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watch_category

watch_category is a bot script to (constantly) check a MediaWiki category. It uses the MediaWiki API. Once it detects changes in the category members, it signals this on an IRC channel. It also opens the changed pages or the category page in the default browser (see Configuration) unless DESKTOPINT is set to false.

Requirements

  • wget
  • jq
  • xdg-open (xdg-utils) (optional, needed to open pages)
  • notify-send (libnotify, optional)
  • ii (link, optional)
  • watch (needed for checking more than once)

Usage

Automatically:

  1. check every minute (configured in-script)
  2. the category page (configured in-script)
  3. joining IRC channel #wikipedia-nl-vandalism on freenode
  4. with username smilebot-watch
  5. only the IRC module (disabling desktop integration):

BOTNAME=smilebot-nuweg CHANNEL=#wikipedia-nl-vandalism DESKTOPINT=false ./watch_category.sh

Quit bot:

  1. press CTRL+C
  2. run watch_category.sh --quit or ./quitbot.sh (this is strongly advised in order to have a clean shutdown)

Restart bot:

  1. press CTRL+C
  2. run ./watch-category.sh again

Configuration

You will probably need to set parameters. This is done like this:

BOTNAME=mybot CHANNEL=#example NETWORK=irc.freenode.net ./watch_category.sh

These are the default values:

General:

  • CATEGORY="Categorie:Wikipedia:Nuweg"
  • PROTOCOL="https://"
  • WIKI="nl.wikipedia.org"
  • OPENPAGES="true" (set to false if you want to open the category page instead of individual pages)
  • SECONDS=60 (wait 60 seconds to check for new items in the category)
  • SPEAKLANG="en" (can also be set to "nl")

IRC:

  • BOTNAME="smilebot-watchcat"
  • NETWORK="irc.freenode.net"
  • CHANNEL="#wikipedia-nl-vandalism"
  • INFOMESSAGES="false" (do not display infomessages in the IRC channel)
  • IRCENABLED="true": enables IRC integration
  • DESKTOPINT="true": set this to false if you want to run the bot on a (headless) server. disables libnotify and xdg-open integration
  • USERNAME="": set this to a valid IRC user name for the IRC network you connect to. That user now gets all messages. There are no messages displayed in the IRC channel. This user needs to be online in order to get these messages.

Parameters

  • --init (-i) removes working files to delete the cache. This will cause the script to mark every item in the category as new.
  • --forcerestart (-f) quits the bot from IRC and starts the bot again. A normal restart can be done manually, see above at Usage.
  • --quit (-q) quits the bot from IRC

Tips

  • For nl.wikipedia.org, this script can be combined with Fast Delete (for example, checking the category Categorie:Wikipedia:Nuweg)
  • Always use ./quitbot.sh after exiting ./watch_category.sh.

Notes

  • The script is limited to the first 500 members of a category.
  • Please do not use this script with too small timeouts, e.g. < 5 seconds. This has two reasons: ** It takes a while to fetch the page. Running the script again when it is not finished will not get you the desired results. ** To prevent unnecessary load on the MediaWiki API of the site you are using, you might want to consider a timeout well above 5 seconds.