Author: Beetstra.wiki
Description:
This is something I noticed with [[User:COIBot]] on meta when it is maintaining a log on [[User:COIBot/LinkReports]]. One can see it in this history: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:COIBot/LinkReports&offset=20120718115734&action=history - there are edits by the bot that remove a huge chunk of data, and then later there are edits that re-insert a huge chunk of data - the re-inserted data is ALWAYS the same, also when it gets manually blanked. Resetting the procedures that do that or even restarting the bot (including: killing the bot, blanking the page, starting the bot again) does not help, suggesting it is not a memory-problem with the bot.
Today I noticed this - when you go to this diff http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:COIBot/LinkReports&diff=3941288&oldid=3941163 (recent) - where I have both left and right only edits of July 2012 in the logs, and I press 'undo', I get a conflict with intermediate edits (as expected), and on approx 90% of the attempts an edit window which does NOT contain the current content of the page, but old data. Note that that old data is ALWAYS the same, and is the same as that the bot gets when it reinstates the huge chunk of data.
Note: I have made a bug-catch in the bot, so it retries and eventually blanks when it gets the old data, but that is just a symptom patch, it still gets the wrong page on a regular basis.
Other Note: User:COIBot/LinkReports has a massive number of revids, maybe that is a hint to the source of the problem?
Version: 1.21.x
Severity: major