Flow cleanup bot
Joined 7 November 2024
![]() | This user account is a bot, operated by Pppery (talk). It is not a sockpuppet, but rather an automated or semi-automated account for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually. Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it. |
This bot converts Flow boards to an XML export with history. Neat. Code at https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/pppery/flow-export-with-history
It is currently running in supervised mode, with the output of each export manually reviewed before being synced over. It will eventually run unsupervised.
Known issues and oddities:
- Old posts with <pre> tags get garbled. This is actually due to an issue in Parsoid that can't be fixed cleanly. phab:T383645 (now fixed in most cases)
- Multiline templates in replies aren't supported.
- Old posts with interwiki links get garbled. Another Parsoid issue. phab:T385132
- Flow apparently allowed commenting on a hidden topic. This will appear as an edit with "(no difference)", as the content isn't shown until the topic was unhidden.
- Occasionally posts will be overindented for no good reason, due to vandalism being hidden or the flow data model not quite matching wikitext conventions.
- Flow seems to have allowed edits that made no change to the post, which are faithfully reproduced as normally impossible wikitext null revisions.
- Flow posts that were "hidden" by a non-admin are exported in the history, but Flow posts that were "deleted" by an admin are not.
- Vandalism and spam is included too. It's not the bot's fault ...
- Multi-line wikitext like tables is poorly supported.
- For certain very old Flow pages (which were Flow pre-2014) it was possible to have a flow board on top of a wikitext page. The edit summaries and usernames of that pre-Flow wikitext page are preserved (where applicable) and imported, but the content is lost without separately importing it from an old database dump (or other database skullduggery only the sysadmins can do). Related to T337807
- On this wiki I manually imported history from dumps for Talk:Design and Talk:MediaWiki UI. User talk:Jorm (WMF), Talk:Beta Features/Nearby Pages/Archive 2, Talk:VisualEditor/Beta Features/Language, and Talk:Search/Old were also affected, but the history was trivial enough (just a page move) to not be worth importing.
- ...
Please feel free to post any other issues you notice at Talk:Structured Discussions/Deprecation or User talk:Pppery