User talk:PointyBot/Archive2

Botting PointyBot
PointyBot has been running on and off for a few weeks now. It does its job, it doesn't blow up, and it hasn't done anything horrible to the wiki so I'd like to propose that it gets botted so it can start maintaining Grand Exchange price history images for about 900 items. If you support or oppose can you say so here, and if you oppose can you also say what you'd like to see changed before you would support it. Thanks, Pointy 21:28, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Support - Can I even vote for this myself? :-) Pointy 21:28, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Support I like the work it's done, and since it's working so heavily, the ability for a user to hide it's edits from the recent change would be nice. 01:43, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Support in terms of giving this user 'bot status. This is precisely what the bot status is to be used for. --Robert Horning 22:44, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Support If it's going to be generating charts for all the exchange items, it makes it much easier watching RC to have a bot flag for PointyBot. Skill 00:47, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Support I do like hiding its contribs, and I like what it does. Christine Talk 23:09, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Support It does the job and it does it right. This is something we need.Ssj metroid 15:18, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Support. Have you considered saving the images as GIFs, though? They have smaller file sizes for black and white image. It could make a big difference if you're going to maintaining almost a thousand images. --Wowbagger421 21:37, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I hadn't really thought about it. The bot's uploaded a good few hundred images now, so it's probably a bit too far in to change it. I suppose at least having pngs will allow us to redesign the charts in future with more colours without needing to replace the gifs, and the total file for all the charts is only 7.5 mb anyway. Pointy 22:26, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Support It seems to work fine, and it's definitely interesting to hide its edits. Also, keep the png format :) 16:17, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Support per above. Dtm142 21:58, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Support Great bot, no malfunctions, etc.

PointyBot is now botted!
Thanks everyone that supported above. PointyBot's now been given the bot flag so I've upped the number of images it's allowed to upload per hour since its updates can now be hidden. Pointy 01:42, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Vector-based graphic?
Have you ever used a vector graphic format, like SVG? I was just thinking, if you have the com-sci know-how (I'm pretty busy), that it would be sweet to have the bot automatically generate an SVG chart instead, which is scalable to any arbitrary scale, and would take up much less space per image. Take a look, see if it's something we could (or would want to) adjust your bot to use. Scalable_Vector_Graphics.

Basically, from a scripting perspective, we could just have a template chart with placeholders in place of labels. Then it would just be a matter of a textual replace between something like YAXIS-LABEL1 and "120" or ITEM-NAME and "Chaos rune", as well as dynamically defining the graph line.

Anyway, excellent work to date, just thought I'd give you more to think about. Tell me what you think!


 * Ok I did some preliminary experimentation, and found that, because some (coughIEcough) browsers don't support SVG, what the wikimedia software does is, each time you include an SVG file, it will automatically render a thumbnail ping for that scale, and that's what will be displayed on the page. If you want to see what I mean, view the source in my Sandbox and then the source in Image:Svg example3.svg and finally the source (or, if using IE, save and open in notepad) at.
 * I think SVG charts will get quite complicated quite quickly. The nice thing about Excel is that is automatically scales axes to fit the data - party hats have a scale in hundreds of millions, willow logs have a scale in tens, and some charts don't even start at zero. The down-side is, of course, you have to have Excel installed which I don't know how many home users will have. I'm not against the idea, and it *would* be quite nice to be able to dynamically size the images, but I think it will turn out to be quite a lot more work than it looks on the surface, so I'm kind of hesitant to think too deeply about it at the moment... Pointy 11:35, 19 February 2008 (UTC)