LGPedia:Lucy's Balcony/archive

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Bots

This might be way out of our league here, but has anyone thought about creating a bot for LGPedia? It could do things like add Template:Tag to all the articles in Category:YouTube tags, make renaming categories easier, and other tedious tasks. I have some programming experience, but I'm not sure what programming language would be needed to make a bot. Does anyone know or are there any thoughts on the idea?--Jonpro 23:06, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

Creating a bot is way out of my league. Hell, I'm proud when my templates don't explode upon first use. Here's the wikipedia guide to bots: [1]. I can authorize a bot if somebody else can program one. --JayHenry 23:14, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

Having a bot for certain tasks might be nice. I was under the impression that you could "borrow" bots from Wikipedia... as in, use their source code somehow. It's so way out of my league though that even if I were given the code for the bot, I wouldn't even know what to do with it, or how to run it. Hm... I should start making friends at Wikipedia. OwenIsCool 23:24, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

Thanks for the link, Jay. I did some researching, and it appears that OwenIsCool is right. I'm going to try to get a bot set up using the 'python wikipediabot'. I'm still not sure exactly how to do it, but I'm working on it. I'll go ahead an create an account because it seems like that's one of the first steps to getting it to work. The username is User:LGBot.--Jonpro 23:55, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

Sounds cool! Keep us posted. Once we've tested it, and if we're sure it's not going to malfunction, then I can authorize it as a bot. The advantage of officially making it a bot is that its edits won't automatically show up in recent changes -- that way if you edit 500 video tags it won't flood recent changes. The disadvantage, is also that its edits won't automatically show up, but we can see them by clicking on (show bots) or by checking: Special:Contributions/LGBot. --JayHenry 00:40, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Ok, cool. Just to make sure, the language code for this wiki is 'en', right? I haven't gotten everything to work yet and want to make sure that's not the problem.--Jonpro 12:05, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

This may not look impressive, but I finally got the bot to work with this edit. I'm going to try to test it out in a few other ways to make sure everything is working correctly.--Jonpro 15:00, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Ok, I think the bot is working fine now. I had it run through some of the video transcripts and replace ''(whatever)'' with (''whatever''). I have to verify every change before it makes the edit, so it is unlikely to "go out of control" and start making crazy or unproductive edits. Other than that, are there any suggestions for more testing that should be done before this can really be put to use?--Jonpro 16:00, 14 March 2007 (CDT)