RuneScape talk:Bots/Archive 1

Suggestions and comments
It's fairly short, but I think this is complete enough to be made into policy. Please leave comments here. Thanks. Skill 06:30, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Support 07:06, 22 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Support--Zeeus 04:13, 29 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Support -- Pointy 03:18, 28 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Support -- Dragon Lilly3 00:50, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Added it to the policy category and took off construction tag as it doesn't look like much else will happen here. Skill 04:34, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Support 00:18, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

hiscores bot
I have no idea where I should be suggesting this and I have no idea how to create a bot nor do I know if what I'm suggesting is even feasible but I just updated the number of people in the level 30 hiscores and most were off by 20,000 people. Is there anyway we could create a bot that could check the hiscores and give a daily update of the numbers?-- 20:22, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
 * The biggest problem I think wouldn't be the technical feasibility (it's pretty simple) but rather this part (point 7) of rule 7 which forbids automatic, repeated queries to the RS website. If it were manually directed that would be fine, but that defeats most of the point of having it done but a bot. Skill 00:43, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
 * So if we did have a bot that could automatically fetch the hiscores but only did so when prompted by someone instead of being done at a preset and repeating time, would that be following the rules in the same way the calculators do? Is this feasible?-- 00:53, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that would work. It's probably simple enough to do so as well, though there's no specialized interface that would allow for this so it would have to be scraped off the page. But that's not too hard to do most likely. Skill 01:03, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok, well as noted above, I don't know the first thing about how to create or program bots but I don't want to just say "hey we should do this" and ask you or anyone else to do all the long and complicated work. So, considering my considerable ignorance on the topic, do you have any ideas how to proceed?-- 01:22, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I know how, and would be happy to do this, provided i remember :) email me at computer-dude at opposite-of-coldmail dot com immibis 09:02, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion-Transparency bot
I just thought of a bot we could have! A Transparency bot! It could add transparency to pictures needing it!

17:45, 13 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Total votes: 3
 * Oppose: 2
 * Support: 1

Disscussion
Support As Suggester

Comment - Sorry for asking, but what is transparency? >.<  17:56, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Awnser Transparency is the checkered grey backgrounds you see on most of the images on this wiki, Programs like Paint.Net, Gimp, Etc 18:20, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Oppose Transparency is something that is next to impossible to automate. ~Nightgunner5 talk 22:42, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Oppose - It is impossible to add transparency automatically. - 00:51, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Oppose - Not only is it impossible, but this is the main source of some users edit counts. (Kytti Khat, Karlis, ETC...). This is mainly what they work for, and that the way it should stay. 02:59, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Oppose - It simply would be impossible to automate. 13:34, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Comment It wouldn't be impossible, but hard, really hard. And that bot would make mistakes. 08:25, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

GEMW Update Bot
I'm writing a GEMW Update bot. It will run once daily from my computer, and update prices in the RuneScape Wiki's GE Market Watch that are over a week old. Since the GEMW prices don't get updated nearly enough, I'd think this would be a welcome improvement. Please comment with Support or Oppose. ~Nightgunner5 talk 22:41, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Total Votes: 3 Supporters: 3 Opposers: 1

Update: I can't figure out how to edit pages using the bot. I followed the instructions on MediaWiki.org. 00:14, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Editing via the API came out in 1.14, but Wikia is using 1.13 still, as 1.14 is in the final test stages before release. I expect the switch will happen early March. The prices are updated automatically by a bot already with no price older than 7 days(I think if I remember every day was viewed as too often, besides I remember when some items has prices that were 59 days out of date). - 00:47, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I think the 1.13 is incorrect on that page, as every thing I have read that talks about editing via api requires 1.14. - 00:54, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay, I'll skip writing the bot. I noticed the other bot while I was checking if mine would work. I wonder what the other bot uses to edit pages though :-/ 01:01, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * SmackBot uses AutoWikiBrowser to make the changes. Generally it is run on a daily basis only updating items that have changed since the last run, and ignoring any with the date of the data.  Saturday and Wednesday it updates items that haven't changed too: this is just to ensure there is a set of points for any future graphing/analysis process, and to show that the page hasn't been forgotten.  I might reduce this to just Saturdays. Rich Farmbrough, 11:18 27  February 2009 (GMT).
 * TehKittyBot uses PyWikipedia to make edits, although I sometimes use AutoWikiBrowser. - 21:15, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Oppose - Don't we already have SmackBot? 02:59, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Indeed we do, and SmackBot does a very good job of updating the exchange pages, so I don't think we need another one... 13:10, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Support - I believe having one more bot wouldn't hurt. Some prices are old and smackbot doesn't seem to update and ,as you stated, the new bot can update prices that are weeks old. 13:18, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * They could conflict with each other if they somehow had different criteria (e.g. one goes by name, the other by ID). If there are items that haven't been updated by SmackBot, then give us some examples and I'm sure Rich will be able to sort it out. 13:27, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I have seen a few, but the most recent one I saw was unfinished potions. I'm not too sure what it was. I'll go check out some items that are not updated yet. 14:03, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Here are some of the few that are about to reach 1 week of unchanged price mark.Grand Exchange Market Watch/Herblore, Grand Exchange Market Watch/Construction flatpacks, and Grand Exchange Market Watch/Miscellaneous. I know smackbot works hard and I appreciate it, I just think that it would be helpful if smackbot updates price with items starting with maybe 0-M and the new bot N-Z. 14:18, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * My bot works using the ID of the items as supplied in the GEMW pages. It finds items in need of updates by looking at Category:Grand_Exchange_by_date_updated and moving down the list until an item's price is less than a week old. Here's an example of the debug output. 15:07, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I can't see a problem with any of those. If nothing has changed in the week then SmackBot doesn't need to do an update. Just doing an update on the date too often would be too much of a burden on the servers, and takes away the information of when the price last changed. 15:43, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * My bot would only do items that are over a week out of date, so I don't see any problems with server load. 16:01, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I can see GEBot working alongside SmackBot. Since SmackBot uses a different method of finding items in need of updates, we get the best of both worlds and minimal collisions. My bot even protects itself from collisions by checking for edits before it updates the page, and I think that SmackBot does the same. 16:30, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how having two GE bots could possibly harm anything. If it means more up-to-date prices, then I'm all for it. I often look on here to see just how much money I'll lose training skills. The extra 200 coin price difference that could have occured in 3 days makes a huge difference when buying in bulk. I support another bot. =D 17:49, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


 * OK let me explain. SB will not update prices that haven't changed. Otherwise everything is updated pretty-much daily. SB uses a its own record of the price so that it knows what has changed.  It avoids updating any that were updated that day, although I think I will need to smarten this up now. Wed and Sat it updates everything. In general anything SB doesn't update on Wed or Sat is a problem record and needs human intervention. There is never anythign more than a few days old or usually more than 1 day outdated, and then only if someone has tampered with the page.  I implemented the Category:Grand_Exchange_by_date_updated and the Item ID field to support this. Yesterday GEMWBot broke a number of pages by taking a carriage return out.  Fixing these meant that SB was then lagging GEMWbot's next run and the day had ticked over it was then in danger of putting older data over newer.  If GEMWBot was only doing the week-old items it claims it would never update anything. Rich Farmbrough, 07:30 8  March 2009 (GMT).

Oppose for the time being. GEMWbot is currently running daily and has not been approved. It is breaking article layouts making them hard for SmackBot to process. See Exchange:Plant pot for example. Rich Farmbrough, 11:50 9 March 2009 (GMT).

SpellCheck Bot?
From User_talk:Rs4life07: Why not get a bot to do this? There could be a semi-protected page that it would read spellings to change to and from, and it would patrol the Wiki using Special:Random! I'd be glad to make one. 18:38, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

So, what do you think? 18:54, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Total votes: 9 Supporters: 5 Opposers: 4

Discussion

 * Strong Support - We can finally take care of all those inconsistencies! Plus, Nightgunner5 would program the bot in PHP, which is the perfect language for this sort of thing.   19:06, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment A proof of concept for the config file can be found here. 19:36, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Oppose - I don't mean to be the black cloud or anything, but I think this was tried on Wikipedia a while ago, and didn't do so well. The problem is that there could be many false positives, and it would be maddening to try to find them all. Perhaps if it were a fully manual bot (the bot would find it, but a user would have to confirm every change), I would support. Butterman62 (talk) 21:32, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The bot would change exact matches, meaning if the config file contained, it would change fial to fail, but not final to fail.  21:36, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's not really a spellcheck bot... more like a find and replace bot. It'd be useful for correcting "American" spelling. ;)  21:44, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The problem is, there's too much margin of error. For example, what if someone's signature has "Fial" in it? Also, there's way too many words to prevent all possible messups. Even meta's bot policy discourages it, as they say, "It is not technically possible in most languages to automatically correct spelling mistakes without a significant margin of error". Butterman62 (talk) 21:50, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm only going to allow it to edit Main namespace articles. Also, it will only edit full words. 22:05, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Even with Americanisms, if you accidentally change links or image names, then things start breaking. It's really best done manually. 22:01, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I could do some sort of Regex to prevent links and image names from being edited. 22:06, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Oppose - as per Hurston 04:26, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Oppose - per Butterman and Hurston. Too big margin of error, might mess up links. Not a bad idea, just probably wouldn't execute too well. 05:46, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment - if editors knew how to spell "receive", "similar", and "thief", then my edit count would be near zero.  --Hatchenator 16:45, 3 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Support - I had thought of this recently and thought it was a good idea. Remember to not change attribute names on tags and in parameters for templates, like accidentally color to colour. - 23:54, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Oppose- Per Butteman. 00:15, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Er, uh... Butterman. 00:16, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Slight Support - I think that this would be a very good idea if we could get all the kinks out. -- 03:41, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Comment - It would be good if the bot could make a list of the pages with spelling "errors". This way the bot can pick up all the spelling errors (especially the ones in less visited pages), and editors can correct them. Win-win.


 * List of pages with spelling errors:


 * 1) Page 1: word1, word2, word3
 * 2) Page 2: word2, word4
 * 3) Page 3: word5, and so on.

13:19, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Comment: I believe this is a good idea but some spellings would be controversial eg Americans spell it armor but I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) Britain, Australia and New Zealand spell it armour. 17:50, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Suggestions
 * Turn on spell check in your browser
 * Look at using AWB with reg-ex-tyopo fixing.
 * Rich Farmbrough, 07:33 8 March 2009 (GMT).


 * Further to the above I have imported the spelling list from en.wikipeida and changed it so that it allows "Vyre" and "guam".
 * * RuneScape:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos
 * * Anyone can add spelling errors if they can use reg-exs and a little common sense: e.g. for Fremennick, Ugthanki etc.
 * * Anyone using en:WP:AWB can check a bunch of pages.
 * * I'm trying to do a one off run through but probably won't have time to do it all.
 * * These edits should be checked, and should therefore not be considered "bot" edits - sometimes they need tweaking, and sometimes they may just be wrong (as in Vrye and guam before I changed the list, for example).
 * Rich Farmbrough, 14:33 20 March 2009 (GMT).
 * Rich Farmbrough, 14:33 20 March 2009 (GMT).
 * Rich Farmbrough, 14:33 20 March 2009 (GMT).

I have run AWB several times, and I believe it has made several hundred edits. It does require the user to check each one, which I do. I currently have a list compiled for Special:AllPages, and run through it on thr weekends, trying to fix typos, grammar mistakes, and other minor issues. I also used to to make the Store value in GEMW articles uniform. (Store=No rather than "not sold" "N/A") I will gladly continue running it, as it picks up several things that humans often miss. 14:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Support - Nightgunner seems to know what he's doing. 20:16, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

GEBot on trial
I've stopped GEBot from running until all of this can be cleared up. I found a few errors in regexes that were causing newlines to be removed, but nothing to cause an entire page to be blanked.

I had GEBot updating items that had changed since his previous update, as well as any item that had no edits for over a week. I'm trying to figure out a way for GEBot to spread its updates out more, to lessen the load on the server.

I've made a copy of GEBot that doesn't edit any pages. I would like everybody to try it out to make sure it doesn't have any noticeable glitches. Please note that it will set the price to 500 coins because it doesn't have access to my database of prices.

22:03, 9 March 2009 (UTC)


 * GEBot seems to still be editing extensivly. Rich Farmbrough, 08:30 16 March 2009 (GMT).
 * GEBot is only updating items that either have outdated prices or are a over week old. It waits 5 seconds between updates, and doesn't have any of the glitches that were causing problems. How is this extensive? 20:17, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Well it's more extensive than "I've stopped GEBot from running until all of this can be cleared up." It's also more extensive than your original statement that it would only update prices that were over a week out of date. Rich Farmbrough, 21:47 18  March 2009 (GMT).

Bot Proposal
Hi, I didn't find in this policy a specific place to propose a new bot, so I will do it here. Please let me know if there's a more appropriate area. Anyway, the bot I propose is to collect market prices from RSWiki item articles and create historical charts based on that data. Here's how I propose it works:


 * 1) It must collect a list of all items in Category:Grand Exchange
 * 2) It must check each page in the list and retrieve the value of price in the ExchangeItem template
 * 3) A database stored locally on the bot is used to retrieve the last known price of the item; if the price has changed, a new entry is stored into the local database.
 * 4) The database of prices is used to generate a stylized historical chart of prices.  The chart can extend for any length of time, even beyond the 30-day timeframe provided by the Exchange itself.
 * 5) If the chart has been updated, it is uploaded back to RSWiki to replace the previous chart for the item.

Each item can be checked at a period of a day or longer, depending on the interval needed to minimize load on RSWiki. The graphs only need to be uploaded when an item's price actually changed. It can even wait longer (for example, upload only weekly), to reduce the bandwidth needed to transfer images. Alternatively, the graphical images can be stored on the bot's machine instead and made available as an external image so it doesn't have to be uploaded. Optionally, the historical data can be uploaded textually to the RSWiki article.

I intend to license the code under GPL or similar open source, free use license. I will code it using PHP with pre-existing library functions I developed for editing other MediaWikis. The database will use MySQL and database schemas and dumps can be made available. I can do testing on RSWiki or on a newly installed MediaWiki made especially for testing purposes. I will run the bot myself on a Linux home server that runs an Apache webserver. I'm open to any suggestions or criticisms. Thank you for your consideration. --Quarenon 15:44, 20 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I just wanted to add that having the min/max GE prices available might also be nice, just because that might help show the trends of where the base price falls between the min/max bracket. I intended to retrieve data only from the wiki since it seems that automated retrieval from RuneScape itself may be against their TOS so this would be up to you guys on whether you want to add more template fields.  --Quarenon 16:07, 20 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Withdrawn after seeing the existing GEMH project. -- 17:44, 1 July 2009 (UTC)