No subject

Fri Mar 14 23:02:16 UTC 2008

of reasons why an edit might fail (locked db's, protected pages, or even
the server dying), and the bot needs to be designed to deal with that. If
your bot crashes, etc. due to an edit failing: well that's your fault as a
developer.

-Chad

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 11:17 AM, White Cat
<wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13706
>
>  Perhaps a community discussion is necessary on the matter, I hereby initiate
>  it.
>
>  When a person tries to edit a page that contains a URL matching the spam
>  autoblocker regex, the user is prohibited from making the edit until the
>  spam link is removed. The spam autoblocker was intended to prevent the
>  addition of new spam.
>
>  In a scenario where a spambot adds spam links to wikipedia, then later the
>  spam url is added to the spam blacklist, then a user tries to edit a page
>  that already contains spam added before the spam url is added to the spam
>  blacklist. For a human this isn't much of a deal to deal with, it is however
>  a different story when it comes to bots.
>
>  Consider you are operating a bot that makes non-controversial routine
>  maintenance edits on a regular basis. The spam autoblocker would prevent
>  such edits. If your bot's task is dealing with images renamed/deleted on
>  commons or if your bots task is dealing with interwiki links this is
>  particularly problematic. Interwiki bots, commons delinking bots often edit
>  hundereds of pages a day on hundereds of wikis. Thats a lot of logs. So the
>  suggestion that I should spend perhaps hours per day reading log files for
>  spam on pages on languages I cannot even understand (or necesarily read the
>  ?'s and %'s) is quite unreasonable. This is a task better dealt with by the
>  locals (humans) of the wiki community rather than bots preforming mindless,
>  routine and non-controversial tasks.
>
>  There is also the matter of legitimate reason to include spam on pages such
>  as archived discussion on a spam bot attack where example URLs are used
>  before these make their way to the spam autoblocker.
>
>       - White Cat
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