The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Operator: Anomie⚔

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic, unsupervised

Programming Language(s): Perl

Function Summary: Update instances ((User:AnomieBOT/RandomPage)) as specified by the template parameters with randomly-selected pages.

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Periodic

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y

Function Details: I have created a template, ((User:AnomieBOT/RandomPage)), that specifies which categories to choose a random page from and how often to do so. The bot will update the parameters as specified in the template documentation.

Discussion[edit]

Per request. The bot operates by getting the list of transclusions of the template, loading the specified categories, combining the result sets as specified, and choosing a random article from the result. It remembers the page revision ID and next edit time so it can skip loading the page contents when the page has not been edited. Source is here. Anomie⚔ 02:31, 9 January 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Does the task need a shutoff page? (I noticed several of your tasks have one). Foxy Loxy ^Pounce! 04:10, 9 January 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It's a standard part of my bot framework, every task has a shutoff page at User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/(({TASKNAME))}. Every edit token request piggybacks a check of the shutoff page, and refuses to return the edit token if the task is shut off. Anomie⚔ 12:24, 9 January 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Well I'm happy now. Foxy Loxy ^Pounce! 01:16, 10 January 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Approved for trial (10 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. I'm not sure how many transclusions you'll need to update, but you could always run the remaining test edits in userspace. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 13:32, 11 January 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

At the moment, the only transclusions of the template are in my sandboxes. If anyone else wants to add ((User:AnomieBOT/RandomPage)) somewhere to test it out, feel free. Anomie⚔ 17:07, 11 January 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Trial complete. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] All were in my sandboxes. Nothing particularly unusual in there, and it seems to have done well even with huge categories like Category:Living people or all subcats of Category:Top-importance articles thrown at it. Anomie⚔ 03:30, 12 January 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I see no problems, especially seeing as it can handle massive cats like Living people!  Approved. Richard⁰⁶¹² 18:24, 14 January 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.