StrategyWiki:Guide/Bots

StrategyWiki welcomes the responsible use of bots to automate routine tasks and prevent death by boredom.

Bot authorisation
If you have a sincere and genuine reason for needing to run a bot on StrategyWiki, you are advised to read the procedure for submitting a request at Requests for permissions/Bot. Only bureaucrats can grant bot users the bot flag necessary for them to be allowed to run on StrategyWiki.

To be authorised, your bot must…
 * not request pages from StrategyWiki more than once every 10 seconds.
 * not download huge numbers of pages in one go (page dumps are available upon request for this purpose).
 * have the provision to be stopped at any time when requested, ideally automatically if its talk page is changed.
 * clearly state in the edit summary what changes it has made to the page (e.g. "Added to Category:Example" rather than "Bot edit").
 * have its source code licensed under an Open-Source license, and available on the bot's user page (or a sub-page thereof).
 * run using a user account specially set up only for the use of that bot.
 * be proven to be stable and conform to all rules.

Currently authorised bots

 * Boothby
 * Auto Prod Bot
 * File Upload Bot (Kerning)
 * Garrbot
 * Hal (bot)
 * Vandalbot
 * NajBot
 * Notmybot
 * Sigmabot

Writing bots
If you want to write a bot for MediaWiki/StrategyWiki, you are very welcome to do so, and there are people here who are willing to help, providing they know about the language you plan to use. However, when writing a bot, make sure that it will do no harm when you're testing it, ideally using a local test installation of MediaWiki before releasing the bot into the wild, or at least making sure that any edits it makes are logged locally and never actually uploaded.