltz (T | C) 02:12, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Nice bot

Darn you TawkerBot! You keep on stealing my reverts! :) Seriously though, nice bot! --Lewk_of_Serthic contrib talk 02:19, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

False positive report

Some sort of off-by-one error; there was vandalism here, but Tawkerbot skipped back two edits, and seemed to assign the vandalism to me. I had made the last edit before the vandalism. Just wanted to let you know. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:55, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

another one

I was just about to complain to you about User talk:82.198.250.7 when I got a vandalism revert message from your bot, but I'm not sure for which page. Anyway I think that User was the real culprit, I'm trying to find someone to do something about him. Kevlar67 17:14, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

And another false report here [19]. The bot is definitely not fixed. - TexasAndroid 18:15, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Hehe :)

I just laughted when I saw this diff: [20] →AzaToth 17:36, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

 

[21] --Rory096 17:45, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Reporting an error

As of 24 March still some issues, it would seem - I got pinged by Tawkerbot2 for this innocuous edit [22], when the real culprit was some anon who made the next edit to that article over two weeks after mine. Perhaps the bot got confused, as it seems another (human!) vandalfighter made a (correct) reversion to my version in the same minute, just before Tawkerbot2's reversion which rolled it further back still to the version before mine. The bot managed to make another two correct vandalism reversions to the very same article later that day, so something odd was going on which would probably be worth your while in investigating.--cjllw | TALK 20:50, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

As I was directly involved, I'd like to say that this mistake was immediately noticed, reversed, and the bot was shut down soon afterwards due to lag between the diffs and the reverts performed by the bot. Thanks. --ZsinjTalk 20:52, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

OK then, thanks....just letting you guys know. Since the bot's message to me wasn't reversed, I wasn't sure if the mistake had gone undetected by the bot's owners. It does seem to be doing a pretty good job, the occasional misfire notwithstanding- nice work!--cjllw | TALK 21:18, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed it when I got back, the bot sometimes runs unattended hence the delay -- Tawker 02:34, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
I had an edit reverted though I can understand why, I blanked a page but it was a temporary place holding page and I was moving the material on it over to the main page as the timing was now appropriate; this was explained in my edit summary and I was the only editor ever of the page. Perhaps you could adjust the bot to recognize if a page that has only ever been edited by one user as probably being in pretty good hands if that user makes changes? - Jord 15:18, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Odd behavior

A few minutes after 71.15.156.22 was blocked Talkerbot2 made this vandal warning [23] and the Bot's contrib list doesn't show it reverting any of the relevant vandalisms. What was the bot doing? JoshuaZ 06:17, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, it appears to have found an edit of theirs to be vandalism but someone beat it to the revert, the bots "spawn both the warn and revert at the same time" kicked in and hence the warning. -- Tawker 06:41, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
Ok, thanks for the clarification. JoshuaZ 06:43, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Any idea what this is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:199.184.38.5&redirect=no This IP has been mine for a while, and I don't remember posting any material recently that was either anonymous or "test" in nature. Dovid 16:47, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

That would be this. --Rory096 06:37, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

thanks for catching

what ever it was that happened at Paul Wayland Bartlett and fixing it. Carptrash 17:45, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

?

You gave me a warning. Not sure what happened. I thought I was editing a page - then it went blank, perhaps because I'd left it active for too long(?). If you check my own history and the history of the page in question (which I've done much work on), I hope you'll accept that I did a "whoopsie", at worst, not deliberate vandalism. If so, I'd appreciate an "innocent" verdict - good name, and all that. Folks at 137 20:27, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

The edit that the bot reverted you on is [24] not sure why it happened but the page was uploaded blank to Wikipedia, the bot caught it as blanking and reverted to the last editor not the last edit. I can't really change edit summaries, but thats what happened -- Tawker 21:06, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
By the way, you do know that Tawkerbot2 is a bot, right? -- Tawker 07:33, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
Not at first. Not even sure of the characteristics of a bot. My one criticism is that the bot gave me no chance to revert (as I tried to), before putting its size 12 boot in and erasing a sequence of my amends (although some were restored by yet another bot). Perhaps a 5 minute period of grace before action? Folks at 137 18:44, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
Essentially what happens with a revert (admin / bot (which is a computer program in short) / or otherwise) is the person reverts to the last editor, not the editor who "vandalised" (although in your case it appeared to be not intentional, a technical glitch caused it to blank the page. I understand you have concerns about the auto bot revert (within 10 seconds I believe it's working at) - you are the second user to suggest it, the thought has crossed my mind but part of the intent of the bot is to discourage vandals by showing them that if they vandalize it will be reverted rapidly every time, if I introduced a delay it might lose some of the deterrent (and the deterrent seems to be working, vandalism has been down often.) Even if the bot didn't auto revert, chances are someone monitoring the anti vandal programs would have noticed the blanking (although it was accidental) and assumed it was vandalism and did the exact same the bot did, chances are it would have been reverted to the last edit before you anyways. -- Tawker 20:58, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Bot warning

Hi there. Your bot sent me a warning for some edit. Not sure what it was for. I'm an administrator, so I'd like to think I know what I'm doing here! :) If you can enlighten me I'd appreciate it. Cheers. Essexmutant 16:04, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

The current lag is causing Tawkerbot to make some misattributiouns, sorry about that. --Rory096 21:00, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Bot warning

I made a typo in putting in a Redirect, and Tawkerbot assumed this was vandalism (I failed to cap the R in Redirect), It would be more useful if it would fix this, instead of making me do it over. Septentrionalis 17:34, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

The bot would have to be coded to recognize almost every possible typo of redirect. Not a particularly easy task. - TexasAndroid 18:22, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
I can try and do a regex match, most syntax guides I've seen called for the all caps #REDIRECT hence the bot used that as its trigger. (and I know I'm not susposed to edit on a bot account but I can't edit this page from a blocked IP otherwise) -- Tawkerbot2 19:18, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
OH MY GOD IT'S SENTIENT --Rory096 23:28, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

False positive

Not sure what the bot is up to here: [25]. Is seems most of the times I go into the bots recent edits and select a diff where the bot has reverted an non-IP edit, it is either a brand new account or a false positive. If the bot could filter out old users I think the number of false positives would drop significantly.

OK. On further investigation I see what the bot was up to. It was an all caps addition that was later corrected. Still it was an honest edit, so a false positive. My suggestion to filter users still stands. --PeR 17:57, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
We do have a whitelist which is manually controlled. It was caught under the all caps filter, which susprisingly is pretty good, it's at 0.5% false positives. My bot has no way of knowing how old a user is on Wikipedia, hence this might be a very very tricky thing to do. (and yes, I know I'm editing as the bot, I can't edit this page if I wasn't as the IP i'm using is blocked) -- Tawkerbot2 19:18, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Trouot cod & Trout Cod pages

I have been attempting to remove one of the duplicate pages referring to the Australian native fish Trout Cod. I merged the content from the less informative page Trout cod into the Trout Cod page and then deleted the content of the smaller page and put a link in the Trout cod page referring any visitors to the combined page.

i received a vandalism warning for my efforts, which I do not appreciate. Please undo the reversion.

See reply on your talk page, redirect syntax, I've fixed it for you -- Tawker 02:53, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

what are you talking about?

what are you talking about. i did not do a test! how didi you get my name? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dogblue (talk • contribs).

Probably worth noting that this user's talk page has never been edited by Tawkerbot2 [26] and that the user's user page stated (he changed it), "my purpose on Wikipedia is to piss off all you [expletive]. i go around messing pages up that do not serve any purpose to me." [27] I don't think it's worth your time to reply to this guy. Hbackman 23:05, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

 ?

i sent that last message. your on METH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dogblue (talk • contribs).

i forgot

i forgot to sign my name . i sent those last two messages. ~~dogblue


vandal rolled back to another (the same) vandal

here's an interesting case: [28]; this guy vandalized, got himself a new dynamic IP and blanked. Tawkerbot2 promptly rolled back the blanked version to the vandalized version. I wonder if this vandal's behaviour was already in reaction to the bot, or if it was just 'lucky'. dab (ᛏ) 15:37, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Here too: [29]. Palmiro | Talk 17:34, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
That second example was interesting. Looking at the first edit, it likely avoided the bot's filters because of the arabic text. One of the bot's filters is most likely for edits that are completely in caps. All the roman alphabet was in caps, but the entire edit was not, so the bot did not flag it as vandalism. The second edit was entirely in caps, so the bot flagged it, and rolled it back.
This type of situation is one I suspect will never be solved. The bot needs strict definitions of what it considers Vandalism. If an edit does not meet these definitions, the bot will not and cannot consider it vandalism. And there are plenty of ways to vandalize that fall outside the definitions in the bot. And this will be the case no matter how wide the bot's definitions are. However wide the definitions, there will be edits that fall outside the definitions.
So if it falls outside the definitions, it's not vandalism to the bot. And thus there is not reason not to revert to that version when the next edit does meet the definitions. The only way to reduce this type of situation is to add more things to the definitions. But anything added has to be carefully weighed against the possibility of false positives. So I'm really not sure what could be done about the situation. - TexasAndroid 17:45, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
This one is going to be an interesting task to try to fix,TexasAndroid has it perfectly, the bot is a strict filter set and can't really make an intellegent decision. Of course, perhaps a flag in IRC or AIV on pages from the same IP range might be in order (editing as bot as I can't edit this page otherwise due to IP block) -- Tawkerbot2 17:49, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Well, if it's an inevitable glitch, it seems an acceptable one. After all, it doesn't actually create a problem, merely fails to solve one. Palmiro | Talk 18:48, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Well, the concern there is people don't check the bots edits and assume its rolled back to the proper version. I'll see what I can do about similar IP addresses but that one is pretty tricky to catch -- Tawker 22:38, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Moved comment from User page.

What do you mean by writing, "Vandalism" on my User Talk Page? There is and has never been any vandalism by me in what I work on in wikipedia. Quit playing games and do something more constructive with your own work.

--Maury 18:39, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm a bot - I dont play games. I'm not human either (but my owner is) -- Tawkerbot2 19:11, 29 March 2006 (UTC)


Bot?

The bot is kind of taking of my picture that is good for the item. It's really annoying. —This unsigned comment was added by Dinogayman (talk • contribs) .

This is not a false positive - the user is attaching an image called "pussy.jpg" to the top of the file, which the bot is (rightly) tagging as vandalism. (ESkog)(Talk) 22:26, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Reverting obvious vandalism good use for bots

I've been giving bots a lot of heat lately, so I suppose I should dole out some credit when one actually does something right — namely, reverting Hydra when a vandal blanked the page (sorry, I meant "anonymous user tested the edit button" *wink* *wink*).
-,-~R'lyehRising~-,- 01:13, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Vanadlisim?

What in the world are you talking about? User:TheGingerone —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Thegingerone (talk • contribs).

I think Shanel basically said what I was going to on your talk page -- Tawker 05:57, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Please rein in the bot

I reverted a huge copyvio on Helen Lakelly Hunt. I promptly received a message thanking me for my "test". That was no test. Any human who looks at the material I removed will see it was lifted verbatim from http://www.sisterfund.org/about_helen.php -- to which I'll add an ext link, assuming the bot doesn't show up again to re-instate the copyvio material. JamesMLane t c 09:22, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Ditto. It's making incorrect reverts ([30]). Proto||type 09:53, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Followup concerning the bot's "false positive": On Helen LaKelly Hunt, at first I thought the article had been created as a copyvio, and I was going to delete all of it and substitute the copyvio template. When I checked the page history, though, I found that there was originally a stub before the copyvio was added. Therefore, following the instructions at WP:CP, I reverted to that version. That's why there was no copyvio template. I gather that's what triggered the bot's false positive. Would it be possible for the bot to read the edit summary and refrain from reverting an edit that has "copyvio" in the ES? Of course, a vandal could exploit this loophole, but I doubt that many vandals are that clever. JamesMLane t c 10:16, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Caught by your bot!

Hi! I created a page swsup which should actually be swsusp. Hence I moved the swsup page to swsusp and was trying to delete all the contents of swsup so that any administrator may come by and notice the empty page and delete it. It was there that I was given this vandalism warning!! :) By the way can you please delete that page ? Bandan Talk

Fixed. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 11:33, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Fix your bot

Hi, please turn your bot off until you can get it to work correctly. It's making incorrect reverts. [31]. I'll put this on your own talk page also. Proto||type 09:46, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, as far as I can tell, that one edit / the one copyvio issue were the only two in the last 500 or so edits, I'm a little reluctant to turn the bot off with that kind of level of accuracy, I'll see what I can do though, its on the list of edits to triple check the bots logic. -- Tawker 15:32, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Another incorrect revert on New Earth - the information added by the anon was not verifiable and what little there was duplicated information already on the page. --khaosworks (talk • contribs) 15:41, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

What appears to be happening is that there are certain times when removals of large sections of material are legitimate. But the bot's filters for large removals still catch them. Removing of Copy-vio sections, splitting up of large articles, just generally removing a large section of worthless garbage text, etc. There are a number of reasons where removals of whole sections are perfectly valid. I suspect we need something more for the bot to flag on to try to weed the vandals from the non-vandals. Not sure what, but one possibility would be to not flag section removals for logged-in users. Not sure if this would be a great solution, but I'm not coming up with much else. - TexasAndroid 15:48, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
How often do vandals leave an edit summmary? One possibility that occurs to me is: Don't revert a large deletion by a registered user that's accompanied by an edit summary. Assuming that the bot can be given the capability to check for the existence of an edit summary, any edit exempted from reversion by this rule could be added to a list for human review. JamesMLane t c 19:13, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Howdy. Your bot left me a vandalism warning message. I wasn't vandalising anything. :) Looking at the other messages, it seems your bot needs some attention. Cheers. --Fang Aili 說嗎? 17:05, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

This edit [32] is the one the bot caught, and reverted you here [33]. Looks like one anon vandalized, another came and removed the vandalism, and then you reverted the 2nd anon, reinserting the vandalism, and finally the bot reverted you. Assuming good faith, I think your script may have been a little slow, and you ended up reverting the wrong edit. Whichever, this was definitely not a false positive by the bot, because it was a vandalistic edit that the bot reverted, even if it was not intentional vandalism on your part. - TexasAndroid 17:18, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Your bot just reverted a useful redirect I made - merging the (short) text from Song of Swords into The Song of Swords and redirecting the stub to the combined article - even though I left an edit summary for both edits, and despite the fact that the article titles are obviously different only by a prepended "The" . Apparently, its only trigger was the fact that my edit was anonymous, which is within Wikipedia policy. Please don't run a bot that prevents anonymous users from contributing to Wikipedia.

Funky edit summary

You might want to fix this: (BOT - Reverted edit by User talk:24.153.124.246 (46187074) - reverted to User talk:Pschemp (46186937)) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cowboy&action=history I'm pretty sure user talks don't edit :) pschemp | talk 17:22, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Poison apple

You reverted a legitimate reversion of vandalism on Apple. I've asked for semi-protection for the page, because of the heavy traffic in vandalism and reversions, but you might want to add some logic to the bot to avoid reverting pages with heavy recent revert traffic.--Curtis Clark 17:47, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I only see two bot reverts on that page today. One [34] was a totally valid vandalism revert. The other [35] is discussed above in the "Fix your Bot" section, and is also a valid reversion, given the situation. (Do see the discussion above.) - TexasAndroid 18:02, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

i was given a warning in error

hello, I was trying to remove information that was probably a copyright violation from the page Derrick Z. Jackson. It said on the page that the information was taken directly from the Boston Globe's website. your bot reverted me and warned me. i don't think the copyright violation should stay on the page, but your bot will probably revert me again if i delete the text again, so could someone clear this up? thank you very much --B.U. Football For Life|Talk 18:15, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Make the edit again. The bot will, in general, not revert the same edit twice to specifically give the ability to override it in cases like this. In the more general about this type of situation, see my first comment in the "Fix your bot" section above for where I discuss that this is still a weakness of the bot. (And currently the largest remaining source of false positives for the bot.) - TexasAndroid 18:21, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
thanks for the explanation, i will go ahead and do that.--B.U. Football For Life|Talk 18:24, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


Tawkerbot2's edit summaries

Hi guys I wonder if you would consider rewording Tawkerbot2's edit summaries while it is still reacting to a small but significant number of false positives? It's doing a super job overall, but I think unnecessary angst is being generated by it leaving indelible Vandalism warning summaries on people's talk histories (including mine). I reckon if it said something more neutral like 'Tawkerbot2 revert' the upset editors arriving here would be less upset, and I can't think there would be any practical loss of information. Just a thought ~ Veledan • Talk 18:50, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Ok, ill change it when I have a second on my pc (cant edit from bberry). Thanks -- Tawkerbot2 20:38, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

EMERGENCY

I NEED help reverting vandalism on Miranda v. Arizona! NOW! Jonathan235 18:52, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Never Mind. Sorry Jonathan235 18:53, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

slightly odd stylistic point

A purely stylistic point that nonetheless seems strange to me: Tawkerbot2 reverted a page blanking on writer's block yet when it said which version it was reverting from and to it said:

Reverted edit by User talk:69.107.88.127 (46250755) - reverted to User talk:Mazeface (45304922))

Why does it use the user talk page for identifying the user when reverting?--Acebrock 03:15, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I said the same thing above at User_talk:Tawkerbot2#Funky_edit_summary pschemp | talk 03:57, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
  • This question has been asked on this page before. Here's the answer from the archive: Mostly because the link points to User Talk anyways that people want to go to and I don't want to make it look exactly like admin rollback, but I'm open to suggestions on formatting -- Tawker 14:49, 20 March 2006 (UTC) ~ Veledan • Talk 12:20, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, well if people aren't intelligent enough to find talk on their own they have issues. I really don't like it, and I think its more confusing that way. A link like user:xxx is sufficiently different from admin rollback. pschemp | talk 13:42, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
Well, at least I've found I always use the talk page instead of the user page, hence I made the link go there as I almost never to go the user page. I'll take a look at reformatting the message if anyone has a better format though -- Tawker 15:41, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

OMG

It gave me a warning and all i was doing was helping rid the world of retards —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mutters1 (talk • contribs).

Poster blanked the page Live Aid, and was reverted. Looks to me to have been an appropriate revert. - TexasAndroid 13:52, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

PHS article was falsely rolled back

30 March 2006 67.10.137.25 05:44, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Your edit removed large sections of the page, and was reverted by at least 3 human editors. So, while this may not have been vandalism, it was certainly not cut and dried a good edit. Anyway, this was another example of the bot triggering on removals of large portions of text. And given that the removal was done by an anon, and done with no edit summary, I'm not sure that there's a lot that could have been done to let the bot differentiate this edit from normal vandalism. - TexasAndroid 13:50, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Wrong guy

Hey hey - sorry i was deleting "dead babies" simultaneously - my bad

Wrong revert

For the page Opie and Anthony

(cur) (last) 16:46, 31 March 2006 Tawkerbot2 m (BOT - Reverted edit by User talk:VodkaJazz (46328894) - reverted to User talk:65.17.122.254 (46328866)) (cur) (last) 16:46, 31 March 2006 VodkaJazz (Revert to revision 46328580 using popups) (cur) (last) 16:46, 31 March 2006 65.17.122.254 (cur) (last) 16:45, 31 March 2006 Lightdarkness m (Reverted edits by 65.17.122.254 (Talk) to last version by Lightdarkness) (cur) (last) 16:45, 31 March 2006 65.17.122.254 (cur) (last) 16:43, 31 March 2006 Lightdarkness m (Reverted edits by 65.17.122.254 (Talk) to last version by Tawkerbot2) (cur) (last) 16:43, 31 March 2006 65.17.122.254 (cur) (last) 16:43, 31 March 2006 Tawkerbot2 m (BOT - Reverted edit by User talk:65.17.122.254 (46328519) - reverted to User talk:Lightdarkness (46328473)) (cur) (last) 16:43, 31 March 2006 65.17.122.254 (cur) (last) 16:42, 31 March 2006 Lightdarkness m (Reverted edits by 65.17.122.254 (Talk) to last version by Tawkerbot2) (cur) (last) 16:42, 31 March 2006 65.17.122.254 (cur) (last) 16:41, 31 March 2006 Tawkerbot2 m (BOT - Reverted edit by User talk:65.17.122.254 (46328326) - reverted to User talk:Payneos (46323070)) (cur) (last) 16:41, 31 March 2006 65.17.122.254

I reverted blanking vandalism by 65.17.122.254, and the bot reverted my revert.. heh. └ VodkaJazz/talk┐ 15:49, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Wrongful warning

I was mistakenly warn by Tawkerbot2, and ctawkbot attempted to add me to the CVU blacklist. Please advise that your bot mistakenly got the wrong username to warn. Thanks. --lightdarkness (talk) 15:50, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Particularly poor at dealing with multiple edits at once

Refering to Prostitution, the bot reverted a blanking to an already vandalised version, and then fairly simultaniously the blanker re-blanked while I reverted to a non-vandalised version (wiping out the re-blanking in the process). Bot then reverts to the blanked version and warns me

It seems to be extremely, extremely bad at dealing with simultaneous edits. --Kiand 16:16, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

The most recent relevant diff. Joe 07:30, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
Hmmm, I'll take a look and report back here, I know its a difficult issue and I've been working on it -- Tawker 07:39, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Your bot vandalised a page

Please see Oral sex history. This is also related. — Ian Moody (talk) 16:19, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Tyrone (UK Parliament constituency)

I was working on this article, gradually inputting substantial additional information today. Your bot has erroneously decided that was vandalism and reverted it to the original stub in need of attention. I have not changed it back yet, as I am not clear whether this would be effective. --Gary J 23:43, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

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