User talk:UnseenServantBot

Welcome!
Well met, UnseenServantBot, and welcome to the Forgotten Realms Wiki! Thank you for your edit to the User:UnseenServantBot page. We hope you like the place and decide to stay and explore the Forgotten Realms with us.

Here are some pages that you might find helpful, that explain who we are and what we do and how we do it. You should find these a useful reference, or maybe they could give you some ideas for something to do.

It's our goal to be a complete and reliable encyclopaedia of the official Forgotten Realms in all its forms, and a valuable resource for all Realms fans, players, and dungeon masters. As such, we do not accept fan fiction, homebrew lore, and player characters. All information added to this wiki must be attributed to an official source. Information must not be copied from sourcebooks and novels. Please always give a source for your information, and explain what you've done in the "summary" box.

We hope you enjoy editing here. Please sign your messages on Talk and Forum pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, please leave a message on my talk page or ask any of the administrators about things.

Again, welcome! Happy scribing!

— BadCatMan (talk) 08:47, July 7, 2013 (UTC)

Bot discussion
Just linking this here for reference: Forum:Using a bot on FRW. — BadCatMan (talk) 05:28, July 9, 2013 (UTC)

The UnseenServantBot is now flagged as a bot. You should be able to hide or show its edits as you like. — BadCatMan (talk) 13:08, July 9, 2013 (UTC)

Bot requests
Hi. If you have a task you want done on the FRW, but it's too mindless, repetitive, and long for a human to do and stay sane, you may request the bot do it. To help me keep track of suggested bot tasks, please post your requests here.

To make it easier, please tell me the exact parameters of the task, such as:
 * The exact text to be removed
 * The exact text to be added
 * The exact text to be changed
 * Where this text can be found or should be located within a page
 * Where the files may be found (preferably out of a category or set of categories).
 * Any potential problems you foresee.

Please also link to a few edits of this kind you've already made, so I can see you've made a start on it, and to demonstrate how it should happen. — BadCatMan (talk) 03:25, July 12, 2013 (UTC)

Important whitespace
I'm terribly sorry, but it seems the newline (\n) character after the heading ==On This Day== is important. I hope you see this in a timely fashion. See the difference between Ches 30 and Tarsakh 1. The former shows up in the User:Moviesign/Calendar and the latter does not. :( &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 14:07, February 16, 2014 (UTC)

Bot Log
I figured I should start listing what I have the bot do, so people can see it in action, watch out for it, and observe its usefulness.

So, recently:
 * Yesterday: updated Character to Person in all uses, automatic.
 * Yesterday, today, ongoing: Update class table lines in Person infoboxes to include edition info where is exists. Manual. I saw Moviesign hard at work on this, and I figured I should pitch in. — BadCatMan (talk) 12:30, January 29, 2015 (UTC)

Current updating dead links to archive links for Realms-L mailing list external links. Mostly on Cormyrean noble families. Except I hopelessly mucked it up. :( — BadCatMan (talk) 07:50, October 1, 2015 (UTC)

Fixing Broken External Links (dndclassics.com)
It seems like all of the "http://www.dndclassics.com/" external links have become broken and this website has changed to "http://www.dmsguild.com/". Some of the older 2e products are now available to purchase as a PDF download through the DMs Guild website, so it would be good to preserve these links rather than completely remove them.

Examples: http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Volo%27s_Guide_to_Waterdeep http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Volo%27s_Guide_to_the_Sword_Coast

As far as I can see the entire URL structure remains identical, so only the actual domain name itself needs to have the find-and-replace script.

Also note the link title would also need to be updated from "D&D Classics product page" to "Dungeon Masters Guild product page"

For testing and debugging purposes, is there a way to generate a list of pages with all external links? – User:Mallmus, 01:41, 1 April 2016


 * I apologise for the lateness of getting to this. I've worked out the details I'm running the bot now. — BadCatMan (talk) 12:25, May 3, 2016 (UTC)


 * This bot task is done. Feel free to try the links, and click "Show bots" in Recent Changes to see the changes. — BadCatMan (talk) 13:18, May 3, 2016 (UTC)

Fixing Broken External Links (wizards.com)
There's also a lot of wizards.com links which are now broken due to how they have reorganised their URL strucutre. For example the Further Reading links on here: http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Unapproachable_East

What I have noticed is if we prefix the wizards.com URL with an archive.org URL we can get a cahced version of the old article. I think this is an acceptable way for the user to read the content.

For example one of the broken links on the Unapproachable East page is http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20030502a&pf=true and trying an archive from June 2003 successful fetches the page: http://web.archive.org/web/20030628123620/http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20030502a&pf=true

archive.org takes periodic snapshots, so we could find an ideal time when they had the main bulk of the old wizards.com site archived and auto-prefix all the old wizards.com URLs. This could fix a high percentage of the broken links, but we'd still need a way to manually check if the links are working and fix any which didn't have an archive.org snapshot for that day. – User:Mallmus, 02:02, 1 April 2016


 * Hi. I've got the bot running over this now. Unfortunately, it's impossible to put every page on the wiki on the list, so I'm just doing the largest categories, like Category:Inhabitants, and very few pages actually have the right link. I also have to do it manually, as some pages already use archive.org, and I need to check the links first. So this will take some time. — BadCatMan (talk) 13:36, May 6, 2016 (UTC)

No more conversation here
Okay, forget the above plan, please don't ever post here unless it's an emergency, because activity here interrupts the bot. Please direct all requests to my own Talk page. Thanks. — BadCatMan (talk) 13:42, May 6, 2016 (UTC)