User:Terminatorius~enwiki

This bot failed to receive Wikipedia community support and is not used. The page is kept for historical reasons

User:Terminatorius - proposed Wikipedia bot for automated blanking of the anonymous vandal IP talk pages.

To stop the bot, please leave the message in the talk page.

The problem

It is usually good to give for a vandal a warning, adding one of the standard warning templates to the talk page (vandals then frequently stop they activity without blocking). However if the vandal uses the anonymous IP, another user (not vandal) may later see that warning, being unpleasantly surprised. In Lithuanian Wikipedia there was a discussion that the person who left the warning to the anonymous user should delete it after several days, but remembering IP's and removing warnings manually takes too much time. Also, the page with 20 previous warnings and the new warning at the bottom may be less impressive to a vandal. From the troll concept, such page feeds the troll, as seems showing a lot of attention to vandal (multiple warnings, threats, sad words from the innocent users of that IP and so on).

The solution

The bot "Terminatorius" blanks the anonymous vandal IP talk pages that are older than 48 hours (since the last editing). It does not blank the normal user talk pages and also does not blank pages without the standard vandal warning templates. Before each blanking the bot checks its User talk:Terminatorius talk page. You can stop the bot immediately by leaving any message there.

This bot

• Obtains the list of IP pages where the vandal warning template is included (via "what links here"). In Lithuanian Wikipedia, we do not use the subst: in anonymous pages as they do not last longer than two days and vandal seems not deserving needed Vikipedia resources. There are anonymous IP talk pages with such unsubstituted templates in English Wikipedia also, see [1].
• Checks the page name, it must be the anonymous user talk page (User talk:N.N.N.N).
• If these two matches, checks the page history (visits the history page). The page must be older than 48 hours (in English Wikipedia I first try the longer age of 240 hours, 10 days).
• If all previous conditions are true, replaces the page content to empty, also explaining the action in the edit summary.

The bot was tested in Lithuanian Wikipedia, first under manual control and later in automated mode. It typically runs daily and just for several minutes. The program is written in Java.

The bot could probably be useful for doing the same work in English Wikipedia. The bot operator is Audriusa 20:42, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Protecting the important information

In some specific cases the talk pages being blanked contain the important information that must be preserved. Such information includes the available data about the IP address user, notes about the repetetive vandalism and so on. Such information can be protected using two built-in templates, important-from and important-until, can be used to protect any important information from blanking. The additional template, keep, can protect the whole page from the automated blanking.

Source code

The source code is available for any administrator under GPL license (just tell me where to send or upload). I am not sure if I should publish it for everybody, as the bot can be reworked to blank arbitrary pages. If you think I should, let me known.

The recent status

The bot was not accepted by the English Wikipedia community and is not used in this project. It is, however, accepted and used in Lithuanian Wikipedia where it has the bot status and runs with flag.