Last modified: 2012-02-21 15:20:07 UTC
It would be of great benefit to hide bot edits from the IRC feed somehow. I understand that some tools depend on the IRC feeds, and for those tools it might be useful to have the bot edits there; however for us human users they're just cluttering. I can think of one solution and one workaround for this problem. Solution: Create separate channels including or excluding bot edits One could create additional channels called #xx.wikipedia-bots where all edits, including bot edits, are listed, or alternativeley #xx.wikipedia-nobots where humans could read the 'clean' feed. The existence of such channels could be announced in the topic of both +bots and -bots channels. Workaround: Change the styling of bot edits All entries currently are colourful, that is, stuff inside [[]]s are one colour, edit types (M, B, N, !) are in another colour, usernames another colour, summaries in yet another colour. For bot edits one could make all of these a light grey colour to separate them visually from 'real' edits, so that real edits stand out from the bot edits. If possible maybe also the text size could be reduced by a couple of points. I hope someone could have a look and a try at fixing this issue. :-)
BAD idea this would break too many tools.
... which is exactly why I propose either a separate channel which includes bot edits or a separate channel for excluding bot edits. Did you read that part of the bug?
By the way, a channel without bot edits could also reduce the processing power needed for e.g. SWMT bots (if they rely on IRC feeds, as I recall they do), as they wouldn't process bot edits at all.
The feed specificly the kind of edit ("M", "!" or "B"), any tool can filter based on that. Keeping multiple channels is not a good idea as this could cause stuff to go asynchronous. And only more load for irc.wikimedia.org Tho I'm not sure if the original purpuse of the IRC RC feed includes human readeres, I suggest human readers go to their respective #cvn -channels on irc.freenode.net. Those channels are set up to report all edits that are interesting to watchers (anonymous edits and all other edits that trigger one or more filters). Theses channels also keep (global) whitelists, blanklists and local adminlist and watchlists making this a lot easier. These channels generally dont report edits by botaccount unless on a watched page or if the bot has been blacklisted.
I didn't specificly say so, but I'm saying now: the SWMT bots are and should be processing bot edits, because edits to watched pages will be reported. Also, in some cases they may be blacklisted on a local wiki if no administrator is arround to block it, in order to keep track of it's actions. Either way, I can pretty much say for sure the CVN would not benefit, nor want, to not procces bot edits.
The Wikimedia IRC gateway is a good option to monitor the status of bot edits IMO to prevent them from making mass trouble and finding it too late to revert them all when somebody looks in [[Special:RecentChanges]] itself for bot edits. Besides, Wikimedia IRC RC feed is a good option to display the import status when using the importupload option, which the Wikimedia Incubator uses most of. Http gives an error but on IRC it continues to report the importing status, even when the importer is carrying the bot flag. Splitting the channels might be an idea, but it would give a heavy load on Wikimedia IRC.
Looks like nobody want to get ride of bot edits nor split them to their own channel. So I am closing this bug report.
