User talk:MER-C

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[edit] WP:HAU

Hello yet again. I regretfully inform you that the bot we were using to update the user status at Wikipedia:Highly Active Users, SoxBot V, was blocked for its constant updating. With this bot out of operation, a patch is in the works. Until that patch is reviewed and accepted by the developers, some options have been presented to use as workarounds: 1) Qui monobook (not available in Internet Explorer); 2) User:Hersfold/StatusTemplate; 3) Manually updating User:StatusBot/Status/USERNAME; or 4) Not worry about it and wait for the patch to go through, which hopefully won't take long. If you have another method, you can use that, too. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Useight (talk) 22:31, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] goatse image

Hi,

You reverted my change, where I put the image back onto the goatse page.

You gave the reason as vandalism.

Will all due respect, I don't see how it can be seen as vandalism,

If you could reconsider your reasoning, please could you revert your edit.

Thanks, —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.242.32.12 (talk • contribs)

This looks like vandalism to me. MER-C 12:02, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh - that's horrible! But it's nothing to do with me. Perhaps its another person using this internet connection - it is a few days ago I think? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.242.32.12 (talk • contribs)

Yeah, last Monday. However, this IP is probably an open proxy. Editing through open proxies is not allowed. MER-C 12:18, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi,

I've just read that article, and I don't think you've understood it correctly. It says that proxies "may be blocked [...] this may affect legitimate users, they are not the intended targets and may freely use proxies until those are blocked".

So I think it's OK to use this until/if it gets blocked? Is that correct? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.242.32.12 (talk • contribs)

Blocked for 5 years. MER-C 12:43, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wiki.java

Hello. I was using some of your bot's functionalities (login and edit primitives) as a base for my bot lately. There were some problems about encoding in general and wpStarttime generation, new way the contents of categories are being listed which I solved. But lately (few days ago) came up something that I cannot resolve. Bot can't make an edit, yet it still can login and read pages. It is likely that there is a new parameter to be passed, but I just can't find what one it would be. Would you have a clue about what is happening? :) Mihajlo ^{_[ talk _]} 13:17, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

I fixed this yesterday, oddly enough: the problem was CentralAuth cookies. Either way, here's the fix - in edit() add cookies2.putAll(cookies); as follows:

// What we need to do is get the edit page and fish out the wpEditToken, wpStartTime and
// wpEditTime values. See [[mw:Manual:Parameters to index.php]]
String URL = base + title + "&action=edit";
logurl(URL, "edit"); // no need to check lag, have already done so in getProtectionLevel()
URLConnection connection = new URL(URL).openConnection();
setCookies(connection, cookies);
connection.connect();
grabCookies(connection, cookies2);
cookies2.putAll(cookies);  // HERE
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new GZIPInputStream(connection.getInputStream())));

I'll rewrite that lot once API edit becomes stable, which should do away with most of the cookie and screen-scraping nonsense. I also fixed bugs in whatLinksHere() and log entry timestamps. getCategoryMembers() works for me, which version are you using? Please tell me about the encoding issues, I do all of my testing either here or on testwiki. I'll get out the fixed version as soon as I chuck in a Special:(Short|Long)pages equivalent. MER-C 09:15, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, this worked well. :) I will certainly look later into the changes that I made to your basic script. Be well. Mihajlo ^{_[ talk _]} 09:44, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Now I went through it, and I can mention these:

• In the method edit you generate wpStarttime and add two extra zeros on it when sending. These two zeros were causing MW to reject some of bot's edits in the past, since they do not appear in the regular form anyway. So, for me this line is just out.print(wpStarttime); without two zeros on the end.
• Wherever you have a name of something, encode it to UTF-8 before send. I needed to do this in the imageUsage method in order to be able to read data also about the images whose names are not made of the English alphabet only. Also consider adding an extra parameter "UTF-8" wherever you create a new InputStreamReader.

I think the rest has been fixed. I'll report if I see anything else. Mihajlo ^{_[ talk _]} 07:29, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

These should all be fixed (I think). MER-C 10:59, 7 June 2008 (UTC)