Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Nitrobot

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Withdrawn by operator.

[edit] Nitrobot

Operator: Rasillon

Automatic or Manually Assisted:automactic, but mostly manually assisted

Programming Language(s):AWB

Function Summary:Automactic bot edit

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run):Runs about 3 hours a day, under my supervision

Edit rate requested: 5 edits per Minute

Already has a bot flag (Y/N):No, bot exsists, but no flag

Function Details:The bot is designed to counter vandalism, personal attacks and trolling on userpages by detecting abusive words and swear words, then automacticlly reverts it. It also detects inapropiate usernames, automacticlly reporting them and slapping the username block template on their page. But its prime function is being an anti-troll bot.

[edit] Discussion

How would this work? Would it watch specific pages or all user pages? Will it revert changes by a user to their own page? What about good changes to a user page that may already have swear words, what will stop the bot from reverting those? Maybe these tasks can be merged into User:AntiVandalBot or User:VoABot II. Voice-of-All 17:05, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

As for inappropriate usernames, I suggest (a) posting names to Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User names rather than automatically blocking, and (b) building in a delay (say, an hour), because (in my experience) the names are already being watched and almost all probems are handled by monitoring admins within a short time. (The bot should check the block log before posting to the RFC/UN page, and not post any user names already blocked, of course.) John Broughton | Talk 17:15, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually, there really should be two bots. What is or isn't acceptable as a user name, per Wikipedia:Username, is quite different than what might be acceptable on a user page. For example, "bot" at the end of a username is verboten, the text string admin should also be flagged, etc. So there needs to be two separate comparison lists, and the incoming data stream is different, and the action upon finding a problem is different (revert versus block or posting about block) - why just one bot? John Broughton | Talk 17:15, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

How are you coding it? Will the source code be available for all to see, and what language/framework are you using? You should also be aware that bots cannot block users or perform any admin actions, and no bot ever has (thus far) had admin priveleges. The chances of your bot being approved with the ability to block users, with yourself not being a sysop - rather a user of a few days, are next to nil, and I suspect that such a bot would have to go through WP:RFA too. It might be workth popping on IRC and going to the vandalism channel to see how pgkbot in there reports bad username for admins to block. Martinp23 17:20, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

OK - you've removed the blocking bit from the proposal. What programming language will it use (unless, help me out here, there's a programming language called English? :P) and will the code be made available for all to review? fixed I'm not sure about reverting incivil posts to user talk pages - the feelings of users about removing comments from thier own talk pages vary, so I can see lots of opposition to you doing this with the bot (however helpful it does appear). Also, please remeber that wikipedia is not censored re:[1], and there can be a place for bad langugage on Wikipedia. Martinp23 17:40, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

AWB wouldn't have the right structure to allow you to do any of what you propose I don't think, unless you'd be using AWB as a normal internet browser, in which case a bot account (much less, a flag) probably isn't needed, and the community would be grateful for you to do most of the stuff under your normal account (unless I'm missing something about AWB here - which I may well be. Can it filter recent changes to find "bad words" in the user_talk namespace, or do the smae sort of thing for new user accounts?). Martinp23 17:58, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

• I'm going to go ahead an close this based on this [2] and after a conversation on MSN. Martinp23 23:28, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.