Talk:XTools

This page is a feedback forum for XTools. For reporting bugs, it's preferred that you use Phabricator.

If the issue is urgent and you're unable to use Phabricator, feel free to ping one of the active maintainers.

Hello,

Could you please raise your upper limit of edits to beyond 600,000? I look at my XTools page several times a day for a variety of different up-to-date data and features and I'm close to reaching the maximum number of edits. It's hard to imagine that this is a resource that wil soon be unavailable to me. There aren't that many editors on the English Wikipedia that have this many edits, would it really be unworkable to be able to break down their edits and admin tasks? Thanks for considering my request.

I see I'm not the only person here with this request. But if you haven't responded in a month, I wonder if any developers are looking at this talk page.

I see every message here :) If I don't reply, it's probably that I don't have a good answer – and that's the case here. XTools has to service a very large amount of traffic, so long-running queries are automatically killed. The 600,000 edit threshold is just arbitrary to avoid running queries that won't finish. If we didn't have this, XTools would constantly go down.

There are couple tasks tracking this, the main one being phab:T318036. I think the rough plan is two have two thresholds – one is the actual limit that can never be exceeded, and that's something really high like 1 million edits. The other is the lower provisional limit that only requires you to login to proceed. I can't say for sure when I'll get this implemented, but probably in early 2024.

In the meantime, I can probably raise the limit from 600K to something just higher so that it will hold you off for a while. You can also use a host of other tools that don't have the same traffic problems as XTools:

• https://fast-ec.toolforge.org/
• https://en.wikiscan.org/users

Hope this helps!

Well, I hit 600,000 and I wish I had made copies of my last edit count page as now I just have an edit total and no more information. I use to check this page throughout the day to check some admin tasks so this is unfortunate.

MusikAnimal, if you could raise my threshold, well, I'll send you virtual gift baskets! I think an upper limit of 1 million would just rule out about a dozen editors instead of dozens. Thanks for the links! I'll try them out.

@Liz We don't seem to have too many "queries gone wild" at the moment so I've upped the cap to 650,000K edits across the board. Your comment got me thinking… being able to look up your own account without limitation is a genuine use case I think we can accommodate. After all, the problem isn't that XTools can't handle counting that many edits, it's just doing so at scale. It'll take me a bit before I can implement this, but it should be before you make another 50K edits :)

@MusikAnimal I was just thinking that it has been a while since I asked about the edit count threshold. I saw your comment above regarding the possibility of allowing editors to look up their own accounts without limitation, and I was curious as to whether any progress has been made in the past two months in that regard. It would be great to be able to view my account's XTools data again.

Hello, also see

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T361829 wikiscan.org returns 502 Bad Gateway (workaround for XTools limitation)

Help, @MusikAnimal. I guess I hit 650,000 edits because I just have a blank Edit Count page again. It looks like it took me 5 months to rack up those 50,000 edits.

I feel like I was blessed when you raised my limit last time because I check my edit count page for different reason throughout a regular business day. Any way I could get another boost in my upper limit? That should take care of things until the end of the year as I'm going to be taking a break later on in 2024.

There can't be that many of us that have this problem, on the English Wikipedia it's about 53 editors. I've noticed that the Commons has some very high edit accounts but I'm not sure about other projects. But it can't be more than a few hundred people who are running into this problem. Considering how many registered accounts there are, that's a drop in a bucket! Now that realization could go either way, either it's a problem that affects only a few editors and so isn't that important to address or it's a problem that only affects a few so raising the limit of edit counts wouldn't have a lot of impact on the operating system. Which would be the better argument?

For some reason about a week ago when I started getting a lot of lag when opening Wikipedia articles, which caused the Chrome tab to freeze for a few seconds and the inability to move my mouse. After a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered that it was ArticleInfo gadget, and the lag does not occur when I have it disabled. The lag is so bad infact that I spent 10 minutes trying to edit a page (with 960k bytes) and the Chrome window kept going unresponsive. After disabling the tool I was able to edit the page. What could be causing this lag? It never occurred before. Also, a while ago the gadget said that there was an issue with the API so I wonder if it has something to do with that.

Are you still seeing this issue? Roughly a week ago, we were firing a hook (Special:Diff/6421280) and this could possibly cause some lag, but the issue would then be with whatever is listening to the hook, not the XTools gadget itself. We're no longer firing the hook, but we have plans to reinstate it.

Also roughly a week ago, XTools was experiencing significant performance problems due to an issue with the databases (phab:T361945). This was fixed on April 5.

That said, I don't know why the gadget (with or without the above issues) would cause your entire browser to lag like you describe. There is no infinite loop or anything like that, and it has a very small memory footprint.

Yes, I re-enabled the gadget to find the answer to this question for a few days and the lag has come back.

I now retract my statement. I am still sometimes getting the lag with XTools disabled, but it happens far less frequently.

Yes the lag has now stopped.

I am reopening this because the lag has come back. When I open the article for London, the browser locks up, but does not lock up with XTools disabled.

I am not convinced its the XTools gadget, but I may still be able to help you figure out what's going wrong. Could you follow the steps at w:WP:JSERROR and report back with any findings?

Hello,

not so long ago the article "Liste von NSDAP-Parteimitgliedsnummern" on German Wikipedia stopped displaying the author distribution. Is there a way to fix it?

This is probably phab:T272521. We haven't come up with a fix yet. I'll try to get it prioritized.

Administrators (at least on en-WP) have access to the number of watchers of a page when it is less than 30. However, it seems this info shows up neither at XTools nor in the ArticleInfo gadget. Would it be possible to get it to appear for the relevant accounts?

@MusikAnimal, just quickly circling back, do you think this would be feasible?

Yes, this we can do :) With phab:T220475 on the horizon, I've been meaning to move more of the logic from the backend to WMF APIs where possible, and this would be one of them.

I'll try to look into it this week.

Hello, at the moment it is not working with Wikimedia Commons, rigth!? I tried this one:

• https://xtools.wmcloud.org/articleinfo-authorship/commons.wikimedia.org/Template%3AC?uselang=en to see the Authorship of Commons:Template:C

But it is stated: "commons.wikimedia.org is not a supported project." Question:

• Will it be in the future? Or is there already another tool working for Commons?
• Or is maybe the template namespace the problem? If I search in _wikipedia_ the authorship of en:Template:Wikidata it is stated "Authorship statistics are only available for mainspace articles."

So a template in commons is mayne a double problem. Any help? Thank you and Best Regards --W like wiki (talk) 13:48, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

The Authorship tool is powered by WikiWho. This is a very expensive tool in terms of performance and data storage, which is why it is only available on select wikis and only for the mainspace. Getting it to work with Commons (in any namespace) would have to come as part of phab:T310386, assuming that works out well. I don't have an estimated timeline on when we'll be able to look into this, unfortunately.

The tool is fixed

Hello, after the rename of the user group from oversight to suppress this user group is no more showed in the propper collumn of the table in Admin Stats tool.

Can a page like this but for a specific user be created?

Hi, I was hoping you could help me out with the following: We have a couple of very active editors in some projects. I use Xtools to see how many pages they created, but I should actually count the number of pages they edited for our metrics. This is a metric I see in General Statistics (‘Pages edited’) but I want to also see the number of edited pages per given year (so to be able to set the parameters for only measuring pages edited in a certain year). How do I go about doing this? Thank you so much! ~~~~

The Edit Counter is the only tool in the XTools suite that doesn't yet support date ranges (phab:T202552). It will be a bit before I can add that.

Since you're asking for the number of pages created in a year, you could use the Pages Created tool instead, and set the date range accordingly. Does that work for you?

Hi @MusikAnimal thanks for getting back to me so soon and answering my question! Sorry to hear it does not support date ranges yet. I did already see the option to measure pages created in a year, and I will use these for our metrics instead. Thanks lots and have a great day! ~~~~

Is there a way to see what WikiProjects a user is most active in? For example, this tool shows my account is most active in Main space, then Talk, then Wikipedia, etc.

Is there a way I can see what projects my edited pages are part of? Do I edit topics around Music more than TV? Do I edit mostly Australian content? Etc. I think I should be able to know this based on the WikiProjects these pages are part of, but unless I look at them individually there doesn't seem to be a way to find this out as a nice chart.

I'd also be interested to compare mine and other accounts, but for now happy to just see my own.

I think a breakdown of the most contributed to WikiProjects would be pretty cool! This can only apply to a handful of wikis that use Extension:PageAssessments (which makes WikiProjects and assessments machine-readable), but English Wikipedia is one of those projects.

I have filed a task at phab:T344464. I can't promise when I'll get to this, but once deployed I'll update you here.

On the Edit Count page (Here's my example), there's a box labelled "Time Card". It has a diagram of the time of day and day of the week that I've edited Wikipedia. It also has a checkbox labelled "Use local time instead of UTC". When this checkbox is unticked, the times and days are in UTC and are accurate. However, when the checkbox is ticked, the times are accurate but the days are not. For example, as I write this, I have 53 edits at 21:00 UTC on Thursdays. When I tick the checkbox, the 53-edit circle slides to 10:00 NZDT on Thursdays, even though it should be 10:00 NZDT on Fridays.