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Recently the Community ♦ bot was ran on Ask Ubuntu Meta to migrate all the MSO links to MSE links. But in the process, the bot converted all the posts written in markdown to HTML. An example preview:

Community ♦ bot doesn't like markdown?

This bot doesn't like markdown and I want it to be handed a time-bound suspension. It has vandalized all the posts that were written in markdown to convert to a different language. Moreover, the bot has edited 289 posts on our Meta in a span of less than a second.

In addition to the suspension, it would be better if all the posts can be re-converted to markdown.

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  • 1
    Related: Community♦ has gone crazy on Code Review meta
    – Aditya
    Apr 23, 2014 at 9:33
  • Seems to be happening all across the network.
    – Raphael
    Apr 23, 2014 at 9:34
  • 12
    The bot needs to be suspended immediately.. It's wrecking havoc all across the network!
    – Aditya
    Apr 23, 2014 at 9:43
  • @aditya that seems to have been a problem with the migration mso-->mse script... it has been run and community should work just as intended again.
    – Vogel612's Shadow
    Apr 23, 2014 at 9:51
  • @Vogel612 You didn't get my point.. I want it to be suspended (aka not run that migration script) across the network so that there is no further damage.. Things should be ironed out first and then run across the network :)
    – Aditya
    Apr 23, 2014 at 9:53
  • @Aditya wait, it hasn't been run network-wide already?
    – Vogel612's Shadow
    Apr 23, 2014 at 9:54
  • @Vogel612 It looks it has by now... But if there are still sites left, it shouldn't be run there (there are ~120 sites on the network)..
    – Aditya
    Apr 23, 2014 at 9:56
  • @Vogel612 I don't see why the MSE/O-split should affect any other meta sites. And, furthermore, how the edits made relate to that.
    – Raphael
    Apr 23, 2014 at 10:01
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    @Aditya - the migration script has stopped.
    – Oded
    Apr 23, 2014 at 10:02
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    @Vogel612 I see, didn't think of that; figured redirects would be enough. However, that did not need to be run via the bot, bumping all these questions, and it did not need to convert everything to HTML. I'm certain the latter is a bug, but the former is annoying, too.
    – Raphael
    Apr 23, 2014 at 10:08
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    @Oded I checked Meta Stack Exchange and Computer Science Meta, but it seems that many more are affected.
    – Raphael
    Apr 23, 2014 at 10:23
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    The script edited deleted posts as well.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Apr 23, 2014 at 10:28
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    @Oded: On how many sites did the script run eventually? And I see questions bumped all over the place (atleast on AU.Meta and MSE itself)..
    – Aditya
    Apr 23, 2014 at 11:51
  • 3
    Nearly all of them
    – Oded
    Apr 23, 2014 at 11:54
  • 5
    All the broken migrations have been fixed now.
    – Oded
    Apr 23, 2014 at 13:59

2 Answers 2

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Yes, this was a bug in the migration code.

A fix migration is being rolled out (using the previous revision as the basis of the change).

We also had a bug in the bump suppression code - these shouldn't have been bumped at all.

That has been fixed now, so such mass edits on answers will not bump the related question (you may note that questions that got edited were not bumped).

Sorry about that!

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4
  • Don't feel sorry... It just affected Meta after all... :-)
    – Aditya
    Apr 23, 2014 at 13:06
  • 2
    Is it possible to unbump all the questions that were bumped previously? Also, in this related meta question's example question the edit by Community ♦ was rolled-back and was not edited by the fix.
    – Aditya
    Apr 23, 2014 at 14:12
  • 2
    Unfortunately, the bump can't be undone, not easily. But the fix and the remaining migrations didn't re-bump. We also left any posts that have been edited after the bad migration alone, on the assumption that people have manually fixed them up. @Aditya
    – Oded
    Apr 23, 2014 at 14:13
  • Okay, that's a reasonable assumption.. Thanks :-)
    – Aditya
    Apr 23, 2014 at 14:15
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This is crazy. Bot essentially destroys important details out of the posts.

As an example, at Programmers it made Wikipedia link invisible (not to mention minor trash inserted into markdown, making it just harder to maintain the damaged post), see revision 3 here:

  • Markdown that was there is:
    [as it is defined in Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_coupling#In_computing),
    rendered as:

    as it is defined in Wikipedia

  • Markdown after being damaged by bot is:
    <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_coupling#In_computing" rel="nofollow">as it is defined in Wikipedia</a>,
    rendered as:

    as it is defined in Wikipedia

Feel the difference?

I suggest that all the damaging edits were rolled back by the bot (preferably without bump):

I also think that it would be safer to first run such edits at meta sites, to minimize risk of damaging posts shown to main sites visitors.

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6
  • Take a look now...
    – Oded
    Apr 23, 2014 at 13:30
  • @Oded rollback looks perfectly correct, I tested by manually reviewing diffs against rev 2; meta.stackexchange overwrites meta.stackoverflow exactly as expected. Test passed :)
    – gnat
    Apr 23, 2014 at 14:09
  • Apologies for the screwup
    – Oded
    Apr 23, 2014 at 14:11
  • @Oded apologies accepted, thanks for the quick fix!
    – gnat
    Apr 23, 2014 at 14:26
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    @Oded yet another bug (in a script that preserved markdown) - in rev 9 here: valid MSO link was replaced with broken MSE one. Looks as if it didn't check whether MSO post id is above cut-off value
    – gnat
    Apr 23, 2014 at 17:09
  • 1
    Yes, this was reported elsewhere - the script was indeed indiscriminate.
    – Oded
    Apr 23, 2014 at 21:09

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