I've got a tool which parses sockpuppet investigation (SPI) pages and does some analysis. One of the steps is I need to validate that all of the usernames found in the SPI report are valid. I do that by sequentially calling usercontribs on each name with uclimit=1 and seeing if I get a baduser error. This works, but it's slow because I need to make 1 API call for each user. For a big SPI case, the time to do this swamps everything else. Is there a more efficient way to do this? Some API call where I can give it a bunch of usernames in a batch and have it tell me which ones are invalid? Alternatively, is there a regex I could apply on the client side to test if a username is valid? The most common type of invalid name I see is when somebody puts down an iprange (i.e. 1.2.4.0/24) as a username. Testing for that client-side would be trivial, but it might miss some others.

On Aug 19, 2021, at 6:21 PM, Bryan Davis &lt;bd808(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:bd808@wikimedia.org>> wrote: On Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 4:04 PM Roy Smith &lt;roy(a)panix.com <mailto:roy@panix.com>> wrote: You can do lookups in batches of 50 (500 if you have the "apihighlimits" right which is commonly granted by the "Bots" group on movement wikis) with <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Busers <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Busers>>. Here's a quick example: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&list=users&format=json&utf8=1&formatversion=2&ususers=Bryan%20Davis%7CBryanDavis%7CBDavis%20(WMF)%7Cbd808 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&list=users&format=json&utf8=1&formatversion=2&ususers=Bryan%20Davis%7CBryanDavis%7CBDavis%20(WMF)%7Cbd808>> The results will look something like: ``` { "batchcomplete": true, "query": { "users": [ { "name": "Bryan Davis", "missing": true }, { "userid": 2619078, "name": "BryanDavis" }, { "userid": 19474624, "name": "BDavis (WMF)" }, { "userid": 24257381, "name": "Bd808" } ] } } ``` Bryan -- Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808 _______________________________________________ Cloud mailing list -- cloud(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:cloud@lists.wikimedia.org> List information: https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/cloud.lists.wikimedia.org/ <https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/cloud.lists.wikimedia.org/>