User talk:Scs

Keeping threads together: If you post here, I'll reply here. If I post on your talk page, I'll look for your reply there.

Discussions updated very recently were archived

In this edit, User:Scsbot archived Help desk discussions such as § Multiple PD notice template, updated as recently as 19:09 8 January. I would have wished to respond to User:Scope creep's recent message (diff), but was prevented from doing so because it disappeared a mere 2 1/2 hours after it was written. Can you explain? Aren't bots supposed to base archiving decisions based on timestamp of the most recent comment in the discussion? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 04:14, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: A bot, like any computer program, is supposed to do what it's designed to do. Some Wikipedia archiving bots, it's true, are designed to look for recent activity, but scsbot was never intended to work that way, because when it was designed (back in 2007 or so) to archive the reference desks, a fixed archiving interval was what was desired.

scsbot won't be rewritten to behave differently, partly because it would be too much work, but more importantly because there's no reason to: there are other bots that are designed to look for recent activity. Starting a discussion to consider switching a desk to a different archiving bot and strategy (as you've done) is the right thing to do. —scs (talk) 04:56, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Understood, thanks. We'll continue pursuing that, and see what develops. Thanks for weighing in! Mathglot (talk) 06:29, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

WP:RD/MA archiving

The archiving function at WP:RD/MA seems to have fallen behind. New date headers are being added, but old topics are there, the oldest one being 12 days old. I thought one week was the time limit, so has there been a change? RDBury (talk) 23:24, 28 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@RDBury: Yes, there has been a change. See Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#Suggestion for Time Increase. —scs (talk) 01:19, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That explains it, thanks. I think 14 days will work better, at least for WP:RD/MA. Sometimes during the holiday season or over the summer there are no active questions and the pages are left empty, and I assume it's a bit discouraging to a potential poster to see a blank page. RDBury (talk) 03:25, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello

I was recommended to seek your input on this: Wikipedia:Help_desk#Help_desk_archiving. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:16, 12 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Answered in the thread. —scs (talk) 20:26, 12 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Strange scsbot edit

Do you understand what happened here: Special:Diff/1239549457? --Lambiam 10:19, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Lambiam: It's basically, "It does that sometimes". The basic algorithm for inserting the new August 10 header is simply to find the last question dated August 9, and insert "= August 10 =" right after it.

So the next question is, why was there already August 9 header after the August 9 question? I suspect that question was actually posted on August 8, after which the bot (during the previous day's run) added the August 9 header after it, after which someone added the "Preceding unsigned comment" comment to the question, with an August 9 date baked into it.

The bot used to insert date headers out of order all the time. Eventually I put in a fix for the most common case (namely an empty day), but I think the bot still gets confused in the case where a "Preceding unsigned comment" comment got added to an unsigned question a day later than the question actually appeared.

Or, at least, that's what I assume happens — I'm not sure I've ever dug all the way down to the bottom of this issue. —scs (talk) 14:13, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The August 9 question was added on August 9 above the already existing August 9 header: Special:Diff/1239515506. The edit summary shows that the poster added their question by editing the section of the preceding question. --Lambiam 19:09, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Scsbot has stopped

The last edit is of 00:34, 17 March 2025 UTC. ‑‑Lambiam 14:02, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Lambiam: (talk page stalker) Scs is aware, see Wikipedia talk:Help desk#archiving woes. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:13, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Miscellaneous RD

Normally, your bot adds/changes the reference-desk date headings within a few minutes after the beginning of a new UTC day, but for some reason it's been skipping the Miscellaneous desk ~~for the past few days~~ since May 7. Is there a problem? Deor (talk) 01:01, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Deor: There is: some text currently on the Misc desk (probably "create a new page") is confusing the poor old bot's screen-scraping algorithm. This seemed like a good opportunity to finally finish the bot's rewrite so that it can use the proper Wikipedia editing API, which I'm working on now. —scs (talk) 02:50, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For your consideration

Something strange happened here. ‑‑Lambiam 05:24, 25 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Any particular reason ...

... why your bot hasn't been running on the ref desks the past couple of days? I've added the date headers, but archiving looks rather complicated, so I've eschewed that. Deor (talk) 00:49, 17 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Deor: Thanks for letting me know. I guess there are two parts to this:

I hadn't noticed that date headers weren't being added. I see the problem now. I can work on this. Thanks for pointing it out — and for taking care of the headers!
But archiving, I think, has been working correctly. What have you seen that wasn't getting archived?

—scs (talk) 01:28, 17 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You could be right; I guess I just got used to seeing the bot archive the language desk (which is the only one on my watchlist) every day about 20 minutes after adding the date headers. Anyway, thanks for looking into the matter. Deor (talk) 03:28, 17 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Deor: Now that I know there's a problem, I'll be temporarily adding date headers on the same schedule as I do archiving. This means that it'll sometimes be a couple of hours after midnight UTC — but it will happen. It'll likely take several days to get the underlying problem fixed, and then things can return to normal. —scs (talk) 10:07, 19 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Underlying problem fixed. Date headers are back to being added on their "normal" schedule (at 00:05 UTC). —scs (talk) 07:21, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Superfluous empty lines above date headers at RefDesk

A new date header needs an empty line before it only if the preceding line is not empty already. When it is, for example when it's an empty line added a day before before the date header being replaced, the vertical space accumulates. Compare edits:
Special:Diff/1311194465, Special:Diff/1311372044, Special:Diff/1311599383, Special:Diff/1311799511, Special:Diff/1311978058 and Special:Diff/1312078466.
CiaPan (talk) 14:50, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@CiaPan: Yeah, I see what you mean. There've probably been multiple times, when I was working on various bits of scsbot's Refdesk scripts, that I forgot or didn't realize this fact. But if extra blank lines are ignored (which, darn it, I tend to assume they are), it's often much easier to code something that blindly inserts a blank line, without having to perform cumbersome extra tests to decide whether it's strictly necessary.

But as volume decreases, this is happening more and more often (I see it's been — yikes! — almost 10 days since there was a new question on the Computing desk), so I suppose I'll have to dig in and do something about it. —scs (talk) 10:33, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Empty lines at the end of a section get ignored (truncated) when you start editing a section, so they don't harm at all - if someone adds something to a section, they automatically disappear. So please treat my notice just as an interesting unintended side feature observation, not a bug report.

CiaPan (talk) 10:59, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed my typos. --CiaPan (talk) 11:05, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

vchimpanzee

You have time to feed the vchimpanzee troll, so try looking through his historical questions. Find one - just one - where his response is that something worked. He always drags out the questions by introducing vague comments about maybe his new mouse did something or maybe the library changed their internet or maybe some website he went to installed something. It doesn't come to a conclusion. 4.17.97.234 (talk) 17:16, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No comment. —scs (talk) 02:32, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"adding date headers" deletes content

Specifically today, as seen on the reference desk for the pages on the topics Computing, Science, Mathematics and Miscellaneous, but also on page Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English. (The links are for the differences between revisions.) ‑‑Lambiam 10:05, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Lambiam: Yes. But all cleaned up now, I think. See User talk:Scsbot#Blank line cleanup at WP:PNT. —scs (talk) 12:09, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]