I made a patch to add any customized user agent and (username would be
default) and if the person doesn't want to add any user agent, they just
can set it to " "
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/147381/
I would be happy for any comments regarding this patch
Best
On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 7:00 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
> Note this reply represents my own views, but does not represent an official
> WMF position.
>
> On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 4:25 PM, John Mark Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> > It would be good to know the answer to whether the username is logged
> > against API requests. It seems like a very important piece of
> > information which should be visible in server ops logging of API
> > usage.
> >
>
> The API request log does record usernames. And doesn't contain user agents,
> for that matter.
>
> But my guess is that at least some of the types of problems Ops would be
> concerned with are in different log files that probably do not contain
> usernames but do contain user agents.
>
>
> > username is easy, if it is needed.
>
>
> I would include username. The only harm is a few extra bytes per request.
>
>
> > pywiki requiring bot operators provide an email address is technically
> > easy, but I suspect it isnt going to be very successful or
> > appreciated, esp for non-SSL wikis, or understood as pywiki hasnt put
> > this info in the user-agent since the new user-agent policy was
> > introduced, so why now?
> >
>
> I don't see any particular need for email addresses if the on-wiki username
> is provided. The key is "some method of contact".
>
>
> > If the main source of problems is the 'large' bots, they usually run
> > many tasks, and it is likely to only be a single task causing
> > problems. With these large tasks, ideally they are paused rather than
> > blocked, in which case we need to introduce a standardised way to
> > pause a bot. In these cases, the user agent could mention the task
> > identifier, and that identifier could be used to pause it until an
> > operator has checked their email. The 'pause' command interface could
> > be IRC or user_talk, or something new based on Flow, or a API response
> > warning like replag which pywikibot honours. I appreciate BinĂ¡ris'
> > point that some (most?) wikis, especially smaller wikis, do not have
> > 'task approval' processes with a task identifier, so this would need
> > to be optional. Large bot operators would use this feature if it
> > meant that only a single task is paused rather than the bot account
> > blocked.
> >
> > For the normal usage of pywikibot, being invoking an existing script
> > which is maintained by pywikibot, we could include in the user-agent
> > which script is running (e.g. move.py).
> >
>
> Including the "task name", which for pywikibot could be the script name,
> seems sensible to me. Besides the stated distinguishing which script in a
> multi-task bot is problematic, it would also help in determining that
> multiple accounts/IPs are running the same problematic script.
>
> I wouldn't go as far as requiring the task name to correspond to any
> particular on-wiki approval, although bots on wikis with such approval
> processes could well use the title of the approval page as their task name.
>
> What user agents do the other large editing frameworks use?
> >
>
> I can tell you AnomieBOT uses "AnomieBOT 1.0 ($TASKNAME; see
> [[User:$USERNAME]])". Not sure if you consider it a large editing
> framework.
>
> The task names the bot uses are generally listed on the bot's userpage;
> various one-off scripts I use locally will use some ad-hoc identifier, or
> "no task" if I forgot to have the script set a task name.
>
> (I should change that to start with AnomieBOT/1.0 to comply with RFC 2616,
> now that I think of it)
>
> --
> Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
> Software Engineer
> Wikimedia Foundation
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>
--
Amir