User talk:Dgbrt

See the history for more:

• 2013
• 2014
• 2015-2017

Create comic page in lieu of DgbrtBOT

I could see here that the bot seemed to have failed this time (or did RamenChef fail to wait long enough?) --Kynde (talk) 20:41, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Ah sorry, saw your comment in the Discussion now. Great if it has been fixed. --Kynde (talk) 20:47, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

ReCAPTCHA

ReCAPTCHA v1 has expired, and since no one replied on the admin forum, I asked Kynde, and he told me to come to you. So can you upgrade it to v2? Thanks. Herobrine (talk) 13:05, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Hi Herobrine, this is bad. Also email notification doesn't work since a long time. All admins are nonexistent since months and I don't have access the the server. I will check what I can do with the BOT account. But there is not much hope. --Dgbrt (talk) 15:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Oh... ok. But if I remember correctly, I think one of the admins (I think Jeff?) has a twitter account, but I don't have one and I can't ask on twitter. Could you like contact him that way? And maybe tell him to add a few admins to deal with problems like this? Thanks! Herobrine (talk) 10:18, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Hi Herobrine, I don't have a twitter account too, but I will sign in when things go worse. And this will happen in the future when all admins are still absent because:

• The next invoice for the web-service at Cloudflare must be paid.
• The name registration at namecheap.com will expire on 2018-08-10.

And it seems that there is no advertising here on the left. So we definitely need new admins here to address these and other issues. I would apply for this, but not alone. --Dgbrt (talk) 13:07, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Hello Dgbrt, I saw your message both here and on Wikipedia. Messaging me on my talk page is enough, I'll see it in my feed reader. Unfortunately, I can't do anything about recaptcha as I don't have ssh access to the server. --SlashMe (talk) 15:25, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply SlashMe. You don't have ssh access but as an Administrator you are maybe able to send an email to the relevant persons. --Dgbrt (talk) 16:09, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I don't have Jeff's email address either. --SlashMe (talk) 06:47, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

The problem is solved. --Dgbrt (talk) 14:50, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

I'm here

I'm sorry Dgbt (and all my other friendly editors/helpers!) Let me know what needs to be done and I'll work through it. I'm going to try to be much more proactive and logged in. It's been a busy few months. Please accept my apologies. The main complication with reCaptcha is that to upgrade to use ReCaptchaNoCaptcha, I'd have to upgrade the wiki. I'm not opposed, it is just a larger work effort than I thought! We are also quite a bit behind! --Jeff (talk) 03:18, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

A slight technical problem

The image size for comics is a bit off, the zoom is weird and there's some space to the right of the screen... Not sure what to do about it, but as an admin now (congratulations, by the way!) you should be able to deal with it. Herobrine (talk) 13:06, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Hi Herobrine, what is weird? Please give an example of what's wrong and how it should be. BTW: To be an admin just means more work ;) --Dgbrt (talk) 13:20, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

It seems that there's only one problem left, rather than the three I mentioned before, but it's still a problem. For example, normally pages should be like this, where there's a sidebar to the left, and the rest is the page you're viewing. But now for comic explanations, there's an empty sidebar on the right side of the screen that shouldn't be there, and the page itself has been squeezed so now it only takes up about 60% of the screen's width. Herobrine (talk) 01:24, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay, but it should be fixed now. --Dgbrt (talk) 16:38, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Unicode issues with the Bot

Hi, your bot doesn't handle UTF-8 in the alt-text well, as seen on today's comic 2038 :P This is a known problem with the xkcd api, which double-utf-8-encodes everything. I believe I've read your bot is programmed in Perl, so I may be able to help fix this. There is a module on CPAN to fix this automagically, Encode::DoubleEncodedUTF8 //gir.st/ (talk) 13:23, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

E: I've sent you a PR; https://github.com/dgbrt/explainXKCD_update/pull/3 //gir.st/ (talk) 13:44, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

I was replying at the same time:

Thanks, you can find the GitHub link here: User:DgbrtBOT. The latest changes are a little bit ugly because I've had to find a fast solution on the forced https connection. Nonetheless the unicode issue is well known, until now I simply was too lazy. And reading the warnings at the DoubleEncodedUTF8 module tells me it should be solved in a better way.

I'm not sure, but my CentOS environment looks good:

env | grep LANG gives me

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

The Perl script already has binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'; which was needed so maybe the same for STDIN could help. Any ideas? I have a Wiki at my PC for testing. --Dgbrt (talk) 14:26, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

The problem is solved and the script successfully tested. Thanks for the help. And if Randall reads this: You probably can fool the BOT by using double encoded UTF at the comic name. But I believe the corresponding image URI wouldn't work. --Dgbrt (talk) 14:26, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Signature

Oops, sorry for forgetting my signature in my comment on "1047: Approximations", and thank you for adding it. Redbelly98 (talk) 01:27, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

You're welcome but there is absolutely no need to apologize. Errare humanum est. --Dgbrt (talk) 14:42, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Elections

Regarding your new Category:Elections...
Is it comics like this you wish to include? 1130: Poll Watching? Guess anything Nate Silver is about it?
Just added 500: Election... question is if election category is to be a subset of politics and that some politic comics that are "only" about election should then not also be directly in politic category? Sometimes there is more to it than election, but not really in the election comic for instance --Kynde (talk) 12:30, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your work. I've written "...in politics or elsewhere" because I think it may belong not only to politics. "1130: Poll Watching" definitely belongs to this category, it's even politics. --Dgbrt (talk) 12:56, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanx.

Thanx for the tweeking and the signing of my entry in 2066.Naraht (talk) 21:07, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Purge?

On the main page, there's a line below the Latest Comic block that states "Is this out of date? Clicking here will fix that."

This link contains an action parameter value of "purge" in the URL. Do you know what this actually does? Is it somehow related to the caching system, or does it just force the main page to recheck the latest comic number?

Just curious, as I thought it might be useful for refreshing the cache when investigating an issue like an updated image that isn't being shown immediately. Thanks for any insight! (Oops, forgot to sign my edit!) Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 17:58, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Purging affects only the cache at this Wiki but not at Cloudflare. A purged page here will produce a new hash and thus also the Cloudflare cache will be expired. You can do this at every page here by adding "?action=purge" to the end of the URL; or if there is already a parameter with a question mark it should be "&action=purge". Nonetheless, editing a page and changing only one single character will have the same effect.

For pictures this is different because there is a page for the image:

• https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/File:reminders.png

and the image itself:

• https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/2/2c/reminders.png

You can purge the first link because it's rendered through the PHP engine but the second link is just a static image and the Cloudflare cache assumes that this doesn't change often. This helps to keep the traffic at the Wiki server much lower. --Dgbrt (talk) 18:04, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Awesome and thorough answer! I appreciate you taking the time to explain it so well. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 18:20, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

2003: Presidential_Succession

In the explanation for 2003: Presidential_Succession, I just noticed that a number of users have updated the "List of specific individuals" section based on events since the comic was published, even though the section heading states that the list is as of the date the comic was published. Specifically, someone removed Serena Williams from the list because of a loss in July 2018, someone removed a whole section on the Royal family (which might be appropriate, but I don't know for sure), and several users changed a number of government people as a result of election results in November.

I was going to try to revert each of the changes back to the original list ,but there are also changes that are probably appropriate in other areas of the explanation. Do you know of a way to revert only those changes that were not appropriate, while retaining others that are appropriate? Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 15:46, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

I decided to just manually revert each change made that was not appropriate, so you can disregard my question. I also added bold highlighting to the text in the opening paragraph that the list is as of the date of the comic to let people know that they should not update the names based on later events. One of the edits was to remove members of the royal family from the list. I left those names off of the updated list, as that makes sense to me. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 17:37, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

Many thanks for your work. The explanation always belongs to the date when the comic was published. Any further developments may be mentioned by that manner, but in general that's trivia because it doesn't explain the comic itself in it's context. --Dgbrt (talk) 21:16, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

1732: Earth_Temperature_Timeline

Ok, hate to bug you again, but I have an odd question about 1732:_Earth_Temperature_Timeline and its comic image, which is 740 × 14,889 in size.

This past week, when I viewed this comic, the image was not displaying, and it wouldn't display even when I clicked on the image file link on the image page (the thumbnail was OK though). I was getting what I thought was a server error instead, and the problem was clearly not due to something in the explanation page. I thought maybe something was wrong with the image file, but I was able to download it and open it in my local image viewer program. I was considering what I might be able to do to resolve the issue, but not knowing why it wasn't opening, I put it off...

However, now it's working fine again on the comic page, and I'm not sure what to make of the previous problem.

Have you seen similar issues like this in the past? Any thoughts on what might have caused it? I considered whether it might be helpful to actually split the image into separate slices and add them to the comic with some slider effect to view just a slice at a time, but I thought that might be too much effort for a wiki environment. Any thoughts? Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 05:28, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Please copy and paste the server error message or do a screen shot. But maybe it was just a local problem with your browser. Other comic images still did work? And click on the navigation title to see the original at the xkcd site. It also has the huge image directly embedded, thus I think we also should do so. --Dgbrt (talk) 17:15, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Protection from antisemitic troll

Hi, good thing to short-term protect the new pages. However at the same time someone with the account truth revealer has registered... also still on other posts back and forth editing (with antisemitic content from IP-users) happens: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2120:_Brain_Hemispheres&curid=21799&diff=170762&oldid=170760 is it possible to also block for stuff like that? like slowing down the capabilities to do multiple edits for IP-users? --Lupo (talk) 16:22, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

This is a bad solution because many - sometimes even most - editors are just IPs. This action today is just a signal to that vandal. Further older discussions are here: Admin requests at the Community portal. --Dgbrt (talk) 16:32, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

DgbrtBOT failed 2019-08-30

Hi Dgbrt. The bot failed yesterday on 2196: Nice To E-Meet You. Have you noticed it? --Kynde (talk) 09:29, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

It began working again at 2252: Parenthetical Names. So 56 comics or about 19 weeks of downtime...? Did you fix it? --Kynde (talk) 09:26, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

It was not continuesly down from August onward. It started again right on 2nd September: 2197: Game Show and did work until Friday, 13th December: 2241: Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect (maybe it is supersitious about Friday the 13th?) - see contributions page of the bot --Lupo (talk) 09:36, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Possible problem with the PHP installation

Dgbrt, I had an exchange of posts on the SlashMe talk page because that is the only administrator with any Wiki contributions shown in 2020 (for example you were in March 2019 and Jeff in April 2019). SlashMe confirmed the problem I identified but had no solution, and suggested that I reach out to you. The exchange is copied below. --JohnB (talk) 00:38, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Really really difficult to get to the What If? page in the Wiki

The name of the page is what if? but if you make an internal link the usual way, as here: [[what if?]], you get a mostly blank page with the message No input file specified. It would appear that page names with a question mark break something. The failed form is what is used on the disambiguation page [[What If]], and so following the page link from there fails. What does work is this internal link: [[whatif]], but when you get there and click what links here, that fails as described above. If you really really want to get to the what links here page for the what if? page, you have to use an external link, as [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Special:WhatLinksHere?target=what_if%3F&namespace%3D]. But but but. On all those pages that it says link to the what if? page, the links are broken as described above.

My opinion is that the way to fix at this problem is to rename the what if? page to have no question mark, and then to visit all the pages in the old linked to list and update their links to the new page name. Ugh. --JohnB (talk) 22:45, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

I have looked a little bit into it and it seems to be a configuration issue with the PHP installation. However, I don't have a definite solution for that and even if I had, I don't have access to the server and wouldn't be able to change it. I think Dgbrt has. Try reaching out to him. --SlashMe (talk) 22:58, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

One more data point. The redirect page [[whatif]] redirects using the [[what if?]] syntax that fails every place else, but when redirecting it actually works. Go figure. --JohnB (talk) 00:47, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi JohnB, you're right – looks like redirects to the pages do work. FYI, a few other users have noticed that there are some more pages that have a similar problem (mainly comics with titles that end in question marks); I've tried to collect the gist of all your findings and add them to the discussion there, but feel free to jump in if there's anything else you can think of. – Yfmcpxpj (talk) 05:21, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for maintaining the bot!

I saw in today's incomplete tag that you mentioned no one ever thanks you. I just wanted to thank you for maintaining it. Mikemk (talk) 15:05, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

I see that you are the newest sysop on the wiki and no one uses the community portal for some reason so... Welcome Bot?

I have an idea to make a welcome bot for new users that have made it to the editing leaderboards. So there are no red links and new members are encouraged to edit. — The 𝗦𝗾𝗿𝘁-𝟭 ^{talk stalk} 16:59, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

A couple of issues

Google seems to have changed something in AdSense again, and the ads have been appearing in random positions again since December, 2019. This page might have a solution? It's been quite a while, and the ads are still broken. Also as others have already mentioned links that end in special characters are broken. Herobrine (talk) 02:10, 5 February 2021 (UTC)