On Jul 11, 2014 9:45 AM, "Marc A. Pelletier" marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 07/11/2014 09:34 AM, John Mark Vandenberg wrote:
Could ops confirm they have the username of each logged in edit at their finger tips (i.e. roughly as easy to access as the user-agent)? Pywikibot doesnt permit logged out edits.
We do, after the fact, from the same data Checkusers have access to.
Not if they don't make an edit.
There's lots of options for bots to cause trouble for ops. (including things that effect all wikis on the cluster, not just the specific one they were accessing)
I'm not sure where that talk occured; I have not been made aware of it and it didn't filter through the normal ops channels that I've seen.
I believe that's referring to the pywikipedia list.
I'm a little surprised by Antoine's suggestion that it is important that the bot user's information is in the UA string - it doesn't seem useful or necessary to me. Bots shouldn't be editing while logged out in the first place, so the bot account will normally always be plain to see.
Obviously, having the user account in the UA would help a bit in tracking down errant bots when they happen but that should be a rare occurance and we have other methods to use in those cases.
Varnish has access to the cookies, sure. But we log UA string and not cookies. Or maybe analytics is doing extra logging I didn't notice? If you're looking at request logs or varnishtop then UA string is a convenient way (and the standard way we've always suggested to not operators) to identify the bot.
Imagine if you've identified a specific type of bad request in logs and they're all from one IP and one UA string. Varnish can easily send an error for a certain UA string+IP address before it hits the apaches if you need it to. But if that UA string is generic then you may end up blocking collateral damage instead of just the one broken bot.
Coren, what you say above is a change from past statements: I can recall more than a few past conversations about this with mzmcbride, Tim Starling and others. (Usually comes up when someone comes asking for whatever app they're writing for a small number of operators. not a big framework like pwb)
-Jeremy