Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Ocobot 2

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 The result of the discussion was Withdrawn by operator.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] Ocobot

tasks • contribs • count • sul • logs • page moves • block user • block log • flag log • flag bot

Operator: Ocolon

Automatic or Manually Assisted: unsupervised automatic

Programming Language(s): PHP, MySQL

Function Summary: tags broken links in the article namespace (0)

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): continuous

Edit rate requested: 0.2 edits per minute

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y

Function Details: Ocobot currently detects broken external links and lists them. Dead external links are then checked manually and updated/recovered/replaced/removed. This works fine. However, the number of identified broken links increases quickly when Ocobot checks articles. It is hardly possible to work through all listed articles. Therefor I request approval for making Ocobot tag broken links in articles if they haven't been removed from the list after a defined time (5 days—could be adjusted though). Similar requests have been approved for trials but expired: BezkingBot-Link, ShakingBot. Ocobot will tag broken external links basically as decided on during the approval process of ShakingBot:

Combining John Broughton and Iamunknown's ideas above, what about tagging the links with something like ^{[bad link]} and as part of that template, adding the page to a category (in the same way that ^{[citation needed]} adds the page to Category:Articles with unsourced statements)? This has the advantage of the list of bad link pages being dynamic, and doesn't need to have fixed links manually removed and new links added in bulk as the ones on Wikipedia:Dead external links do. Thoughts, opinions? ShakingSpirit^talk 07:23, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

This (Ocobot's second) task would run manually assisted at the beginning to spot errors and to optimize the code. It will run automatically and unsupervised later.

[edit] Discussion

{{dead link}} operates in a way similar to the fact template, and already has the date= parameter. Although, I haven't created the sub-categories for the months yet. —Dispenser 02:21, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Oh, that's a nice template that could be used. Thank you! I have a few suggestions how it could be improved further. I'll post these on the template's talk page when I'm at home this evening. — Ocolon 10:04, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm afraid the suggestions I was going to make would cause more confusion than help. I'd have suggested to rename the url parameter because url is usually used for working URLs while the waybackdate template uses site for dead links. Such a differentiation would make it easier for bots to ignore links that are already marked dead. However, other wayback templates like dlw use url. Maybe this inconsistency will be removed once. But that's not the point here. So,

I think the template can be used in its current form. — Ocolon 17:24, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Task looks good. Approved for trial. Make 50 or so edits, and then report back. —METS501 (talk) 00:33, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm afraid I have to withdraw this request for now. The reason is that I currently do not have enough time to look after the bot because I'm too busy with other projects. I do not see technical problems here and I'd like to continue this once I have more time again. Sorry for the inconvenience caused. — Ocolon 06:55, 16 April 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.