User:STBotI

This user account is a bot operated by ST47 (talk). It is used to make repetitive automated or semi-automated edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually, in accordance with the bot policy. This bot does not yet have the approval of the community, or approval has been withdrawn or expired, and therefore shouldn't be making edits that appear to be unassisted except in the operator's or its own user and user talk space.
Administrators: if this bot is making edits that appear to be unassisted to pages not in the operator's or its own userspace, please block it.

Admins: Getting to block a bot is not a trophy you get. If you block this bot, you had better have a good reason.

Timing[edit]

It seems a lot of users have whined about the bot tagging bad images. Indeed, this is a horrible consequence. It should surely wait until the user, who has already refused one chance to do it right, adds the proper information. As a result, I made some changes to the bot's system. Previously it used a single FIFO stack with a fixed length. Imagine it as a pile of papers. Each image that is uploaded is a new piece of paper added to the top. Once there are 10 pages, every new page added to the top also causes a page to be removed from the bottom and processed.

Instead, it now uses two more complex time-based FIFO stacks. These stacks are polled every 30 seconds for expired items. Upon upload, images are added to the first stack. Between 300 and 330 seconds later, it is processed: we check for tags and do fun stuff. Certain images are added to a second stack, the orphan stack. After 450-480 more seconds, they are checked for incoming links. Maybe those will be tagged sometime in the future. Not yet.

Deadline[edit]

There's a bunch of talk about a deadline for image policy compliance. When that happens, very little will change with this bot. I may make some modifications to keep it running more of the time, since it seems to disconnect once in a while and not recover. I may also configure it to start running on backlogs, depending on what I can do to make that work. This way, if it misses something the first time, or a tag is removed without action, we can catch it again. If anyone would actually use a list of images that are re-tagged, let me know, and when I implement this I will do that at the same time. (Here, backlogs refers to images uploaded say a week ago which the bot already looked at. This would not require another BRFA.)

Another possibility is orphaned tagging. If I do implement the previous suggestion, I will do this as well. I currently have an orphaned image checker running on STBotI, but it is not set up to tag images, just make a list. My research shows that we cannot tag these images this quickly (10-15 minutes), as we run into issues with people doing a lot of work and not adding the images until later. Perhaps a 24-hour delay would be effective.

I changed my mind. It won't be delayed, it will simply do a walkthrough of all images. Walkthrough proceeds at about one second for a good image, so it takes over a week to complete a run.

Message from Hotel1800[edit]

Can you give me guidlines on putting a picture on a talk page please? - User talk:Hotel1800

Upload it and put it on as you normally would. If this bot causes you a problem, report it to an Administrator. Often these bots just try to police Wikipedia throwing their weight around when they don't really have any - generally bad programming, well, at least this bot is. Also, please try to comment on the discussion page, not the user page for this, and other, bots. 86.138.158.223 (talk) 23:33, 30 November 2009 (UTC)