User talk:MusikAnimal

Hello. This needs priority but unfortunately I don't have time to create Inquiries that rhyme or are in the form of a haiku, I hope you'll be able to forgive me :)

Ever since AFI was added to the main page, the AFI nomination page is being filled with a year's worth of nominations every day.

Your bot MusikBot is currently the only bot capable of archiving completed nominations archives. This is done in task TAFIDaily, (see its RfBA). When you made the RfBA, you described this task as such:

Archive the discussion of approved or unapproved (marked as {{unapproved}} or {{not approved}}) entries:

• [...]
• Archiving occurs when it's been over three hours since the last comment was made, as specified by User:MusikBot/TAFIDaily/config.js [which you have since deleted as "obsolete"]
• The regex and logic is similar to what MusikBot does at WP:PERM
• Archiving occurs independently of task #1. That is, an approved entry might get added to the list but the discussion may not necessarily be archived yet. This gives !voters a chance to see the result of the discussion. The bot ensures approved entries are not duplicated within the list

That was all well and good until AFI got added to the main page. See for yourself how many open nominations we have: WP:AFINOM.

It appears that your bot no longer archives closed nominations 3 hours after the last comment. Instead, it archives all of them at once, once a day, at exactly 5:35 AM. See these diffs for example:

This is obviously a problem. Are you able to change your bot's setting so that it checks the AFI page single hour, instead of once every day? If you could do that, it would be amazing, and it would help a ton with all those new nominations! Or even any other change that would make sure archiving is done more quickly would be really helpful. The best way to fix this would be to give us a page like User:MusikBot/TAFIDaily/config.js to allow us to tweak the setting ourselves, but the issue is urgent and even a quick fix is more than enough for now.

Thanks! FaviFake (talk) 00:39, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

I just had to add this banner to stop people from nominating articles until we cleaned up :(

We are currently overwhelmed. Please consider voting on the existing nominations (so we can close them) instead of creating new ones at the moment. Come back later.

FaviFake (talk) 01:12, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Sure thing,  Done!

The best way to fix this would be to give us a page like User:MusikBot/TAFIDaily/config.js to allow us to tweak the setting ourselves – the config is actually at User:MusikBot/TAFIDaily/config (things have changed since the BRfA was filed :). It would not be very straightforward to be able to adjust the run frequency here, though, since that involves updating a cronjob on Toolforge. I'll change it to run once an hour, as requested.

It appears that your bot no longer archives closed nominations 3 hours after the last comment. Instead, it archives all of them at once, once a day, at exactly 5:35 AM. – It should be running twice a day, at 04:35 and 16:35 UTC – and always has, but it should only archive a thread if at the time that the bot is ran, it's ~3 hours after the last comment. Other archive bots work similarly. So, changing to an hour cadence will more accurately archive ~3 hours after the last comment. — MusikAnimal ^talk 02:16, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, I forgot to reload my cron configuration. I've just manually ran the bot, and from here on out it should run at :35 past every hour. Best, — MusikAnimal ^talk 02:41, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Wow that you so much! You were so quick that I saw the notification for the archiving beore your reply and was super confused for a second! Thank you!

Ooh that makes sense, thanks! Is all this information documented somewhere? All I could find was the BRfAs from the past decade. FaviFake (talk) 02:44, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

As for the config, if you go User:MusikBot, you can browse to the task (User:MusikBot/TAFIDaily in this case), and if a config page exists for that task, it will be listed and documented there. If there's something else you feel should be documented, let me know. Best, — MusikAnimal ^talk 03:08, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Oh, I'm dumb, I saw that the first part of that page was all technical stuff and didn't notice there was something else below it.

I saw the bot has a value for auto_unapprove_offset to automatically apply Not approved to nominations with no comments after X days. This will obviously never happen now that AFI is so popular, but I was wondering if you could change it so it also works when nobody has closed it yet and the discussion has been open for 14 days (similar to other venues), even if it has some comments.

The rules at Wikipedia:Articles for improvement/Nominations § Instructions were updated following a discussion and now they're much more rigorous, so all nominations are not approved if they don't get enough supports within 14 days. I think it would be nice to have the bot do the work of closing these nominations so it's less controversial.

Another nice feature could be to make the bot do the work of speedily closing doomed nominations where at least four out of the first five respondents oppose it, i.e., they vote Oppose or Remove (although these aren't really controversial).

To be clear, these are absolutely not necessary and were just random ideas that I had while reading the task. They might even cause issues if we later decide to change the rules again, and they're probably harder to implement compared to "change this value to once an hour". FaviFake (talk) 17:40, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Also, how does the bot interact with section headings? I was planning to change all level-3 headings in WP:AFINOM into level-2 headings (and all level-4 into level-3) to make the page easier to browse with the new sticky TOC in Vector2022. Can I do that, or would your bot freak out?

ETA: Actually it's probably best to keep them as level 3 headings, I've changed my mind. FaviFake (talk) 18:32, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Another question: (sorry!!!)

It seems the bot initially used to rotate the various level-3 sections. Was this disabled on purpose? Would it be possible to enable that again? The top nominations keep getting the most comments, so I've reshuffled them manually once. I like the original way, it's exactly how I would've set it up it it had been up to me:

Rotate the nominations

• This occurs only once a day
• This is done to ensure all nominations get fair visibility, as the list can become quite long and !voters may never scroll down far enough to see and !vote on other nominations
• Rotating includes moving the first level 2 heading (Arts, Geography, etc.) to the bottom of the page
• The nominations within each level 2 section are also rotated

FaviFake (talk) 21:28, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

@FaviFake Amazingly, I actually remembered this this discussion with Northamerica1000 from over 10 yeas ago when rotation was first requested. I could not recall why it was removed, but fortunately I left an edit summary for Special:Diff/1017842035 pointing to that discussion: User talk:MusikBot/TAFIDaily/config#Further changes. So it sounds like it was just because of inactivity, which is not a problem now.

One important note, however: Rotating discussions causes edit conflicts. For this reason I recommend sticking with the original, and still-implemented 24-hour frequency. So unlike the other bot clerking, rotation will only happen once a day.

Should we reach out to other recently active members of AFI before making this change, along with others? Feel free to move the discussion directly to WT:AFI if you wish (you can tag the discussion section with {{moved discussion from}}). It doesn't seem controversial so I'm happy to just do it, but the other ideas you have could perhaps use input from other AFI reviewers as well. — MusikAnimal ^talk 00:13, 4 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Perfect! I was worried it just broke over time but I'm happy to learn that it was just disabled.

Of course, 24 hours is sufficient.

I think you can just do it, I moved the entire half of the page to the top yesterday and nobody seemed to notice or say anything. We'll revert it if someone really likes the uneven distribution of votes for some reason.

I agree the rest of the changes are more controversial, if I still want them I'll probably make a more concrete request at WT:AFI in a few weeks and ping you. I was mostly just asking if it would be easy/hard for you do code, but I think it came out as an actual request. FaviFake (talk) 00:41, 4 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Update: i proposed re-enabling the section shuffling, and the only two respondents said they liked the idea.

In that section I also proposed automating another task that currently needs to be done manually: simply adding {{subst:AFI notice}} at the bottom of the talk page of nominated articles, and {{subst:AFI project notice|1=ARTICLENAME}} on the talk pages of the listed WikiProject, if there are any. This is already in the nomination instructions to make sure we hear from the article's editors and the relevant WikiProjects before we make a decision (Prior to those instructions being added, we had accidentally approved a medical article without notifying WikiProject Medicine, but luckily they noticed it and it was retroactively pulled from the holding area.)

I think you could set it up like this:

1. Every hour, after archiving finished nominations, the bot checks the names of the articles in ====Level four heading ====.
2. It keeps a record of the past articles, and if it notices that a new level-4 heading has appeared, it writes it down on its list and adds {{subst:AFI notice}} at the very bottom of the talk page of that new article.
3. It checks the wikiprojects on that article and notified them (again by appending {{subst:AFI notice WP|1=ARTICLENAME}} at the bottom of the talk page)
4. The next hour, the bot will check its list again and it will notice that this article was already on the list, so it knows it doesn't need to do it again.

Note that {{subst:AFI notice}} does not need any parameters, it does everything on its own and just needs to be substed at the bottom.

What do you think? Is this new task easy to code? FaviFake (talk) 02:49, 5 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 14:20, 3 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 10:32, 9 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

...with the addition / removals of PPs since November 3. Tbhotch^™ (CC BY-SA 4.0) 03:37, 12 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Probably more fallout from User talk:MusikAnimal/Archive 49#User:MusikBot II/FixPP/config. I will look into this today. — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:55, 13 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Okay I think this one is Fixed now. Thanks for reporting! — MusikAnimal ^talk 20:38, 13 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

For your information, MusikBot's FilterMonitor has been broken since September. DatGuy^Talk_Contribs 23:36, 12 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Acknowledged, thanks for reporting. How fun it is that all my bots break around the same time but for different reasons :-P — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:56, 13 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

Haha, sorry! FaviFake (talk) 20:06, 13 November 2026 (UTC)Reply