filter history of edits on bots (hidebots=1)
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	SpeedyGonsales
	Nov 3 2008, 2:53 PM

Description

Copy/paste of irc talk (I hope Simetrical and _mary_kate_ wouldn't mind :-)

<stemd> question (or feature suggustion/request):
<stemd> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Professor_Balthazar&action=history&hidebots=1
<stemd> there are lot of pages which contain lot of bot action, and few (read one or two) human edits
<stemd> as recent changes has filter hidebots=1
<Simetrical> No bot flag in the revision table.

Simetrical looks for bug

<stemd> aha
<_mary_kate_> join on user_groups
<_mary_kate_> ;)
<Simetrical> _mary_kate_, different semantics. That would be retroactive.
<_mary_kate_> it achieves what the user wants
<stemd> Simetrical: (last time I studied db tables of wikipedia was some 2 years ago :-)

Simetrical doesn't see the bug

<Simetrical> _mary_kate_, inconsistently with RC.
<_mary_kate_> inconsistency in mediawiki oh my whatever next
<stemd> select * from revisions where USER != bot :D
<stemd> I'll post bug, thanks

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
URL: http://wikipedia.org
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13516

Details

Reference: bz16228

Related Objects
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Status	Subtype	Assigned	Task
Open	Feature	None	T18619 Add filters to history page
Open	Feature	None	T18228 filter history of edits on bots (hidebots=1)
Open	Feature	None	T13181 Mark bot edits in histories

Event Timeline

• bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 10:20 PM

• bzimport added a project: MediaWiki-Page-diffs.

• bzimport set Reference to bz16228.

• bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

SpeedyGonsales created this task.Nov 3 2008, 2:53 PM

ayg wrote:

Pretty sure this is a duplicate of something.

Maybe you were thinking of bug 11181 ?

ayg wrote:

Yeah, related issue, although not the same.

Bug 16392 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Is there a page were bots are a problem?

(In reply to comment #5)

Is there a page were bots are a problem?

Other than the above, of course :)

Wiki.Melancholie wrote:

For small(er) wikis it's quite a problem, see bug 16392:
http://als.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%CE%93&curid=7185&action=history

There are many page histories that are flooded with single bot edits, making history pages a heavy going sometimes ;-)

As time flies, page histories will become longer (that everybody wants, '''depth''' of the wiki).

But if you have 2.000 edits on some page, a few hundred human made edits
and rest is a bot edits, you will kill Brion and any other PHP programmer
if they soon don't resolve this bug :-), and you for some reason want/have to
go deep down the history to find some particular edit.

Now is that possible in between 1 minute and 1 hour, when that become 3-4 hours,
people will start screaming.
So better to do something soon :-)

Best wishes for 2009!

Agreed, this is a major issue, not just for small wikis, but for topics that are flooded by bot-happy editors :)

ahmad.m.sherif wrote:

proposed patch

This patch may help, i'm not sure about the resulting performance though.

Attached:

hidebots.patch2 KBDownload

happy.melon.wiki wrote:

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 11181 ***

This is not a duplicate of bug 11181, but it is a blocker for this.

Looks like the patch would have issues on pagination, showing less history entries than requested. Also, it is hardcoding the bot group.

Assuming you work with the bot group, and there are few bots per wiki, you could get a list of users to filter out, making this hack quite efficient. Perhaps even with a rev_user not IN.

ayg wrote:

Or you could do a left join. That would be more efficient if there are enough bots. This would have fairly bad worst-case performance in any implementation, I think.

ayg wrote:

Well, if bug 11181 is fixed, this becomes trivial, same as on RC. That seems like the most sensible way to do it. Without fixing that, you'd also have to hide *all* bot edits, not only edits with the bot flag.

Yes, bug 11181 is the way to do it. Note that even with it, we will want an scrip to retropopulate the value.

ayg wrote:

Not possible. Not all edits by bots are bot edits. Some bots deliberately do not set the bot flag on their edits, because they don't want to be invisible. We should not make these bots' edits retroactively invisible.

In such case they are unlikely to have bot flag.

(In reply to comment #17)

In such case they are unlikely to have bot flag.

The bot flag comes with other privileges, such as higher API query limits. Also, some bots may wish to exercise discretion and mark certain edits as bot edits while leaving others visible.