User talk:Rick Block

If you're here to respond to a comment I posted on your talk page, feel free to reply on your talk page (so the question and answer are together). I ALWAYS watch talk pages I've posted comments to for a while. If you leave me a message, I'll respond here unless you ask me not to.

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Indexing CFDs

I was replacing one of the templates in Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Archive debates and I noticed that the CFD archive indices stop after February 2018. Is there a reason the archives stopped being created? Primefac (talk) 20:51, 2 January 2019 (UTC) (please ping on reply)

@Primefac: This is on my list to look at - I noticed a week or so ago. The way it's supposed to work is the bot waits until all the open discussions for the month are closed (one way or another), and then creates the monthly index. Without looking at it, my guess is something changed that is making the bot think there are still open discussions. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:55, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

@Primefac: I think it's fixed and have added indices for the missing months (there's still an unclosed request from November, so the indices stop with October). -- Rick Block (talk) 18:13, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom 2019 special circular

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Administrator account security (Correction to Arbcom 2019 special circular)

ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.

Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are required to "have strong passwords and follow appropriate personal security practices." We have updated our procedures to ensure that we enforce these policies more strictly in the future. The policies themselves have not changed. In particular, two-factor authentication remains an optional means of adding extra security to your account. The choice not to enable 2FA will not be considered when deciding to restore sysop privileges to administrator accounts that were compromised.

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Proposed deletion of File:Montyflip.png

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2019 US Banknote Contest

	US Banknote Contest
	November-December 2019
There are an estimated 30,000 different varieties of United States banknotes, yet only a fraction of these are represented on Wikimedia Commons in the form of 2D scans. Additionally, Colonial America, the Confederate States, the Republic of Texas, multiple states and territories, communities, and private companies have issued banknotes that are in the public domain today but are absent from Commons. In the months of November and December, WikiProject Numismatics will be running a cross-wiki upload-a-thon, the 2019 US Banknote Contest. The goal of the contest is to increase the number of US banknote images available to content creators on all Wikimedia projects. Participants will claim points for uploading and importing 2D scans of US banknotes, and at the end of the contest all will receive awards. Whether you want to claim the Gold Wiki or you just want to have fun, all are invited to participate. If you do not want to receive invitations to future US Banknote Contests, follow the instructions here

Sent by ZLEA at 23:30, 19 October 2019 (UTC) via MediaWiki message delivery (talk)

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Username changed

Hey, I brought this up at the talk page for Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations as well. But, could you update the list so my old username, User:Dan56, is changed to my new name? isento (talk) 17:46, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Looks like you figured out how to do this yourself :) Rick Block (talk) 21:58, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Rick Bot

Hi. Rick Bot seems to have missed me off as the nominator of Siege of Lilybaeum (250–241 BC) at Wikipedia:Featured articles promoted in 2020 (June) and I am wary of inserting anything manually for fear of breaking something. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:13, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Eight years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:08, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Featured topic promotion lists

Hi, I just came across Wikipedia:Featured topics promoted in 2020 and noticed that your bot strikes through all the nominations after a while, for example to indicate that Wikipedia:Featured topics/Operas by Claudio Monteverdi was demoted 9 minutes after it was promoted. Something seems to be wrong with Rick Bot's "autoupdate" function. If this is difficult to fix, I guess just turning off the strikethrough (and not mentioning it in the header) would make these pages less confusing. —Kusma (t·c) 20:44, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

I'll take a look at it this weekend. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:33, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

@Kusma: I believe I've fixed it. The layout of WP:FT apparently changed some time ago and the bot has not been able to determine the list of FTs. This also affects WP:WBFTN. Thanks for letting me know about this. If you notice any further issues, please let me know. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:20, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Looks much better, thank you for fixing this! —Kusma (t·c) 16:51, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:WPCG" listed at Redirects for discussion

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A brownie for you!

Editcountitis is my favorite essay of all time. Thank you for creating it all those years ago! Clamless (talk) 19:49, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

You're welcome! -- Rick Block (talk) 00:32, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Nine years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:28, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Bot question

Hello, Rick,

I was looking over Wikipedia:List of administrator hopefuls the other day and noticed that there were quite a few editors listed on it who were blocked as sockpuppets or had been indefinitely blocked, some of them over a decade ago. So, I removed their names and the ones who had a "I want to be an admin someday" userbox, well, I removed it from their user page. None of these editors will be returning. Unfortunately, when RickBot updated the page, it removed the editors who had had the userboxes removed but it re-added all of the names that I had manually removed from the page. This is puzzling to me because I thought editors could add their names to the list (because they didn't have the admin userboxes) so it seems like it should be possible to remove them, too.

I know that this page probably gets very few views, but is there any way that manual changes won't be undone by RickBot? I just took the accounts off again but I don't want to do this regularly. Thanks for any help you can offer. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:16, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

The bot cues off the contents of category:Wikipedia_administrator_hopefuls which is populated by the userboxes, so to remove someone the userbox has to be removed. Note that the userbox can be on a subpage. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:26, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

Several bugs in CfD indexing I found

1. Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Archive debates/2020 September index, Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Archive debates/2020 November index, Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Archive debates/2020 December index, and Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Archive debates/2021 February index were never created.
2. The bot gets confused by the markup in bibliomaniac15's signature, causing things to render with stray apostrophes and in italic instead of the intended bold.
3. The bot occasionally seems to conflate two discussions into one entry. For example, see the entry for Category:Activists from Dedham, Massachusetts at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Archive debates/2020 April index, which has become merged with a separate discussion for Category:Activists from Toronto. The "Category" link goes to the first category, the "Discussion_log" link goes to the discussion for the second category, and the "Decision" link concatenates the closing statements of both together.
4. Several historical indexes were created too soon, and are therefore missing some discussions. For example, Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Archive debates/2019 October index was created on the first of the month and doesn't include any discussions closed after the first of the month.

* Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:17, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

@Pppery: Thanks! I'll look into these, maybe this weekend. Franky, I've never been sure anyone ever uses these indices.-- Rick Block (talk) 15:05, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

@Pppery: I made an update to the bot source which seems to have fixed 2 and 3, and have manually updated the indices from January 2020 through April 2021 (and Oct 2019). At this point I'm not sure why it misses some months and runs early. I'll look at it some more tomorrow. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:04, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I think I may have a clue as to the issue here. A couple of weeks ago, I was going over some old CfD logs for the last few months, and went to one of my sandboxes to transclude a bunch of CfD logpages. But for some reason I was unable to save the page! I don't recall the exact error message, but I believe it was a blacklisted link. (And all I was trying to do was transclude the log pages, so it's confusing that this would even be picked up by a filter). Anyway, I don't remember exactly which page it was, but I believe it was from one of the months your bot is currently having trouble with. If I were you, what I'd try is having it dump its rendered page to a text file, and then create the page manually (I believe sysops bypass the filter, or at least have an option to click through it). jp×g 05:04, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Active admins

Hi, Rick Bot seems to have removed a number of seemingly active admins in the u-z username category... Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 22:02, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

• Is the bot down? The last update was 29 September. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:23, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, the bot is down. I have a certificate issue of some kind I haven't been able to resolve yet. Seems to be related to this, but as far as I can tell I don't have the expired certificate. -- Rick Block (talk) 22:48, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Places in Bedfordshire/script

Template:Places in Bedfordshire/script has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Tom (LT) (talk) 03:14, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

WP:WBFAN

Hi - I don't know if you are aware, but Rick Bot has not been updating Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations for promoted and demoted featured articles since the end of September. Also Wikipedia:Featured articles promoted in 2021 has been updated manually since then. RetiredDuke (talk) 14:14, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I know. I have certificate issues I'm working through. Shouldn't be too much longer. -- Rick Block (talk) 20:44, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

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Rick Bot

Hi there. I refer to this edit by Rick Bot: [1]. My previous username was Freikorp. Most of my featured article nominations were made under this name, though obviously new ones are made under my current name. As per a suggestion at Wikipedia talk:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations#Update username, I manually updated the list to merge my contributions made under my two different names, as I am not happy to be featured on the list twice. Rick Bot, however, has reverted me fixing this issue. Is there any way we can stop it from doing that, and allow me to merge my nominations? I'm not sure how it collects data, but I'm open to modifying the original nominations to feature my current username, if that fixes this issue. Thanks. Damien Linnane (talk) 00:33, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

@Damien Linnane: I responded there. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:04, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Category:Real closed field has been nominated for renaming

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Category:Formally real field has been nominated for deletion

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Nomination for deletion of Template:Datecnum

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"Sentry®Safe" listed at Redirects for discussion

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New administrator activity requirement

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22:53, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Re: Update my name at FAN user list

Hi. I tried to update my username here at the list of Wikipedians by FA nominations, but your bot's next autoupdate undid that. Can you please restore the updated name? Thank you. 𝒮𝒾𝓇 𝒯𝑒𝒻𝓁𝑜𝓃 (talk | contribs) 17:10, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Name changes have to be done in the by-year lists, like this. I think I caught them all. -- Rick Block (talk) 21:42, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Always precious

Ten years ago, you were found precious. That's what you are, always. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:00, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

WBFAN missing one?

Hi — looks like John Raymond science fiction magazines, promoted a few weeks ago, isn’t showing up in WBFAN? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:55, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

I think this edit will fix it. Not sure why it was missing. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:35, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Now fixed; thanks. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:37, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

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Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured list nominations issue

Hi, filing a bug report for Rick Bot, though it looks like you may not see it - in the last update to Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured list nominations, all of the promoted lists were stuck at the bottom commented out as not having nomination history, and Wikipedia:Featured lists promoted in 2023 was not updated. It looks like FACbot updated Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/Featured log/September 2023 correctly, so not sure yet what happened. --PresN 15:53, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Must have just been a hiccup, Rick Bot fixed itself the next day's run. --PresN 21:53, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Archive debates/June index" listed at Redirects for discussion

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german version of illustration Monty Hall Problem - Standard probabilities

Hello Rick, I updated the german version of the "Monty Hall Problem" article. It uses your illustration "Monty Hall Problem - Standard probabilities.svg" now.

In addition, I used Libre Office Draw to change the text to german language. Unfortunately some of the colours disappear when I use Libre Office Draw. However, I uploaded my result to File:Monty Hall Problem - Standard probabilities_de.svg to commons. Now I'd like to ask you if you could please change the text with your tool chain, so all colours stay unchanged, and replace my intermediate german version with a final version from yourself. I like your illustration, thanks for providing it in the first place :-) Best regards, Buecherdiebin (talk) 12:04, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Hallo! The image you're talking about was apparently created by Diego Moya (talk · contribs) (based on an image I created with no text at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Monty-RightCarSwitch.svg). I can't find the original image on the computer I'm currently using (a Mac). I suspect I created this image on a Windows PC that I no longer have access to, probably using Microsoft Powerpoint. Perhaps @Diego Moya might be able to help? -- Rick Block (talk) 23:46, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't have the configuration I had when I created the image. Buecherdiebin maybe you can update the image and upload your version in both languages, so that the colorus match? Other option would be to crop the image and recreate the text yourself in a new tool. Diego (talk) 06:41, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@Diego Moya Thank you for this feedback. In the meantime I managed to create a JPEG File with German Text and matching colours. I will use this and maybe replace it later when I find a Tool which updates the SVG File without funny Side effects. Buecherdiebin (talk) 07:31, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Done. Today I tried "Scribus" and it worked fine :-). Buecherdiebin (talk) 09:38, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Featured article nomination counter bug

Hey there! Thought you might want to know that WP:WBFAN lists Gerda Arendt (courtesy ping) twice, putting one of them under User:Gerda Arendt. Not sure where that comes from! Thanks :) theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 08:26, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! Looks like this edit fixed it. -- Rick Block (talk) 22:36, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Query on Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured topic nominations

Hi there! I'm one of the coordinators at the Featured/Good topic process and had a few quick questions. The Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured topic nominations appears not have not been updated for a while–is there a reason for this? Also, I'm not seeing any "rust" colors for good topics. The page should probably be moved to Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured and good topic nominations, since it includes both (?); we recently changed the main page to Wikipedia:Featured and good topic candidates. Thanks! – Aza24 (talk) 23:44, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

A side note–could you add {{Wikipedians by contribution sidebar}} to the lists of featured articles & list nominations? My computer isn't getting the page to load to do so! Aza24 (talk) 00:22, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I'll look into why the page is not being updated (as I recollect, it's fairly complicated to figure out the difference between good and featured for topics), and I'll add the sidebar template. Just FYI - it may take a while, real life intrudes. -- Rick Block (talk) 22:10, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

No worries! I'll check back in a few weeks if I don't hear anything. We're starting to change it so good topics have "good topic" in their page title, so perhaps that will help with the difficulty. Aza24 (talk) 00:51, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

@Aza24: I've done a major restructure of the WBFTN code in the bot. Let me know if you notice any issues. Along the way I noticed Wikipedia:Featured_topics/Bruno_Mars and Wikipedia:Featured_topics/Overview_of_Rachelle_Ann_Go apparently never made it to Wikipedia:Featured topics. There are a fair number of other anomalies the bot notices as well. If you edit the WP:WBFTN page there are comments at the bottom about featured and good topics that don't seem to have nominations (???), and nominations with no corresponding featured, former, or good topic (not necessarily a problem). The bot deals with case changes and some renames. I'll poke around a bit and see if there are other patterns that can be accommodated. And, let's leave the page at WP:WBFTN. Adding "and good" to the page name is a bit misleading. The stars are (or are at least supposed to be) only for topics that were at one point featured. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:37, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Numbers

Hi Rick, just wondering if it would be possible to display the number of nominations for each user at WP:WBFAN etc? It's sometimes a little annoying to count for editors with large numbers of nominations. No worries if not possible, though. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:45, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

That's funny... I was coming to this talk page to request the exact same thing for WP:WBFLN. I had spoken with PresN about it in September and had been meaning to leave a message about it. I'd also love if we have a ranking before the person's names as well, similar to how WP:WBGAN shows the rank. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:47, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

While we're at it, we probably might as well make the columns (except for the stars) sortable, if you're up for making these changes of course. Example (not that I doubt you'd be able to visualize it, but I wanted to see for myself):

Rank	User	Count	Lists
1	ChrisTheDude	189	*stars*
2	PresN	115	*stars*
3	The Rambling Man	111	*stars*
25	Hey man im josh	31	*stars*

Anywho, no pressure, but this was perfect timing for me to chime in. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:56, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@AirshipJungleman29 and Hey man im josh: I've added a space every 5 stars. Sort of a minimalist change, but I think it makes the number pretty easy to see. Adding a count seems a little tacky to me, and sortable columns seems like overkill. Sufficient? -- Rick Block (talk) 00:44, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

@Rick Block: @AirshipJungleman29 and I missed your ping (note that pings don't work if you edit a comment to add them without re-doing your signature). It's easier to read now, but I was hoping to avoid having to count the stars personally. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:53, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't think something like the little (X articles) at the WP:GA subpages would be that tacky, but it's your call. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:05, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

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BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Issue with Rick Bot updates

Hey Rick, hope you're well. I wanted to point you to this edit. I went through and updated some of these pages yesterday because I'm working on a little side project, documenting when/how some of the old lists were demoted. This edit is incorrect and I reverted it yesterday, but it's been re-applied today. The reason it's incorrect is that those were actually three independent lists that were nominated, promoted, later demoted, and eventually merged to Member states of the Commonwealth of Nations, which was also later promoted and demoted. I understand the bot does try to update to the target article, when it can, but this weird situation is definitely an oddity. Any thoughts on how to best handle this situation for the bot? Perhaps something that I can comment out so that the bot knows not to update the link? Open to suggestions! Hey man im josh (talk) 17:33, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

It also mistakenly struck out List of tallest buildings in Shanghai, which is still a featured list. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:37, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Darn, it struck it out again and also bypassed the redirects again. I won't edit war with the bot about it, but I wanted to note it again somewhere so that I can fix it if we come up with a solution to this problem. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:46, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

I'll take a look. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:27, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

List of tallest buildings in Shanghai should be fixed (the FL page had an extra space at the end of the article name). I've changed the bot source to treat the Commonwealth page names in the by-year file as special cases. The bot should not follow the redirect anymore. -- Rick Block (talk) 20:32, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Fantastic, thanks Rick! That Shanhai one makes sense now :) I've got all the history pages watchlisted so I'll keep an eye out moving forward and let you know if anything weird comes up. Hey man im josh (talk) 20:35, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

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Bot not running

Hey Rick Block, I hope you've been well. I noticed I hadn't seen some updates on my watchlist in a bit, and I've just noticed that your bot has been running since November 30th. I just wanted to let you know in case you weren't already aware. Hey man im josh (talk) 19:00, 19 December 2024 (UTC)