Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser

AutoWikiBrowser 6.3.1.1

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This is the discussion page for the AWB project. It is also the place to discuss using the AWB program itself (if you need help, or have a question about AWB, etc.). Where to make specific types of reports or requests is explained in the Before you post section below. Before asking questions, please read the Frequently asked questions below.

Before you post

Do you want to ...	Please use
Report a bug in AWB?	Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs (but see instructions for Phabricator there)
Report an incorrectly fixed typo?	Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos
Request a feature for a future version of AWB?	Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests
Request approval to use AWB?	Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/AutoWikiBrowser
Ask a question about AWB or ask for help?	This page

Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions

When I start it up I get one of the following errors: "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click on OK to terminate the application.", or "To run this application, you must first install one of the following versions of the .NET Framework..." This error means your computer does not have the .NET framework version 2 installed properly. You can choose from various versions for download here, or you can run Windows Update and select version 2 of the .Net framework from the "Optional Updates" section, if you want the choice made for you. Does AWB run on Linux or Mac? AWB runs reasonably under Wine. See details here AWB might also run under Mono. AWB (Windows) with Unix scripts can be done with Cygwin or Virtualbox On the Mac, AWB is not natively available, but an option is to use virtualisation with Parallels Desktop for Mac (subject to meeting supported operating systems requirements) and then run Microsoft Windows virtually with AWB as the Windows instructions above. Note this option is not free, as a license is required for both Parallels Desktop for Mac and Microsoft Windows. An alternative visualization method is to use the free VirtualBox, see also Comparison of platform virtual machines. You can use the JavaScript Wiki Browser instead. Does AWB work on other projects and languages? Many Wikimedia projects and languages are supported, see the "User and project preferences" option in the general menu. Other languages will be added on request, though at the moment the interface is always in English. You are also able to use AWB with third-party wikis: Options > Preferences > Site, you can change the wiki there. The wiki must support the Bot API required by AWB. This means that it should have latest HEAD version of MediaWiki or something close to that. The wmf-deployment branch is also recommended, as this is what is currently live on WMF sites. Under Windows Vista (and newer), AWB is using wrong font size, which results in clipped text and lost buttons and options, (see example here). How to fix it? Tracked in Phabricator Task T103506 Solution #1: Go to "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Display" and switch resizing of the fonts to 100%. Solution #2: Right click on AutoWikiBrowser.exe --> Properties -> Compatibility (tab) --> enable the "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" option or for Windows 10, if available, select System (Enhanced). AWB puts stubs after categories, though categories are always rendered the last by MediaWiki? According to WP:STUB#Categorizing stubs, by convention they are placed at the end of the article, after the External links section, any navigation templates, and the category tags, so that the stub category will appear last. If your wiki uses another order, please let us know here. I don't like or use Internet Explorer; please use Firefox instead. AWB does not use Internet Explorer per se. It does, however, use the same web browser control (MSHTML) as Internet Explorer; the equivalent Firefox component does not provide the needed functionality. How do I open the page in another browser if I can't use the one in AWB? Right click on the edit box in the bottom right side of your screen. Select "Open page in browser". How do I edit a page that doesn't exist? Uncheck "Ignore non existing pages" in the "Skip articles" box. How do I skip certain articles? Use the "Skip if contains" and "Skip if doesn't contain" on the "Skip" tab Can't you leave up a "stable" version, so I don't have to download new versions? It is important to keep people up to date with the latest versions, because their use of the software doesn't just affect them, but the whole of Wikipedia. As any bugs that remain will be trivial, hopefully releases won't be too frequent. How can I stop AWB clicking when it changes pages? This is a Windows sound theme setting. This page explains how to turn off the clicking sound. Alternatively, delete the following key from the Windows registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\AppEvents\Schemes\Apps\Explorer\Navigating\.Current AWB randomly crashes upon page load on my system, and I always use a browser other than Internet Explorer when using Wikipedia. You may have installed custom scripts incompatible with IE. Wrap the contents of your monobook.js into conditional: //Detect IE5.5+ if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE")==-1) { // Previous contents go here .... } I get Just In Time Debugger Messages when loading AWB/loading pages. In Internet Explorer, go to Tools → Options → Advanced. Make sure 'Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer)' and 'Disable Script Debugging (Other)' Are both checked. Press apply and close. Why does AWB run very, very slowly if I try to make changes in the edit window on larger pages, especially pages with long lists or tables? If running on Windows, exit the Speech Recognition software that is built into some versions of Windows; don't just turn it 'Off', you must 'Exit' the software if you have started up Speech Recognition. When I do a clean install of AutoWikiBrowser the application seems to find old setting data somewhere. I'd like to do a really clean install. Any ideas? Clean up your registry and remove the folder "C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Local Settings\Application Data\AutoWikiBrowser" (Windows XP) or "C:\Users\user name\AppData\Local\AutoWikiBrowser\" (Windows 7). Note that the application data folder may be hidden. AWB prompts that there is a newer version but won't update Check the version number of your AWBUpdater.exe. The current version is 2.4.0.0. If you have an older version, you have to download the latest AWB version and make a clean install. Which .NET Framework version do I have? You can find your .NET Framework version in Help → About box. Where are the default settings stored? Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\AutoWikiBrowser Windows Vista onwards: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\AutoWikiBrowser\Default.xml I cannot copy text from the diff window using the Control+C keyboard shortcut. You must have Microsoft.mshtml.dll available for AWB to use for this functionality to work. You can try downloading the file (there are a number of third-party websites offering DLL file downloads) and putting it in the same folder as AutoWikiBrowser.exe. This is reported not to work for all users, presumably due to .NET Framework problems. Is there any way to set AWB to not use https? (GFW blocks 443 port) In preferences, set project to "custom". Set the left box to http. In the webpage box, type en.wikipedia.org/w/ (English Wikipedia) or zh.wikipedia.org/w/ (Chinese Wikipedia). Note that leaving off the /w/ will result in a "root element missing" error. How do I login to AWB with accounts enabled with two-factor authentication? You should use a bot password. Despite the name, they aren't just for bots. See Wikipedia:Using AWB with 2FA.

Discussion

Old/multingual wikisource

How to use AWB on http://wikisource.org , the old/multilingual/incubator wikisource? There is no language prefix and apparently it's not possible not to select a language nor to use the custom mode (error 403). If there is no solution, here is an idea : use mul as language prefix (which is done in some other cases).

Cdlt, VIGNERON * ^discut. 14:33, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

User:VIGNERON. Yah you can do it by just choise the Project "custom" and select "http://" then simply give url "wikisource.org/w/".-- Jay ❯❯❯ Talk 07:15, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

@Jayprakash12345: you could try and tell me if it really works? As I said before, I've got a HTTP 403 error for some reason :/ Cdlt, VIGNERON * ^discut. 17:27, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

User:VIGNERON, Sorry Please use "https://" instead of "http://". And Login is working fine for me. [1] [2]-- Jay ❯❯❯ Talk 17:38, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Oh, so obvious I missed it, thank you a lot! Cdlt, VIGNERON * ^discut. 19:40, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Can awb work from a list of urls

• Hello. Can awb work from a text file containing a list of urls, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maiden_Castle,_Dorset&oldid=300874924? Lingzhi2 (talk) 11:46, 1 January 2019 (UTC)

Lingzhi2, I don't know if there is such an option, what stops you from removing the beginning and the end of the url to leave the article name alone? I would use notepad++ and regex replacement. If you have article names in txt file you have option to load this file.Uziel302 (talk) 13:18, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

Uziel302, let me explain the goal. I want to acquire the html files of previous versions of all FA articles. Specifically, I want the version that existed at the exact moment it was promoted to FA, so I can glean prose size stats from them via Python... Years ago (years and years ago, actually) I used to use AWB a lot and I found that it left html versions of pages in browser cache... I don't know whether it still works like that... So as the first step to my goal, I thought I could run AWB over all the FA talk pages, get those talk pages in my browser's cache, run Python over them while they are on my laptop, and get oldids from the "article milestones". Forex, the number "300874924" in the URL above gets you the FA-promoted version of Maiden Castle, Dorsett. [Somewhat surprisingly, the "title=Maiden_Castle,_Dorset" in the URL is unnecessary. So forex if you change the oldid in the URL above to "361087775" you get the FA-promoted version of Cottingley Fairies]. So once I had all those oldids, I could use Python again to make a list of URLs with different oldids. Then I could load that list into AWB (again) and get the OLD versions of the actual FA articles into my browser's cache (or so I hope). Then I could look atthose in various ways... BUT... I tired running AWB over talk pages today, first without making changes, then trying to make an immaterial changes (substituting "e" for "e", case sensitive), but nothing I did had any effect at all.... Do you have ideas? Thanks! Lingzhi2 (talk) 14:15, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

Lingzhi2, you can use source/text file to load a list of URL on that format, but I don't know how it should load it to your cache, isn't there other ways to scrape the links? I use HTTrack to scrape HTML from the web to my computer.Uziel302 (talk) 14:25, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

HTTracker looks like a version of web whacker. I suppose I could point it at the FA page and have it get all the links on that page, but then I would have to figure out a way to change those links to Talk page links... not sure it would do that. AWB OTOH could just run from Category:Wikipedia featured articles and convert to talk pages... Lingzhi2 (talk) 14:36, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

"Software disabled"

Screenshot of the application displaying the error message

I'm trying to use AWB with the Civilization Wiki, which I have done many times in the past. Today, AWB wouldn't start the process when I clicked "Start". Upon closer inspection it says "Software disabled" at the lower left corner. When I try to login, it displays an error message that asks to check that the Internet is working and the Wiki is online (both true). Indeed, after the login apparently fails, AWB still easily creates a list of articles in a category. I've tried updating, restarting and logging in and out, but nothing seems to work. Any ideas what might be the problem? I've also uploaded a screenshot of the error (included next to this message). —ZeroOne (talk / @) 21:52, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi @ZeroOne: I was able to login just fine to Civilization wikia. Are you using the latest AWB version, 6.0.0.1? — Ganeshk (talk) 00:42, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

You can find the new version here, https://sourceforge.net/projects/autowikibrowser/files/autowikibrowser/AutoWikiBrowser6001/ — Ganeshk (talk) 00:54, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Oh, no, I was running 5.10.1.0! The auto-updated couldn't find the newest version! :( I installed it manually and ran the auto-updater -- and it downgraded the application back to version 5. But after reinstalling the new version it works like a charm again, thank you! —ZeroOne (talk / @) 22:18, 9 January 2019 (UTC)