User:SineBot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This user account is a bot operated by Slakr (talk).

It is not a sock puppet, but rather an automated or semi-automated account for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually.
Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it.
My userboxes
300,000+ This user has made over 300,000 contributions to Wikipedia.
~~~~ This user signs their posts and thinks you should too!
This user assumes good faith.
EW0 This user has not experienced any edit wars and does not wish to be involved in any.
This user maintains a strict policy advising against all personal attacks.
This user strives to maintain a policy of neutrality on controversial issues.
This user has been on Wikipedia for
10 months and 20 days.
This user enjoys contributing to Wikipedia without wearing clothes.

Contents


Footage of the bot's rarely-seen Sine wave.
Footage of the bot's rarely-seen Sine wave.

SineBot

SineBot is a bot that is designed to replace HagermanBot, which added {{Unsigned}} and {{UnsignedIP}} tags to unsigned edits made to talk pages as well as a handful of non-talk pages. The bot derives its name from a happy coincidence: "signing" on Wikipedia involves typing four tildes in a row (~~~~). Each tilde resembles the graphical representation of a sine function, and, of course, the very word "sine" is a homophone of "sign."

Maintainer

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, compliments, or complaints, please contact slakr, this bot's developer.

A graph of the displacement of the bot's sine wave. It is fighting with its evil archenemy, the cosine wave.
A graph of the displacement of the bot's sine wave. It is fighting with its evil archenemy, the cosine wave.

What SineBot does

  • SineBot is a recent changes patrolling bot that uses api.php to spot edits made on certain pages the moment they happen.
  • It will automatically add {{Unsigned}}, {{UnsignedIP}}, and {{Undated}} templates to comments left by registered and anonymous users, respectively.
  • Except on pages that are frequently modified, the bot will normally give editors a grace period (a minute or so) to sign and date unsigned/undated comments before assuming that a particular editor forgot to sign.
  • It runs continuously (except, obviously, for maintenance).
  • If a particular person makes three or more unsigned comments in a 24 hour period, the bot will place a single {{Tilde}} warning on his/her talk page.
  • Reports obvious vandalism and suspected personal attacks to various anti-vandalism IRC channels.

Where SineBot does it

Beware.
Beware.
  • All users are monitored by default, but anyone can opt out of having the bot sign his/her unsigned comments (see below).
  • Most edits to qualifying pages are monitored by default.
    However, whenever the bot isn't sure about whether or not to sign a specific edit, it prefers NOT to sign it.

Opting out

Single person

Single edit

To explicitly disable autosigning on a single specific edit, place !nosign! or !nosine! anywhere in the edit summary.

Entire talk page

Entire pages can be excluded using {{bots}} allow/deny tags. This is useful if you don't want the bot signing comments to your talk page. However, be sure to establish consensus on article talk pages before denying the bot from signing comments made to them.

What it looks for

  • The bot looks for signatures that are auto-generated by the most widely-used form of signing, tilde-based signatures.
    1. It should have a link to your user page (like "slakr")
    2. It should have a timestamp in UTC (like "01:58, 18 August 2007 (UTC)")
    • The easiest way to combine the two and to avoid the bot complaining is to stick four tildes ("~~~~") at the end of your talk page contributions.
  • There are exceptions to account for many strange/bizarre signatures, but if you keep having trouble with the bot not recognizing your signature, consider using the opt out methods listed above.
  • It will ignore unsigned comments from people with lots of edits, as it assumes that they should know better by that point.

Playing with it

To see SineBot in action, try leaving an unsigned comment in its sandbox just as you would leave a comment anywhere else.

Siblings

This bot has a twin on the English WikiNews.

Nerdy details

  • SineBot is written from scratch in PHP and runs as a background process using phpcli. It makes use of native libcurl and xdiff libraries for faster processing of changes made to pages. All network transfer is compressed using zlib to save bandwidth (i.e. maximize user throughput to wikipedia's servers).
  • Its version history is available here.

Status

Awards

Awards and Barnstars