On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:
Andre Engels schrieb:
At the moment, if I want to run a bot, I open a screen and run it. Am I supposed to get some kind of remote desktop connection in the future?
As DaB sais: we can't impose any rules on bot use on the individual projects, and don't want to.
Ok, then I'll just shut up...
It just seems silly to run several interwiki-bots on the toolserver, instead of cooperating to run one.
Still, there's the matter of what it means to 'cooperate to run one'. Would that mean that there's only a single interwiki bot process running? That can only work if it is fast enough to go through _all_ pages on _all_ languages in a reasonable time. And even then you have only replaced the autonomous bots. Running with hints would be hard to get in; interactively running the bot would not be possible at all under such a scheme. Or does it just mean using a single username? In that case I don't see the advantage. Or is it that you want to be sure to use a single codebase? Keeping bots up-to-date is a good idea, but the problem it solves is not a very big one, in my opinion.
I think better results could be reached by putting the emphasis on the "cooperating" part rather than the "running one" part. Get some database or such where the bots notify when they have either updated a page or found that it did not need updating, then have the bots (except when running with hints or such) request this database before doing interwiki on a page and skip it if its last notification was less than so-and-so-much time ago (for example one week).