User talk:InternetArchiveBot

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Operation status

For the most up to date information see the run pages or Wiki Operations Summary on Airtable

• 🟢 InternetArchiveBot is currently running on 300+ Wikimedia wikis.
• 🟢 InternetArchiveBot is being tested on Japanese Wikipedia (ja).
• 🟡 Testing is stalled on Alemannisch Wikipedia (als) and Asturian Wikipedia (ast).
• 🔴 Bot is approved but disabled on Hungarian Wikipedia (hu).
• 🔴 Bot is approved but disabled indefinitely pending software improvements on French Wikipedia (fr), MediaWiki.org, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia (nn), Polish Wikipedia (pl), and Portuguese Wikipedia (pt).

Last updated: 21:36, 14 March 2026 (UTC)

How this page works

1. Ask your question in any language. Questions in English or German will receive the fastest responses.
2. Our team will try to respond within seven days.
3. Seven days after our response we will mark the thread as resolved. This queues the thread for archiving.

   If our response does not answer your question, you are welcome to remove the "section resolved" tag and write an additional comment.

4. Seven days after the thread is marked as resolved, it will be archived. Once a thread is archived, it should not be un-archived. Instead, create a new thread and link to the old one.

SpBot archives all sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=~~~~}} after 7 days.

In uk.wiki a bot adds «dead» value to «deadurl» parameter for alive links

Examples: Гнесь Олена, Гадюка анатолійська лучна, Гадюка грецька лучна, etc. --Шабля (talk) 06:09, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

Adding a great deal of extraneous text

In archiving the References in Grade I listed buildings in Monmouthshire, Grade II* listed buildings in Monmouthshire, and very likely in a lot of other places, the bot is adding the text "Archived 2019-02-02 at the Wayback Machine" to every single line of the tables. I really don't think this improves the look of the tables, or their usability. Is there any way the archiving could be done without adding this extraneous text? KJP1 (talk) 06:24, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't see those pages. They are red links for me. Can you point to the correct wiki you are referring to? —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:13, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678 English Wikipedia: w:Grade I listed buildings in Monmouthshire, w:Grade II* listed buildings in Monmouthshire. VirusDontKill (talk) 21:36, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Hmmm, very unusual. It shouldn't be expanding links out like that when outside of a reference. I'll take a closer look.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 12:38, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

• This section is being kept open to aid in testing the new release of IABot coming up.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

URLs have changed at a couple of wikis

It looks like the bot no longer runs at two wikis where the URL has changed:

• Scruffy Wiki (now Scruff Wiki) - URL has moved to https://scruff.miraheze.org
• Simple Electronics Wiki - URL has moved to https://amps.wiki.gd (or https://simpleelectronicswiki.miraheze.org)

Rob Kam (talk) 10:23, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

So it seems I'm unable to do anything due to my travels. I keep hitting IP blocks on Miraheze globally which is impacting SUL account creation too.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 09:16, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

The bot is still inactive on Scruff Wiki and Simple Electronics Wiki --Rob Kam (talk) 20:10, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Bot incorrectly duplicated part of the article text

In an attempt to rescue a source in this edit on enwiki, the bot duplicated part of the article text immediately after the source:

The bot replaced this:

== Kerala Legislative Assembly ==
''Source: http://www.ceo.kerala.gov.in/electionhistory.html''

=== Early years (1957 - 1979/80) ===
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center; background:#ffffff; width:90%"
|-

with this:

== Kerala Legislative Assembly ==
''Source: http://www.ceo.kerala.gov.in/electionhistory.html''

=== Early years (1957 - 1979/80) ===
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center; backg {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211111050225/http://www.ceo.kerala.gov.in/electionhistory.html |date=11 November 2021 }}

=== Early years (1957 - 1979/80) ===
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center; background:#ffffff; width:90%"
|-

—Bruce1ee^talk 11:29, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

IABot will be getting a major parser update to its code in the next major update, that should prevent such an issue from happening again. Fortunately, the issue you reported is very rare. Sorry about that, though. You should just be able to remove the duplicate without the bot fussing about it. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:44, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. I was able to remove the duplicated text without any problem —Bruce1ee^talk 21:24, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

• This section is being kept open to aid in testing the new release of IABot coming up.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

  Something that looks like the same problem as reported here occurred again just yesterday in en:Special:Diff/1303575786 where the bot duplicated the whole article mispasting it in the middle of a template. MwGamera (talk) 05:58, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

Bot incorrectly merged two parts of a citation

In this edit, the bot merged a video transcript archive link into the citation for the video and tagged the video link as dead, which it isn't. Is this a problem with the bot or a problem with the formatting of the citation? — W.andrea (talk) 16:50, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

@W.andrea: This is definitely an interesting case here. IABot will intentionally merge them when it detects the target of the archive is the same as the source URL. Not sure how it considered them the same here. I can't look into it more closely right now. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 20:04, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

• This section is being kept open to aid in testing the new release of IABot coming up.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Option not to archive stable or repository URLs

I suppose I haven't asked yet because I assumed someone else might've, but here goes: it is usually not worthwhile to have an archived copy from many domains that are particularly stable, or which merely act as a convenient repository for information that is known to exist elsewhere. While I understand archiving has additional purpose beyond simple contingency in case of link rot or site failure, to me it's clear there are certain domains where the potential disruptive effect on pages and editors caused by the additional wikitext very plausibly outweighs the benefits of having an inline archive. Google Books is easily the most visible example of this on the English Wikipedia, where the archives added to citation templates for one or two links can constitute tens of kilobytes in the total page size—which is a lot for editors to scroll through and organize—I must make clear that the inconvenience is nonzero. Often, it contributes to articles being mechanically more difficult to edit, as increases in wikitext size eventually cause the editor to lag.

It seems like a lot to ask for, but would it be possible to add a checkbox that does not automatically add archives for a certain list of domains in this vein? It would even be reasonable to have it checked by default, I just think there's a clear distinction here where editors can make a slightly more optimal decision about what they archive with knock-on effects in mind. Hope this reaches the team well, Cheers. Remsense (talk) 21:52, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

IABot shouldn't be handling Google Books. This was brought up elsewhere fairly recently, and I have reset the bot on Google Books. It should keep it off the domain going forward. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 20:14, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678:Google Books are still archived by the bot as of Oct. 20, 2024 on Chinese Wikipedia, e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=第一次驅漢事件&diff=prev&oldid=84660136 Happyseeu (talk) 15:55, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

• This section is being kept open to aid in testing the new release of IABot coming up.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Bot is still creating wikilinks inside of external links (an error)

See task T344219, reported over a year ago. I added another diff there today. A fix would be welcome. I fix one or two of these per week, and other editors who monitor the error page for wikilinks inside of external links are probably fixing errors that I do not see. Jonesey95 (talk) 22:09, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

I fix a handful of these a week, for example this one today. —Bruce1ee^talk 23:30, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

This is one of the issue being fixed in the next major update of IABot. It's getting a rewrite to the parser. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 20:15, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

This is still happening. Jonesey95 (talk) 13:13, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

This is still happening. Jonesey95 (talk) 17:00, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678: @Harej: Still occurring and is a near daily occurrence. Any progress adding a check to disallow the bot from creating these errors yet? We'd appreciate a ceasefire on this daily error popup. Thank you. Zinnober9 (talk) 21:07, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

• This section is being kept open to aid in testing the new release of IABot coming up.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Erroneous removals of web.archive.org links (not mentioned in edit summaries)

This is from July 2020, so the bug may have been fixed long ago, but just in case: in en:Special:Diff/967892350, the bot erroneously removed the second web.archive.org link from a list item within {{refbegin}}..{{refend}}, keeping only the first one:

−

*[[Rafael Sorkin|R.D. Sorkin]]; Two Talks given at the 1997 Santa Fe workshop: ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090114214257/http://t8web.lanl.gov/people/emil/Slides/sf97talks.html A Review of the Causal Set Approach to Quantum Gravity]'' and ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090114214257/http://t8web.lanl.gov/people/emil/Slides/sf97talks.html A Growth Dynamics for Causal Sets]''; Presented at ”New Directions in Simplicial Quantum Gravity” July 28 - August 8, 1997; ;;

+

*[[Rafael Sorkin|R.D. Sorkin]]; Two Talks given at the 1997 Santa Fe workshop: ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090114214257/http://t8web.lanl.gov/people/emil/Slides/sf97talks.html A Review of the Causal Set Approach to Quantum Gravity]'' and ''''; Presented at ”New Directions in Simplicial Quantum Gravity” July 28 - August 8, 1997; ;;

Gamapamani (talk) 06:04, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

More recent similar stuff, from March 2023 in en:Special:Diff/1147210758

As in the previous case, removals are not mentioned in edit summary.

−

* [http://www.gllka.com/ Great Lakes Light Keepers Association.] **[https://web.archive.org/web/20100616000310/http://www.gllka.com/resources/index.htm Great Lakes Lighthouse Resources], Great Lakes Light Keepers Association.

+

* [http://www.gllka.com/ Great Lakes Light Keepers Association.]**, Great Lakes Light Keepers Association.

Note how this time the list structure is also messed up.

−

**''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090321025246/http://www.lighthousecentral.com/gallery.php4 The Ultimate Guide to East Michigan Lighthouses]''. Bugs Publishing, 2006. [[Special:BookSources/0-9747977-1-5|ISBN 0-9747977-1-5]]; [[Special:BookSources/978-0-9747977-1-7|ISBN 978-0-9747977-1-7]]. **''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090321025246/http://www.lighthousecentral.com/gallery.php4 The Ultimate Guide to Upper Michigan Lighthouses]''. Bugs Publishing, 2007. [[Special:BookSources/978-0-9747977-2-4|ISBN 978-0-9747977-2-4]]. **''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090321025246/http://www.lighthousecentral.com/gallery.php4 The Ultimate Guide to West Michigan Lighthouses]''. Bugs Publishing, 2005. [[Special:BookSources/0-9747977-0-7|ISBN 0-9747977-0-7]].

+

**''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090321025246/http://www.lighthousecentral.com/gallery.php4 The Ultimate Guide to East Michigan Lighthouses]''. Bugs Publishing, 2006. [[Special:BookSources/0-9747977-1-5|ISBN 0-9747977-1-5]]; [[Special:BookSources/978-0-9747977-1-7|ISBN 978-0-9747977-1-7]]. **''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090321025246/http://www.lighthousecentral.com/gallery.php4 The Ultimate Guide to Upper Michigan Lighthouses]''. Bugs Publishing, 2007. [[Special:BookSources/978-0-9747977-2-4|ISBN 978-0-9747977-2-4]]. **''''. Bugs Publishing, 2005. [[Special:BookSources/0-9747977-0-7|ISBN 0-9747977-0-7]].

While in this case all three URLs are identical, only the last one is removed - though of course it still shouldn't be.

Gamapamani (talk) 11:29, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

• This section is being kept open to aid in testing the new release of IABot coming up.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

functioning of the bot on it.wiki

Hi, sorry for the inconvenience. I'm writing because I've noticed this kind of edits made by the bot on it.wiki. The italian it:Template:cita web allows to automatically show the links to both the original and the archived version if the link to the archived version on internet archive is present in the |url= parameter. Therefore, edits like the one that i linked are completely useless, since what the reader sees is exactly the same as before. With the big disadvantage though that the article "weighs" 2 275 bytes more than before. Would it be possible to teach to the bot not to intervene if it finds a link to an archived page of the wayback machine in the |url= parameter? I hope that I could explain myself, if you have questions pleas ask. Thank you. Friniate (talk) 20:38, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

This is unfortunately a limitation of the current version of IABot since it's code is shared on all wikis.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

• This section is being kept open to aid in testing the new release of IABot coming up.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Not archiving

As is the case for vietnamese wiki, in portuguese the bot didn't archive the links as requested.

See diff. RustyRapier (talk) 11:08, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

Bot cannot run in vi:Stêphanô Nguyễn Như Thể

Hi,

I frequently use the IA Bot for archive links for my Vietnamese Bishop series, which works great and saves so much time. However, while there is almost the bot works well for all articles, there is a single article that the bot never can help me archive links, it is vi:Stêphanô Nguyễn Như Thể. I hope you can help me check what's wrong with this specific article or bug from the bot that prevents its work on this page. Many thanks, ThiênĐế98 (talk) 15:06, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Weird change made by the bot

What was the bot's intent in this change? It claims to have rescued one source. However, what it did was only remove the "dead url" template. The URL was in fact dead (it redirected to a generic landing page on a different domain; presumably any URL from that domain would get redirected to the same landing page). Robryk (talk) 11:39, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

• This section is being kept open to aid in testing the new release of IABot coming up.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

Please don't insert a webarchive template inside an external link

This bot edited en:Butte des Morts at 21:31, 17 April 2025 (UTC), changing

<ref>[http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/dictionary/index.asp?action=view&term_id=11330&keyword=origin+name Butte des Morts, Lake [origin of place name]<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref>

to

<ref>[http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/dictionary/index.asp?action=view&term_id=11330&keyword=origin+name {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110611091019/http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/dictionary/index.asp?action=view&term_id=11330&keyword=origin+name |date=2011-06-11 }} Butte des Morts, Lake [origin of place name]<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref>

This is not OK. Please figure out why and change the bot so that it never inserts a links within links. Anomalocaris (talk) 22:22, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

Returning archival functions into pt.wiki

Hi! I'm a sysop on the Portuguese Wikipedia. According to the Airtable tracker, the pending issue for ptwiki is Support for ptwiki-specific citation parameter. Are there any specifications available for what's needed, or any way I could help move this forward? Cheers, BraunOBruno (talk) 19:09, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

@BraunOBruno: it's just waiting on the next major release of IABot. I have not forgotten ptwiki.  :-)—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 12:12, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

Weird editing by bot on enwiki

This bot done an edit to en:Institute of Chartered Accountants of the Eastern Caribbean, which made that article part of a cs1 error category. bot added |archive-url= but also added {{webarchive}} to same field.––KEmel49 (talk) 17:52, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

@KEmel49: That's a new one. In any event, you should be able to safely delete the Webarchive template without the bot fighting you on that. I'll keep this section open so I have additional test cases for the new IABot release.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 12:20, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

IAbot and page moves

IAbot edited the redirect many hours after a page move: [1]. If there is a delay of 14 hours, maybe check whether the page is still where it was? Kusma (talk) 09:58, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

I've also noticed this a few times. Most recently here. Bkonrad (talk) 13:57, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

Request to improve error message

Hello.

This is very useful thanks but I use it so rarely that I always forget to set the correct wiki on the top right of the single page request.

1) Please could you change the “bad page” error message to say that the page is not found on (name of wiki)

2) Could the default wiki please be the most common one - presumably enwiki?

Chidgk1 (talk)

@Chidgk1: IABot is undergoing a rewrite. I will keep this thread open to remember your suggestion. Thank you.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:42, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

Bot is making unhelpful citation markup formatting edits

The whitespace changes in this edit are completely unacceptable for a bot. Jacobolus (talk) 03:28, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

The bot doesn't put archived versions of links

Why doesn't the bot put archived versions of links in this article? Рысь испанская (talk) 18:31, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

Permission error

While logged in, I'm getting "The action you are trying to perform requires the analyzepage permission. This permission is obtainable with the following groups: basicuser, user, admin, root, bot". I'm not using a VPN and have agreed to the ToS, but has prevented me from using this bot for a few days now. CommunityNotesContributor (talk) 19:52, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

I am facing the same issue and would love to know how to get the necessary permissions. WilliamThyer (talk) 03:25, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Massively messed up edits

The bot just made two massively messed up edits at en:Special:Diff/1310919164 and en:Special:Diff/1310919221, looks like it basically repasted most of the article at the edit location. Regardless of what the exact reason was, maybe there should be an edit size safeguard, because it seems highly unlikely that any normal edits made by the bot would come anywhere close to this size (~150k and ~200k respectively). Gamapamani (talk) 11:16, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

I was curious if this was something that happened more often and looked through the bot's enwiki edits since the beginning of August. Turns out that while these problems aren't that frequent, a large positive edit size is a good indicator that something has gone wrong. Of course there can be legitimate cases like this one with 121,403 bytes for 681 sources, so a better metric is the bytes-to-edited-sources ratio. Based on this sample, all edits with a >2,000 plus-ratio were problematic. There were 3 broad categories (the numbers in parentheses are the totals if multiple links were edited):

• Repastes of article content: 149,754, 108,012 (216,024), 3,390 (6,780). This includes the two already mentioned above.
• Strange clobbered redirects: 133,998, 41,467, 38,152, 27,066, 11,043, 10,790, 9,725, 5,098, 4,409, 1,018 (43,719). Since these redirects are only a few days old when the bot gets to them, maybe it's operating from an outdated cache?
• translate.google.com pastes: 4,870, 4,190, 4,180, 4,135, 3,239, 2,107, 1,089 (3,267). Tricks like pasting paywalled articles into translate.google.com and archiving the result (some of the originals are actually in English). I think per (enwiki) policy text-only translate.google.com refs should be removed (or tagged for manual editing to locate the original source), especially since at least some of these pastes qualify as copyvios. (Funnily enough, these links have been previously excavated from archive.* shortlinks by GreenC bot.)

Legitimate large-ish edits like when the link has urlencoded non-Latin text start at around the 1,500 byte mark. So I think setting the safeguard ratio at around 3,000 bytes per link should pretty much avoid false positives (though not necessarily catching all problems).

Large removals appeared to be legit, resulting from duplicates being merged, so I didn't go over all of them. Although, it may also be helpful to mention in edit summaries that identical refs have been merged. at least when the edit size becomes large. Encountering things like a -33,490 byte change explained only as Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead can look a bit disconcerting. :)

I'm pretty sure at least some of this has been reported before, so not trying to be particularly novel here, just summarizing what I saw in case it helps. Oh, and this does not concern the notification edits made to Talk pages that can also be quite large. Gamapamani (talk) 19:35, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Bot goofed up after Libyan crisis page moved

see en:special:diff/1313199419 Wbm1058 (talk) 22:43, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

Bot keeps creating articles on enWiki

• [2]

IABot, sick of being forced to only do citation cleanup, has decided it, too, would like to create articles. The problem? It's doing this by re-creating articles recently moved to draftspace. It's done this about 4 times in the last month. GreenLipstickLesbian (talk) 05:46, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

STOP putting archive links within the existing link's text

This error is still happening, and still erroneous behavior. Please fix this annoying error so this annoyance with the bot's behavior may stop. Thank you. Zinnober9 (talk) 22:54, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

E-Mail Confirmation mail is misformed

I don't think it should look like this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:IABot_E-Mail_Confirmation_mail_to_me.png Äxl (talk) 07:47, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

I can't say I've seen this one before. What email client are you using, as the document renders fine in everything I use.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:59, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678 I've got the same issue with Protonmail's web client. I've attached the anonymized headers & source code here, where you can see Content-type is being declared as text/plain: to see it, edit the source code of my comment - you'll be able to see it as an HTML comment (it breaks a lot of things when rendering as wikitext).

I assume that clients not obeying the plaintext directive just have more generous developers, or there is something about Protonmail that edits the headers (which would probably break some standard). Komonzia (talk) 23:32, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

False positive just happened again after supposedly being corrected

I reported a problem in July which Cyberpower said was "self-corrected", but it just happened again. What gives? — W.andrea (talk) 00:31, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

It just happened again. — W.andrea (talk) 21:37, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong with this edit.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 16:59, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Error

Archive bot is making mistakes [3]. (both URL's are not live so I'm not sure why he is tagging them as live) Timur9008 (talk) 02:23, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

This keeps happening [4]. I have reverted 2 edits. Timur9008 (talk) 06:12, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Malfunction on English Wikipedia

Bot appears to have malfuctioned on the English Wikipedia, the page was moved to a new title and the bot copied the contents of the new page to the now redirect. Aydoh8^{[what have I done now?]} 11:27, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

High load/ lag times are making this great tool unusable for me

I presume that all those who attempt to use IABot may be having a similar experience. The tool is really great when it works and I am grateful for what it does for me in archiving citations on WP pages I am working on. I typically only use the Fix a single page option. However, over many weeks now, I have hardly ever been able to get it to work, because the long time lag makes it time-out. I have tried queuing a job, but that has been frustrating because it runs an analysis OK (and emails me to tell me), but does not add archives (and I don't know how to get it to do that in a queued batch). So the tool is effectively unusable for me at present. Can we please have an indication of what is happening, and whether a return to more normal service can be expected. ??_Marshelec (talk) 06:47, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

Same, it almost always times out for me at this point. Grateful for this tool, but this issue is making it unusable. Anne drew (talk) 19:39, 1 November 2025 (UTC)

Same issue for me. TenthAvenueFreezeOut (talk) 23:55, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678: Sorry, this problem report is not resolved. The lag time still makes the tool timeout. Plus although I can get a queued batch job to run, I can't find out how to get the batch job to actually add archives. So the tool remains unusable for me, and I cannot find any status page that tells me what is happening or when it might be fixed.Marshelec (talk) 20:07, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the bot has reached a scaling limit and that is in part causing the tool to time out. Aside from scaling back IABot, I am working on a new version of IABot that should be a lot more efficient at how it does it's job. This should address the timeout problems permanently. In the meantime, I will continue to do my best to keep lag times down. I do apologize for this inconvenience. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 02:44, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I really value this tool, so will wait as patiently as I can for a new version. :)_Marshelec (talk) 03:56, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for working on this issue! Οἶδα (talk) 04:22, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! We'll be patiently waiting for the new version. TenthAvenueFreezeOut (talk) 07:39, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Any updates on this? Gommeh (talk) 03:05, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

• Hi. I have been also facing the similar issue on enwiki for past few months. Just opened a thread on the help desk as well. Thank you! M.Billoo2000 (talk) 13:21, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

Sub-referencing

Hi @Cyberpower678, WMDE Technical Wishes is working on sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details. While the main use case is book pages, we are also seeing use cases with external links in sub-references (example). Sub-referencing is currently deployed to German Wikipedia as our first pilot wiki (and to test.wikipedia.org). We're hoping to deploy the feature to other Wikipedia language versions in a few months. Based on your documentation it seems the bot needs to be updated in order to deal with links within <ref details="...". My test [5] confirms this, the bot ignored the first plain link within the sub-reference and only changed the identical link in the regular reference. We would be thankful if the bot could support sub-references! Let me know if there are any questions or anything we can help with. Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 15:19, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

Stop linking Internet Archive books

This bot now links user-uploaded copyvio copies of books falsely available as "free" on internet archive, e.g. these edits all link copyrighted books [6] [7]. Further, see this discussion on stuff in their lending program (though IDK if it was linking those). Please cease the whole "bluelinking books for verifiability" task because much of what is available on IA is improperly licensed, this is a huge copyright violation. Most of the edits I saw had this problem. PARAKANYAA (talk) 10:08, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing attention to that specific alleged copyvio material. It has been removed from access.

Please do (continue to) bring such issues to our attention so we can take appropriate actions.

In the meantime we will continue to add links pointing to books and papers available via archive.org as part of our effort to help strengthen the integrity of claims Wikipedia editors make. Markjgraham hmb (talk) 18:53, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

How do you plan to make it not link from user uploads? Most user uploads on IA are copyright violations. PARAKANYAA (talk) 20:21, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Problem

can you fix a Wikipedia article https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahroos_Siddiquee_Nadim

I provide everything to properly , any other site article you edit this man article i request to you if you are administered please fixed this article Robikalita62 (talk) 19:37, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

Archiving of live sources in article

Hey! I've been trying to use the InternetArchiveBot for the list of highest-earning Fortnite players to archive the ever-changing sources the article relies on. The bot fails to do this. Am I doing something wrong? Can someone help me? Rockfighterz M (talk) 14:47, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot is again percent-encoding Chinese characters (November 2025)

I previously posted about the same issue in April 2022. Today, the bot edited an article to change:

https://news.yahoo.com/做運動練人氣-030833704.html

to

https://www.hk01.com/%E7%9F%A5%E6%80%A7%E5%A5%B3%E7%94%9F/185059/%E7%82%BA%E7%B7%B4%E8%85%B9%E8%82%8C%E6%89%A3%E5%96%89-%E5%A5%B3%E7%94%9F%E8%B5%B0%E6%A5%B5%E7%AB%AF%E7%B7%B4%E5%AE%8C%E7%BE%8E%E7%B7%9A%E6%A2%9D-ig%E5%A5%B3%E7%A5%9E%E4%B8%8D%E6%9C%83%E5%91%8A%E8%A8%B4%E4%BD%A0%E5%BE%88%E5%A4%9A%E4%BA%8

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626002057/https://www.hk01.com/知性女生/185059/為練腹肌扣喉-女生走極端練完美線條-ig女神不會告訴你很多事

to

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626002057/https://www.hk01.com/%E7%9F%A5%E6%80%A7%E5%A5%B3%E7%94%9F/185059/%E7%82%BA%E7%B7%B4%E8%85%B9%E8%82%8C%E6%89%A3%E5%96%89-%E5%A5%B3%E7%94%9F%E8%B5%B0%E6%A5%B5%E7%AB%AF%E7%B7%B4%E5%AE%8C%E7%BE%8E%E7%B7%9A%E6%A2%9D-ig%E5%A5%B3%E7%A5%9E%E4%B8%8D%E6%9C%83%E5%91%8A%E8%A8%B4%E4%BD%A0%E5%BE%88%E5%A4%9A%E4%BA%8B

Percent encoding these non-English language characters makes them unreadable. This makes it harder to catch whether the wrong URL was used or to detect from the URL a summary of what a source says. Would you modify the bot not to percent-encode the non-English characters? I do not want to have to keep reverting the bot when it makes these edits. Thank you. Cunard (talk) 11:19, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

This and this are two more edits that percent encoded non-English language characters. I am reverting these edits. I thought this issue was fixed in the past since I didn't notice it in the past few years. Was there a regression? Cunard (talk) 10:46, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

It happened again here. Cunard (talk) 10:12, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

It happened again here. Cunard (talk) 08:02, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

It happened again here in changing "så" to "s%C3%A" and "måtte" to "m%C3%A5tte". Cunard (talk) 09:27, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

False permission error

The bot will not allow me to request pages due to it saying that I require the "analyzepage" permission, which I already have. I am an extended confirmed editor on enWiki and satisfy the criteria listed at [8]. This issue has been going on for a long time making the bot unusable for me. Lenny Marks (talk) 16:11, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

IABot OAuth Error on AARoads Wiki

Hello, I am trying to log into the IABot Management Interface for the AARoads Wiki, but I am receiving a fatal error during the OAuth handshake. Error Message: "An error occurred in the OAuth protocol: invalid consumer key" URL: https://iabot.wmcloud.org/index.php?w=wiki.aaroads.com It appears the OAuth Consumer Registration for IABot on AARoads is missing, invalid, or does not match the key stored in the IABot configuration. Could you please verify the OAuth consumer key settings? Thank you. Tomkozak61 (talk) 18:20, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Incorrectly flagging a link as dead

The bot flagged the same link (https://www.etihad.com/en-ca/abu-dhabi/stopover) as dead twice [9][10] even though the link isn't dead. Any reason what's causing the error? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 14:45, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

Full dates being published in es.wiki

Hi, we have an issue with the bot in es-wiki. Look for instance at this edit[11], the bot is transforming the dates into a "human readable format". However, in Spanish we do this with the templates automatically so it is not necessary. Worse than that, having the dates in that format, creates a lot of problems when translating the pages to other languages, as the dates cannot be autotranslated and have to be changed by hand one by one. Please, correct this error. We have been updating all bots that do the same over the years in es-wiki. Regards,--Freddy eduardo (talk) 15:40, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Apparently reverted a redirect

Not sure what happened with this edit, but it seems the bot undid a redirect, causing duplicate articles. Dl2000 (talk) 21:14, 5 December 2025 (UTC)

What does the "memory core" mean in the terms of service?

Whenever I am prompted to accept the Terms of Service on the IABot website, it mentions that I am responsible for any modifications to the "memory core". What is the memory core and is it freely accessible somewhere? GrinningIodize (talk) 17:24, 11 December 2025 (UTC)

Bot down? & Does it also archive sites that haven't been archived yet?

@Cyberpower678 and GreenC: I clicked "Analyze a Page" and could log in but after I changed the dropdown to wikidatawiki the bot is down with Error code: 500 Internal Server Error. It stayed down for 5 minutes or so. Then it was back up but when I again selected wikidatawiki in the dropdown, it went down again. Could you take a look? I think changing the project in that dropdown is needed as just entering the full URL in the Run bot page didn't work.

Moreover, I have a question: when the bot checks links, does it also check if there is at least 1 functional archived version of the site in the Wayback Machine and if not, request an archive of the site? Because if it isn't, it would only be able to make sites accessible that got archived otherwise before the site went 404 but it's not rare that there's no archived version. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:32, 11 December 2025 (UTC)

Anybody here? It still doesn't work. Now I got a 500 Internal Server Error when trying to login (https://iabot.wmcloud.org/?returnedfrom=oauthcallback&wiki=wikidatawiki). @Cyberpower678 and GreenC: & other users in the know. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:23, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Try now —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:09, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

It works now, thanks! Do you know whether the bot checks all the links for if there's an archived version in the WBM (regardless whether the link is broken or not)? Prototyperspective (talk) 19:28, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

I believe the current policy is to only address dead links at the moment. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 19:57, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

STOP putting archive links within the existing link's text!!

This bot is regularly and problematically inserting archive links within the existing link's display text VIOLATING link syntax and causing wikilink-in-extlink Linter errors multiple times a week. Latest being diff. STICK THE DAMN ARCHIVE LINK OUTSIDE THE EXISTING LINK FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!! Multiple reports going back years and zero responses from operators?? UNACCEPTABLE. Zinnober9 (talk) 00:36, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

Bot operator: See task T344219. Jonesey95 (talk) 16:51, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot not working for me

Hi. I'm currently unable to use InternetArchiveBot on English/Spanish Wikipedia. The bot does not respond or process links when I invoke it, so I have to add archive links manually. Is this a known limitation, or is there a way to restore normal functionality for my account? Thanks. CHr0m4tiko0 (talk) 18:23, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

504 Gateway Time-out

When I try to analyze the pages, I receive a “504 Gateway Time-out” error. I have attempted multiple times to archive the non-dead links in the en:Indian hegemony articles, but each attempt results in a time-out. Emdad Tafsir (talk) 07:22, 1 January 2026 (UTC)

I am experiencing the same problem with other articles. I see a warning banner that current lag is about 2940 minutes, which is over 2 days. It seems something is seriously malfunctioning? -- Beland (talk) 11:04, 9 January 2026 (UTC)

Lag at the moment is 5948 minutes, which is over 4 days. Is the bot stuck on something? -- Beland (talk) 21:48, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Australian Plant Name Index

Bot is repeatedly marking "dead link" to the Australian Plant Name Index in Xanthosia and Quoyaarticles that are not dead. Gderrin (talk) 19:46, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

On en:Wikipedia, w:Template:Cbignore can be used to mark links that you want the bot to ignore. AlasdairW (talk) 23:27, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

Hello AlasdairW and thank you for your work.

There are thousands (~6,000) pages that have a link to the Australian Plant Name Index. I only edit pages about Australian native plants, and do not know a way of adding the template you've suggested to all of them. Even adding that template to the pages about Xanthosia and Quoya is cumbersome and time consuming when there are many other important tasks here. Gderrin (talk) 01:00, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

It is unfair that this bot adds "dead link" to pages in seconds when an editor spends extremely tedious hours deleting "dead link" many times over. The "dead link" has been added to at least 80 pages of Zieria species, 20 Xanthosia species, 9 Quoya species, 7 species of Xylomelum, several species of Eremophila, Eremaea and others. I feel there is no alternative than to disable the bot. Gderrin (talk) 23:34, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

False Positive reporting denied

Reporting of a false positive was denied for permission error.

The false positive is described: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Battle_of_Tsushima&diff=1333190006&oldid=1333188683
Yiba (talk) 07:01, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

Bot created a content fork on English wiki

see this page history, thanks Wbm1058 (talk) 20:20, 1 February 2026 (UTC) and this page history Wbm1058 (talk) 20:39, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

This is still a problem Wbm1058 (talk) 12:36, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Oops, it did it again Wbm1058 (talk) 13:16, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Ahem. It's still misbehaving. Bump. Wbm1058 (talk) 18:46, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

Bot providing archived link to homepage rather than specific site asked for

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T416489

I've created the bug report linked to in this section because of this diff on enwiki. Graham87 (talk) 15:01, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Bot changes

Hi, please explain the reason for these changes. Thank you.--Kanags (talk) 11:12, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Queenstown Lifeboat Station (link marked as dead)

For the second time, a current link has been marked as dead. Martin Ojsyork (talk) 13:36, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

The same situation applies here: https://sk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=V%C4%8Del%C3%A1r_%28mesa%C4%8Dn%C3%ADk%29&diff=8164119&oldid=7986508 .--Scholastikos (talk) 07:28, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

Why several network citations were not archived?

I've seen this kind of situations several times like [12]. The 14th citation is from websites, too. However it didn't be archived by IABotManagementConsole. Please help, thanks. 迴廊彼端 (talk) 06:37, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Gostivar english

User name (Local hero) The city of Gostivar constantly reverts changes made by Albanians, it imposes information only unilaterally, favors only the Slav-Macedonian side, and absolutely does not tolerate information regarding information from Albanians. Pjetër Guli (talk) 22:06, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Albanian Referendum for political and territorial autonomy in north macedonia

He also redirected the referendum for political and territorial autonomy, to ilirida and change name of Republic of Ilitida to Ilirida Pjetër Guli (talk) 22:10, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Phil Collins

This bot caused a CS1 error by rescuing 2 sources on the English Wikipedia. Tomkozak61 suggests this edit. Achmad Rachmani (talk) 22:41, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

Motociclismo.it

The website written on the title of this message is the on-line version of an italian magazine. This magazine closed in 2024. Unfortunately we have used a great amount of articles from the web page of this. All of this articles are currently off-line. In my wikiwork, when i have found them in pages, i always found the articles into the webarchive. The problem is that a great numebr of articles from this website are been used. So i talk you if it's possible to activate this bot in order to add the archive copyto all the notes with this url: motociclismo.it Thank you so much. SuperbikeHistory (talk) 17:02, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Bot should learn url manner

In enwiki bot done something very much unwanted. there are proper format of url and bot should know that. See this edit, look at url_to_pdf.––KEmel49 (Talk) 18:49, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

https://web.archive.org/web/20150528000000/URL_TO_PDF is not a valid Wayback link. What would you expect the bot to do with it? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:37, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

bot should check if it's entering valid url or not, https://web.archive.org/web/20150528000000/http://url_to_pdf/ is not even closer to any wayback link.––KEmel49 (Talk) 15:53, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

GIGO. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:59, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

False positives for Time.com articles?

These 2 changes to "Roswell incident" on English Wikipedia seem like false positives. Both URLs still work:

• https://time.com/vault/issue/1997-06-23/spread/120/
• https://time.com/4376871/alien-autopsy-hoax-history/

No archive URLs were added except the two from Time.com. Rjjiii (talk) 15:15, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Archive.today is a malicious website

Hello,

Please look at Archive.today incident and based on that prevent the bot from adding the now-deprecated archive site. It causes maintenance overhead for editors who have to go and remove it again. On Wikis that haven't deprecated this source yet, if you're going to wait for them to decide instead of being proactive, I'd suggest that this bot deprioritises archive.today.

It's still adding new links, like here, even though enwiki has added the sites to its spam filter: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Democratic_Party_%28United_States%29&diff=1340153937&oldid=1340003549

Thanks! Komonzia (talk) 19:17, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Request

edits From this link for documentation we need only Tamil Wikipedia collections year wise or day wise.-- சா அருணாசலம் (talk) 00:44, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

url-status on zhwiki

Hi, InternetArchiveBot is updating |url-status=live/dead to |url-status=no/yes on Chinese Wikipedia (examples: 1 2). zhwiki has updated Cite templates from |dead-url to |url-status , why did the bot still fill |dead-url's parameter to |url-status ?

For citations that didn't fill |dead-url or |url-status , could the bot update |url-status instead of |dead-url ?

Best regards, Tim (talk) 02:43, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Issue with Megalodon

I am changing the archive.today links whenever I can in various articles. When the only archiving options is Megalodon, I replace the archive.today links with Megalodon links and delete the others so that they can be replaced with archive.org links via the IABot Management Interface. The issue is that when I do this, the bot replaces the Megalodon links I've already added to faulty archive.org links and leaves the url-status parameter as "bot: unknown"; here is an example. Would it be possible to correct this? Xexerss (talk) 12:34, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

@Xexerss, are you still having this problem? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:40, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I just tried again, and yes, the problem persists. Xexerss (talk) 11:42, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Weird. When I go to the archive.org website, I briefly see the whole page, and then it reloads and blanks it, saying that it's a bad URL. I wonder if it's archived but blocked from public view. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:55, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Doesn’t show wiki project list from the menu

After login, iabot page shows "MISSING i18n ELEMENT (meta$$wikiname)" on menu when I going to select wiki. When I select any option, it show me another wiki project with outh permission. Mehedi Abedin (talk) 01:30, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

archive.org

Hi. Why did InternetArchiveBot stop to add links to archive.org in cite book/journal templates at Serbian Wikipedia? It is very useful to fill incomplete filled templates. KrleNS (talk) 04:32, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Tool refuses to add archives at PopTop Software

Using "Add archives to all non-dead references (Optional)" for w:en:PopTop Software, the tool reports a successful analysis but performs no archivals, despite 11/18 sourcing having no archive link. Is this a bug? IceWelder (talk) 13:29, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

thankyou

It's great to see a bot being created and looked after to tidy things up. #highfive Back ache (talk) 08:55, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

chtyvo.org.ua shut down

The Ukrainian online library Chtyvo has shut down (it had been offline for some time prior) but this doesn't seem to be recognised by the bot as link rot. An example is https://chtyvo.org.ua/authors/Khoma_Ivan/Sichovi_Striltsi_Stvorennia_viiskovo-politychna_diialnist_ta_zbroina_borotba_Sichovykh_Striltsiv_u_1917-1919rr/. I've rescued the links in my articles that were present in the Wayback Machine. A search on Wikipedia for "chtyvo" yields only 67 responses so it's not perhaps a critical situation but ideally these links would be rescued where possible. Thanks for the work you do. Joko2468 (talk) 01:27, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

This bot should not aggressively change template whitespace

Edits such as w:special:diff/1345133170 are not acceptable. Jacobolus (talk) 16:21, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

That looks like a good edit to me. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:34, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

Every one of the whitespace changes is garbage, and if a bot routinely does this it should be blocked. The bot should not be trying to reformat human-formatted template markup. Jacobolus (talk) 19:48, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

Bug report: recreation of renamed article

The article was renamed without leaving the redirect, but after approximately 30 hours bot recreated her.
See https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log?page=Сафоново_(Парфеньевский_район).
This error easily avoiding by adding nocreate parameter to API request. See documentation on MediaWikiWiki:API:Edit.
@Cyberpower678 — Alex NB IT (talk) 21:42, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

Rendering problem with templates after links (Parsoid) Phab:T368724

Hello, could you please add an empty space between an unformated link and the following dead link template (Vorlage:Toter Link in the German language version)? Due to the rollout of Parsoid we encountered a bug, that templates directly following a url are made part of the link. (see Phab:T368724 and following examples and discussions)

Example in de: https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Punisher_(2004)&oldid=263259949&useparsoid=1#cite_note-5

Example in en with useparsoid=1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_sea_turtle?useparsoid=1#cite_note-75

Example in en.wikivoyage: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Mozambique#Climate

Topic in Parsoid feedbacks: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Feedback#dewiki:The_Punisher_(2004)

Und die Diskussion in der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Projektdiskussion#Parserfehler_bei_Vorlagen,_die_direkt_an_einen_Weblink_anschlie%C3%9Fen_Phab:T368724

@Cyberpower678 --Mielas (talk) 16:50, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Missing template or bad boilerplate?

At:

species:Talk:Herbert Habeeb#External links modified

the bot's boilerplate includes:

you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

There is no such template. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:33, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

+1000 min of wait

For weeks now I've been trying to use the bot but it always says there's more than 1000 minutes of delay. Before, this wasn't happening, at most it would show 7 or 12 minutes, but 1000? What's causing this every day? It's impossible for me to use it, really. I hope you can fix it. Goo064s (talk) 22:18, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

Seconded. It is basically non-functional at the moment. Thanks. Ganesha811 (talk) 13:58, 21 April 2026 (UTC)