For the past week, I’ve been using AWB to help move from template to template (only) and looking at UIBs. However, when I receive a talk page message and am forced to review the messages, when I click the button to review them, I’m taken not to my talk page or a diff to my talk page, but to the purge page for my talk page - which is very strange. If there’s a way to change the action of that in AWB, please change it so it reflects onto the talk page or the My Notifications page…but I know AWB is a strange beast.
I think it has something to do with the fact that AWB assumes the wiki uses underscores for spaces, rather than hyphens. I think that is just the nature of the beast right now since wikiHow is one of the few wiki sites I know that uses hyphens.
From https://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Use-AutoWikiBrowser-on-wikiHow:
“ AWB was designed for Wikimedia projects first, so some of the features won’t work correctly here, ever
” - meaning that some features on AWB won’t work correctly. This is also because wikiHow uses an older version of MediaWiki.
Since AWB is developed and maintained by a third-party and the program isn’t officially supported by wikiHow, unfortunately there’s nothing we can do on our end with regards to its eccentricity.
I’m also gonna leave a general note for anyone who chooses to use AWB: please be mindful of the current RC number during your editing session to ensure it doesn’t become too overwhelming for patrollers
If RC begins to go into the triple digits, consider taking a break to allow patrollers to catch up.
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SkiC
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I’ve never used AWB. I thought it was risky.
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JayneG
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You’re absolutely correct @SkiC
- it’s not something that we encourage using because of the chance of things going wrong or misuse. Always best to edit as usual wherever possible
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For regular articles, it’s sometimes riskier. However, when all you are is moving between lots and lots of UIBs without auto-saving (creating your edits), it’s actually used as a quick-moving tool to get me between UIBs faster and the way to go in these cases.
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I mean, there are some things that can only get done with AutoWikiBrowser. But such tasks are few and far between that it is not that common to even use AWB to get them done.
It is not like AWB won’t work, it is that the behavior is kind of unexpected and AWB may mess up some things because of how wH’s MW installation is configured.
