On 10/25/05, Jason Y. Lee jylee@cs.ucr.edu wrote:
I know this is likely a stupid question, and it is likely a gross violation of policy and accountability that I know of. And I'm already guessing what the answer is, and why I bother to ask is currently beyond me other than the reason that it's 5 in the morning where I am and I'm likely just being stupid. For which this point of this email, and for what I'm writing for has been a complete waste of time...
Anyway, would it be possible or stupidly possible to set up something, and I'm not specifically saying the Toolserver, however, this is a passing thought... where all the bots are just dumped into a fault tolerant server and have access by several trusted programmers and people so that if a useful and trustful bot goes awry that someone has immediate access to try to fix it or otherwise kick the damn thing to stop it? This is of course, an alternative from shooting at it by blocking the user account, or the IP address for that matter.
What might be good is to amend the bot policy to require the bot notice when it has new talk page messages, and if someone writes "STOP" on the talk page that the bot pauses it's operation until the stop is gone.
This would make it easier for any user to stop a broken bot without having to track down an admin.
What might also be useful in the future is running certain kinds of bots on the toolserver simply because there are a number of operations that are much cheaper if you have access to a copy of the database.... For example, I am currently adding a category to all "Fair use images" which are not inlined from the main namespace. (On en it's a CSD if they've been tagged for 7days, because it's not fair use if we're not using them!). It's about 2,200 images. If my bot didn't talk to my local copy of the Wikipedia database it would have to load the 20,700 image pages in the 'fair use images' category just to find the 2,200 images I care about. The database query takes about 45 seconds on my *laptop*, hot cache, or about 2 minutes if I just started mysql.