Forum:Are bots disallowed? mine broke for no apparent reason

Dear Wikia

I had a site where a bot would upload generated images from some programs I was running.

This worked fine for a week or so, and several dozen images + pages were uploaded in this manner.

Now all of a sudden today, I am getting random errors when I try to do the uploads. I am getting mysterious HTTP failures, JSON errors, various other mishaps during upload.

As a test, I re-ran my scripts to upload to referata instead of wikia, and they work fine. So it is not my scripts, it is wikia.

I am wondering what exactly has happened. I cannot find any documentation and the error messages from mediawiki are cryptic. Thank you


 * Can you paste the error messages here?


 * im using mwclient from sourceforge and python, i guess the problem might be there... but then again, it works fine with referata, and worked fine with wikia for several days over hundreds of files, why fail today?
 * i was getting a httplib.BadStatusLine errors, causing the bot to die
 * i inserted time.sleep(5) which seemed to help a little, but it still crashed.
 * There is no set pattern to the failures. sometimes it crashes after 15 files uploaded, sometimes it crashes after 1 file uploaded.

upload 25755 bytes from OpenSCAD_freebsd_i386_software-rasterizer_ssec__home_don_openscad_tests_regression_opencsgtest_for-nested-tests-expected.png ... type  len 25755 debug api data dump: {"upload":{"result":"Success","filename":"OpenSCAD_freebsd_i386_software-rasterizer_ssec_home_don_openscad_tests_regression_opencsgtest_for-nested-tests-expected.png","imageinfo":{"timestamp":"2011-12-03T20:25:22Z","user":"Openscadbot","size":25755,"width":512,"height":512,"url":"http:\/\/images.wikia.com\/cakebaby\/images\/b\/be\/OpenSCAD_freebsd_i386_software-rasterizer_ssec_home_don_openscad_tests_regression_opencsgtest_for-nested-tests-expected.png","descriptionurl":"http:\/\/cakebaby.wikia.com\/wiki\/File:OpenSCAD_freebsd_i386_software-rasterizer_ssec_home_don_openscad_tests_regression_opencsgtest_for-nested-tests-expected.png","comment":"OpenSCAD test","sha1":"2608767a96b6cb51a575f667a3b33a246c41d508","metadata":null,"mime":"image\/png","bitdepth":8}}} end debug api data dump image uploaded

^^^^ thats a good one

upload 11055 bytes from OpenSCAD_freebsd_i386_software-rasterizer_ssec__home_don_openscad_tests_regression_opencsgtest_color-tests-expected.png ... type  len 11055 debug api data dump: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> MediaWiki API &lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot;?&gt; &lt;api&gt; &lt;error code=&quot;help&quot; info=&quot;&quot; xml:space=&quot;preserve&quot;&gt; ****************************************************************** **                                                              **  **  This is an auto-generated MediaWiki API documentation page  ** **                                                             **  **                  Documentation and Examples:                 ** **              http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API              ** **                                                             **  ******************************************************************  Status:          All features shown on this page should be working, but the API is still in active development, and may change at any time. Make sure to monitor our mailing list for any updates. Documentation:  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API Mailing list:   http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api Bugs &amp; Requests: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?component=API&amp;bug_status=NEW&amp;bug_status=ASSIGNED&amp;bug_status=REOPENED&amp;order=bugs.delta_ts

^^^ thats a bad one. its just spitting back the api.php page.

here is another example with the connection set_debuglevel(1)

send: '\r\n' send: '--fUqVc0yrcm0qgb33LiqlSZM253NcSzPX\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="comment"\r\n\r\nOpenSCAD test\r\n--fUqVc0yrcm0qgb33LiqlSZM253NcSzPX\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="ignorewarnings"\r\n\r\ntrue\r\n--fUqVc0yrcm0qgb33LiqlSZM253NcSzPX\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="format"\r\n\r\njson\r\n--fUqVc0yrcm0qgb33LiqlSZM253NcSzPX\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="filename"\r\n\r\nOpenSCAD_freebsd_i386_software-rasterizer_ssec__home_don_openscad_tests_regression_opencsgtest_for-nested-tests-expected.png\r\n--fUqVc0yrcm0qgb33LiqlSZM253NcSzPX\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="token"\r\n\r\n1098a8a8e876a29732af8f103b262e8d+\\\r\n--fUqVc0yrcm0qgb33LiqlSZM253NcSzPX\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="action"\r\n\r\nupload' send: '\r\n--fUqVc0yrcm0qgb33LiqlSZM253NcSzPX--\r\n' reply: '' send: 'POST /api.php HTTP/1.1\r\nContent-Length: 26836\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip\r\nHost: cakebaby.wikia.com\r\nUser-Agent: MwClient/0.6.6\r\nConnection: Keep-Alive\r\nCookie: wikicities_session=1e3e62fbfba992b92ce249738d2885e6; wikicitiesUserName=Openscadbot; wikicitiesToken=afeeb427d7a53cdb66c3e7c7e4083a40; wikicitiesUserID=4633358\r\nContent-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=fUqVc0yrcm0qgb33LiqlSZM253NcSzPX\r\n\r\n' send:  sendIng a readable reply: 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n' header: Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:32:42 GMT header: Server: Apache header: MediaWiki-API-Error: help header: Cache-Control: private header: X-Served-By-Backend: ap-s40 header: Content-Encoding: gzip header: Vary: Accept-Encoding header: Content-Length: 22022 header: Connection: close header: Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 debug api data dump: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> MediaWiki API &lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot;?&gt; &lt;api&gt; &lt;error code=&quot;help&quot; info=&quot;&quot; xml:space=&quot;preserve&quot;&gt; ****************************************************************** **                                                              **  **  This is an auto-generated MediaWiki API documentation page  ** **                                                             **  **                  Documentation and Examples:                 ** **              http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API              ** **                                                             **  ******************************************************************  Status:          All features shown on this page should be working, but the API is still in active development, and may change at any time. Make sure to monitor our mailing list for any updates. Documentation:  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API Mailing list:

etc etc etc

Thank you.

Donbright 20:35, December 3, 2011 (UTC)

Lately there are some edit errors, like users who edit conflict themselves or getting a blank page while saving (and if you refresh you get double-post), so probably the bots are having the same issues, I noticed it too with AWB who sometimes is getting stuck, but it restarts after some seconds.