Ian07 wrote:77topaz wrote:
Odd: that's not the name of the LifeWiki page it leads, nor has it ever been the name of that LifeWiki page.
It
was, however, formerly the name used in the infobox which IIRC is what Catagolue actually looks at:
http://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?title ... ldid=51091
That's only part of the mystery. It's actually quite interesting to see how that hilarious name appeared on a Catagolue page. It all started when Apple Bottom abbreviated 'very very very very long' to 'very^4' on 1st July 2017, accidentally omitting the 'long' in the process. As AB did over 700 (!!!) maintenance edits on that day, it is understandable that one subtle error slipped through:
http://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?title ... ldid=34819
That, on its own, didn't look too incongruous -- the '^4' acts as something of a punctuation mark, splitting and therefore disguising the ungrammatical 'very boat'. There it lay dormant for nearly a year and a half, when AwesoMan3000 replaced 'very^4' with the equivalent 'very very very very' on 14th December 2018:
http://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?title ... ldid=51053
Again, this was part of a huge batch-editing bout, which may have even been partially automated: a find/replace to expand instances of 'very^4' to 'very very very very' sounds entirely reasonable. The problem, however, was that in this case, the original 'very^4 boat' was ungrammatical; this became especially apparent when changed to 'very very very very boat'.
The problem was finally resolved by a third serial batch-editor, Ian07, who corrected the name to agree with the page title whilst adding helpful statistics to many pattern pages. This removed the last trace of 'very very very very boat' from the current edition of the LifeWiki:
http://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?title ... ldid=51091
So the problem was completely solved, right? Wrong. The Python script used to scrape common names from LifeWiki and add them to the Catagolue source code was executed on 21st December, seven days after AwesoMan3000 changed the infobox to say 'very very very very boat' and a month before Ian07 corrected it:
https://gitlab.com/apgoucher/catagolue/ ... 7a6e02480f
This managed to evade detection -- unsurprisingly, given that the commit had a 2000-line diff -- until it was finally noticed yesterday.