Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard
Where's the place to "seek out a community discussion" on "a community bot" (whatever that means) about getting a bot to stop leaving a particular kind of pointless message? The InternetArchiveBot does various things, and even leaves some helpful messages, but when it leaves a note on an articles talk page that all it did was provide an archive-url to a cite that didn't have one, this is pointless, annoying bot-spam. We don't need to know that it did something trivial that no one sane would question, and we already know – anyone watching the article already saw the edit, so now they're getting a second watchlist hit for the same thing for no reason.
I went to the bot's talk page, and it isn't editable except by admins. I got to the author/operator's page, which directed me to file a ticket about it a Phabricator. So I did [1]. The response to that was a testy "The bot is currently approved to run with these message.", which is a silly thing to say. All the bots are approved to do what they do or their operator would be in trouble and the bot would be blocked. I was told "The last discussion regarding them had no consensus for change", which means it has been discussed before and other people are tired of these messages, too. "If you feel the bot should stop leaving messages, please seek out a community discussion. This is a community bot". I see a bot requests page, which seems to be only for asking for bots to do stuff not to stop doing them, and isn't really a discussion page; and the noticeboard, which appears to be for reporting bugs and policy violations.
So, I'm not really sure what the process or venue is. PS: This isn't about ALL InternetArchiveBot notices, just the the no-one-will-care pointless ones. — SMcCandlish >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 12:50, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
Simple pseudocode fix: if $CHANGESBOTMADE == ($ARCHIVEURL or ($ARCHIVEURL + $DEADURLYES)) then $POSTABOUTIT = no – i.e., if it's done anything at all other than that trivia (including that trivia and something non-trivial), then go ahead and post a notice.
— SMcCandlish >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 15:04, 4 October 2017 (UTC), clarified 23:05, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
I am the editor that created the discussion in about bot notices in talk pages. In regards to the InternetArchiveBot and its announcement about modification of external links: what's the point of keeping these notices on an article's talk page after an editor has checked the links and found them okay? Pyxis Solitary 05:27, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
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