User:RFC bot

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This user account is a bot operated by Messedrocker (talk). It is not a sock puppet, but rather an automated or semi-automated account for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually. Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it.

Issues by topic area
Biographies	(watch)	{{RFCbio}}
Economy, trade, and companies	(watch)	{{RFCecon}}
History and geography	(watch)	{{RFChist}}
Language and linguistics	(watch)	{{RFClang}}
Maths, science, and technology	(watch)	{{RFCsci}}
Art, architecture, literature and media	(watch)	{{RFCart}}
Politics	(watch)	{{RFCpol}}
Religion and philosophy	(watch)	{{RFCreli}}
Society, sports, law, and sex	(watch)	{{RFCsoc}}
Wikipedia style, referencing, layout and WikiProjects	(watch)	{{RFCstyle}}
Wikipedia policies, guidelines and proposals	(watch)	{{RFCpolicy}}

This bot has proudly taken up residence on the Wikimedia Toolserver.

The point of this bot used to be to maintain a template known at {{wider attention list}}, however it has taken on the bigger and nobler job of automating the several WP:RFC lists.

This bot is based on the Python Wikipedia framework and was coded mostly by User:Betacommand, with highly important bug fixes by User:Gmaxwell and text specification, minor updates, and whining by User:Messedrocker. The code is available on Botwiki under the MIT license

Contents 1 How it works 1.1 Example use of RFCxxx Template 2 Feature requests 2.1 Archives

[edit] How it works

The new automated RFC lists are generated through the transclusion of a template on a page. The bot frequently examines the template transclusions and then adds appropriate pages to the list.

Let's say for example you were requesting comments for a politics-related dispute. To list a discussion, you would do this:

{{RFCpol | section=Section Name !! reason=A short summary of the discussion !! time=~~~~~}}

Note that "Section Name" in the parameter definition "section=Section Name" is the name of the section in the discussion document where the RFC is to be discussed, not the name of the section in the associated article that the dispute relates to. The bot creates a link back to the section heading in the discussion page on the relevant RFC list using the section parameter.

[edit] Example use of RFCxxx Template

Below is an example of how a completed RFCxxx template and associated section heading might appear in a discussion page edit box before saving.

The listed discussions are sorted chronologically and the tags are removed from the discussions after 30 days.

If the RFC is wrongly formatted, then it will not be listed! Instead, it will accumulate on this list.

[edit] Feature requests

If you would like the bot to do something different, or would like to do something new, please state below.

• A discussion page could have more RFCs than one.

[edit] Archives

People sometimes move discussions which have RFCxxx templates in them to archives, and the archived discussions then appear in the RFCxxx lists, however editors should not edit the archives.

The best solution is obviously for any bots and users that move discussions to archives to strip out or wrap the templates in nowiki, but hahahaha, that's going to happen, who am I kidding .... so the next best thing might be to have the RFC bot either ignore RFCxxx templates that it finds in an archive page, or strip it out, or throw nowiki tags round the whole template.

or always flag an RFCxxx template in an archive page as an error. DMcMPO11AAUK/Talk/Contribs 05:05, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Determining that a page is an archive might rely on an archive template eg {{talkarchive}} at the top of the page, or finding "/archive" (needs a case insensitive match I guess?) in the page name, or some other method.

If you use an "is it an archive" test, presumably you can just stop processing on data that you determine is archived and move on to the next discussion page? DMcMPO11AAUK/Talk/Contribs 14:39, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Archives usually do not have an associated literal article, eg. Talk:Foo has Foo, but Talk:Foo/Archive1 normally has no Foo/Archive1 associated with it. This might be an effective test. JERRY ^talk _contribs 23:26, 4 January 2008 (UTC) it helps people in life no know how to go through in life

I notice the RfC tag was removed from Flouride. What was the outcome? --AeronM (talk) 03:04, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I suppose you would be able to tell by looking at the discussion. The tag is automatically removed after 30 days, regardless of how complete it is. MessedRocker (talk) 20:32, 31 May 2008 (UTC)