Problems with python script on web hosting

Question

Hi guys, I have written a script for Wikipedia & it works fine on my computer, yet when I upload it to my web host(Dreamhost) it doesn't work & says that the user I am trying to log in as is blocked-this is not true, it works on my computer & I#m not blocked. This is the exact error message I get-

A problem occurred in a Python script. Here is the sequence of function calls leading up to the error, in the order they occurred.

 /home/tris1601/thewikipediaforum.com/pywikipedia/wikitest.py
   35 site = wikipedia.getSite()
   36 newpage = wikipedia.Page(site, u"User:Dottydotdot/test")
   37 newpage.put(text + "<br><br>'''Imported from [http://en.wikiquote.org '''Wikiquote'''] by [[User:DottyQuoteBot|'''DottyQuoteBot''']]", u"Testing")
   38 
   39 wikipedia.stopme()
newpage = Page{[[User:Dottydotdot/test]]}, newpage.put = <bound method Page.put of Page{[[User:Dottydotdot/test]]}>, text = u'You have so many things in the background that y... could possibly work?" <p> [[Ward Cunningham]] \n'
 /home/tris1601/thewikipediaforum.com/pywikipedia/wikipedia.py in put(self=Page{[[User:Dottydotdot/test]]}, newtext=u"You have so many things in the background that y...''] by [[User:DottyQuoteBot|'''DottyQuoteBot''']]", comment=u'Testing', watchArticle=None, minorEdit=True, force=False, sysop=False, botflag=True)
 1380 
 1381         # Check blocks
 1382         self.site().checkBlocks(sysop = sysop)
 1383 
 1384         # Determine if we are allowed to edit
self = Page{[[User:Dottydotdot/test]]}, self.site = <bound method Page.site of Page{[[User:Dottydotdot/test]]}>, ).checkBlocks undefined, sysop = False
 /home/tris1601/thewikipediaforum.com/pywikipedia/wikipedia.py in checkBlocks(self=wikipedia:en, sysop=False)
 4457         if self._isBlocked[index]:
 4458             # User blocked
 4459             raise UserBlocked('User is blocked in site %s' % self)
 4460 
 4461     def isBlocked(self, sysop = False):
global UserBlocked = <class wikipedia.UserBlocked>, self = wikipedia:en
UserBlocked: User is blocked in site wikipedia:en 
      args = ('User is blocked in site wikipedia:en',)

Any ideas as to why it isn't working?

Thanks, much appreciated!

Answer 1

It could be that your host (Dreamhost) is blocked, and not your user.

Answer 2

I'd start by adding in some debug. Can you capture the output you're sending to wikipedia and the results it resturns? There's probably some more information lodged in there which you can extract to see why it's failing.

[Edit] r.e. debugging - it's hard to give advice given the small snippet you provided. The fact that you've got over 3.5k lines in a single file suggests there's either some rather innefficient coding in there or that the problem wasn't particularly well broken down... which is likely to make debugging more tricky.

Having said that, the .put() mentioned in the debug above is almost certainly sending a request to the server. You could start by printing out those requests or bits of the request. To try and piece together what request is being sent and then try doing just those requests and recording the output using python's print command:

print "Sending '%s' to server%(my_put_request)

...where my_put_request is the bits of data you're sending.

[Edit2] I just spotted that this it's the pywikipedia bot script you're using. The wikipedia article on the bot mentions some points on permissions which would support uggedals suggestion of it being an access problem. It's quite possible that wikipedia recognises dreamhosts IP and that someone else has tried doing something bad in the past which has caused them to be blocked in some way.