User:AllyUnion/Project board

Welcome. This is AllyUnion's project board: A listing of projects and/or ideas being worked on by AllyUnion. There may be technical problems being worked on here as well.

Notification Bot

This bot is designed to notify users about an event or something going on. Rather than having a user going around to notify people, I rather have a machine do this work.

There are two subprojects being worked on this bot:

User talk page notification based on a list and "subst"ing a subpage of the bot's User space. I have so far, completed that portion of the script, which successfully works. I have unfortunately come to the realization of two problems. Which is listed below.

An image notification bot. This is a bot that notifies a user about a no source image. There are several ways to approach this problem, one of them is having a CGI form to be run so that users can enter the name of the user plus the image(s) in question. At the current stage of development, I decided to attempt to use based on the page's history, rather than the upload history on the page. I think I rather need to recify that. Furthermore, in order for this to properly work, I believe I will require a backend database to notify people.

Problems to resolve

Speed: The time that the bot needs to complete a task is rather difficult. The bot can not exceed certain limitations on the Wikipedia, otherwise the server would be too busy just attempting to handle the bot's requests. On the other hand, tasks are scheduled to run a certain set time, and the bot must run at those times. So the bot must complete tasks at a reasonable speed so it can finish all its tasks.
Threading: I have to figure out some complex yet easy way to thread such that the bot's edits do not overlap. Furthermore, the bot's edits can not overlap someone else's edits.

Issue with user's talk pages on different projects... somehow to need to figure out how to cross post with different projects.

Possible solutions / thoughts

For user talk pages, the bot could stack up the list users it needs to notify, combine all the text it needs, then make its final round of edits... Again, a database would be needed. --AllyUnion (talk) 08:38, 20 October 2005 (UTC)