Last modified: 2012-12-30 20:53:26 UTC
The meta info is treasure for a well-written bot. The problem is, fetching it on every login is bandwidth waste, and relying on an obsolete cached copy might produce bad results. Is it possible to create a way to check if (and what) meta info has changed? The best idea I came with is a request that will supply the "last fetched here" timestamp and will get a description of what meta should be re-requested. For example, the description may list the meta types and their parameters that should be requested. Then, the bot may request them if / when needed for its task. (I came to this idea while trying to write a new version of Apibot.) Grigor Gatchev
Did you mean meta=siteinfo?
Also meta=allmessages, meta=userinfo (where affected by the site change), meta=globaluserinfo (where affected) and possibly other meta (eg. when a new meta param is introduced. Paraminfo changes will be very useful, too - forgot about them in the first post. In short, any info a bot will better depend on, and is reasonable to cache it.
