Speaking of bots, over the past few days and in recent months, bots that the community had come to rely upon have stopped working, and we don't have the source available to fix them.
In the most recent case, the en: crypticbot was stopped and banned by a misguided administrator. It was overturned, but the damage was done.
Unfortunately, it was the one was responsible for daily sub-pages at Templates for Deletion and others, and running the Village Pump and others. Cryptic cannot restore operation until returning to work on Wednesday.
It seems to be too fragile for depending on individual users, and would benefit by toolserver or central access to the database to avoid overhead. (Hopefully, ensuring technical competence.)
What needs to be done to have a centralized system for running such hourly and daily tasks?
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org