User:AperfectBot

This bot is owned by aperfectring. It is an implementation of pywikipediabot, and uses some code stolen from graciously donated by relet. Its job is to maintain the future and recent past planning pages lists, and to create new planning pages upon request. Much thanks goes to Robyn and others who helped with the planning and suggestions for improvement.

How it works at the moment I edited this

It looks at Category:Meetup on YYYY-MM-DD for the most recent days, and all days where coords are available, and finds all pages in it which have a title that matches: YYYY-MM-DD lat lon

It also looks at Category:Expedition_planning for all pages matching YYYY-MM-DD lat lon where the date is further in the future than the latest available coordinates.

Go here for information about how it constructs the summary.

The bot takes about 10 minutes to complete one iteration. Most of this time is actually fetching and writing the pages, the actual processing time is rather minimal.

Tasks Remaining

These are in rough order of importance

• Put the code into source control somewhere
• Create the daily picture gallery.
  • I will put this to a vote later and see what kind of feedback I get.
  • My thought is to look for an HTML comment, something like <!-- Front Page -->, on the end of an image in the gallery. If it exists, that image will be used for the front page gallery. If no images have the tag, it will use the first image in the first gallery.
  • When it goes to update the gallery, it will include an HTML comment on any it adds, something like <!-- Automatically added -->. If it doesn't see that comment, it will not change that picture for that graticule's expedition.
  • The bot will prefer manually added pictures over bot-added ones, and then prefer ones which had the "front page" comment, followed by auto-chosen pictures. That way if we run over the number of allotted pictures for a day, ones people added themselves will be first in line to be kept.
• Look into either signing up for access to a server, or convince one of our friendly neighborhood geohashers with a server to let me have access to update and run this, as well as the Notification program, from it.
  • The random power outages I am getting at home are really becoming annoying.
  • I will be moving in about 2 months, and these services would be down for up to 3 weeks while my stuff gets moved.
• Create a list of graticule and graticule talk pages on which planning occurs
  • Create a parsing engine for these pages, to be able to include their plans in the list
• Sort the results for each day using an undetermined key to sort on
• Let AperfectBot eat bananas

Task scheduling

I will use this section to plan out my time in the evening on tasks. I will probably put in an hour or two of work on most weekdays. Anything from before 2009-06-17 is included for historical purposes. The bot is live! Anything I will be doing from now on is new features, bug fixes, or improvements to output.

2009-07-13

• The summaries have been added to the Main Page and if more than 4 would appear on that page, then a "More summaries..." link is put in their place.
• An "Update this list" link has been added to date pages.

2009-07-10

• All old expedition summaries have been created. Date pages have been updated to include the summaries as well. The next step is to move the update request to someplace more permanent, and provide an edit link. That will be done after this weekend.

2009-07-05

• There appears to be some issue with writing to the old date pages. Until I can figure out what is causing it, the updates on old date pages will be on hold. Anything on the current events page should be updated as normal, or with minimal delay.

2009-07-04

• I fixed another bug in the list with user lists.
• And another where the bot was stripping links from location descriptions.
• I also added the ability to specify old dates to update. I am running a test here which should update all date pages this year with the appropriate summaries.

2009-07-02

• Date pages should now be automatically created for all dates from $TODAY into the future. They will be overwritten for all dates the current day US ET forward that are on the list. They will only be written between the hours of 9AM and 10AM US ET.
• I fixed some cases where users' names would show up in the user list multiple times. Let me know if you still see cases where the same user shows up twice.

2009-06-26

• Create date pages (YYYY-MM-DD) if they don't already exist.

2009-06-22

• Move the output from its current location, to a template: Template:Recent_expeditions
• Change the old output page into a transclusion tag, to preview what the final results on the current events page will look like.
• Add includeonly tags around a "provide your own update" link, which goes to an edit page.
• Add a "How to change the text of my planning/expedition summary" link, which should be to a simple, user-friendly description of how it chooses the text, and how someone would go about changing it.
• Add a "Report a problem" link to the list.
• Code fix on writing pages to make them a bit faster.
• Status: The content for point 4 is here. Point 1&2 now complete. Point 5 done, time is now about 8 minutes between updates instead of 12.
• Status2: Everything in the list should be done now. Please look the output page over. Thanks.

2009-06-21

• Start using templates and transclusion.
  • This should (at least in my deranged mind) make dealing with user edits to the daily lists easier to cope with.
• Add at least some user modification of the list
• Status: The first part seems to be mostly in place, the only part of that which is left is to write the output which is now here to a template page. I also think I have something ready for test on the second point. I also added a hook which will allow us to enhance the date links with holidays.

2009-06-20

• Switching to a new set of categories as follows:
  • Category:Meetup on YYYY-MM-DD for anything from the latest available back to the first in the list
  • Category:Expedition planning for anything further in the future than the latest available
• Still looking for the best way to figure out the last the coords are available for.
  • My current thought is to use the python implementation posted here.
• Status: The above is complete. The bot also will create empty date stubs now. I am now looking for input on my update below.

2009-06-19

• More planning on picking the dates to report.

• My current thought is to report everything from Expedition planning from three weekdays ago, until the latest available coordinates. This gives people a bit more time to report on a potentially geohash-busy weekend, but means that the number of days in the recent past list is not constant. This table assumes no DOW holidays.

Today (US Eastern Time)	First day reported	Last day reported
Sunday	Wednesday	Monday
Monday	Wednesday	Tuesday
Tuesday	Thursday	Wednesday
Wednesday	Friday	Thursday
Thursday	Monday	Friday
Friday	Tuesday	Monday
Saturday	Wednesday	Monday

• Another option is to have a fixed number of past days in the list (let's say 3), and all days where coordinates are available. This keeps the recent past list a constant size, but if people are busy geohashing on weekends, their expedition planning could drop off the page before it is reported on. This table assumes no DOW holidays.

Today (US Eastern Time)	First day reported	Last day reported
Sunday	Thursday	Monday
Monday	Friday	Tuesday
Tuesday	Saturday	Wednesday
Wednesday	Sunday	Thursday
Thursday	Monday	Friday
Friday	Tuesday	Monday
Saturday	Wednesday	Monday

• If I get some decent feedback on which of the above is best, I will begin coding on it.
• Figure out how to determine what days there are coordinates available for.
• Status: I am now using the first option, and parsing both Category:Expedition planning and Category:Expeditions. It now updates about every 7 minutes with the truncated date list.

2009-06-18

• Reverse the sort of the dates
• Plan out how to pick the dates to report
• Status: first point done, second still in progress.

2009-06-17

• Tweak the length of location descriptions
• Trim out the extra instances of header boundaries in the location descriptions
• Begin work on sectionalizing the results by date
• Possibly start the bot in a continuous loop, which means that it will provide updates about every 30 minutes, if needed. I will leave this going overnight and while I am at work the next day, if I do it.
• Status: All of the above complete. Let me know if the bot misbehaves. If it starts misbehaving really badly, use the Distraction Banana section below.

2009-06-16

• Fix up some location parsing.
• Status: Did some work on it, but not a whole lot

2009-06-15

• Look for more options as far as people going
• Look for more options as far as the location the hashpoint is in
• Status: The user list may get a little better with time, but its quite close at this point. There is still work to be done on the location.

2009-06-14

• Status: 100% less shouting on the page

2009-06-13

• More thorough planning
• Begin coding in earnest
• Status: By the end of the day, I had a very basic parser, which wrote the full contents of Category:Expedition planning to a page on the wiki.

2009-06-12

• Begin preliminary planning

--aperfectring 12:05, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

EMERGENCY STOP SECTION

Putting any text beneath the following header will cause the bot to stop running. Please only do so if the bot is REALLY misbehaving.