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 talk to one of the sysops about it on their talk page, who will then consider your application and forward it to a bureaucrat for implementation, as 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&hellip;
 * 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.

If you plan to submit a bot for authorisation, please have the following information available on its user page:
 * Purpose (e.g. typo and punctuation repair)
 * Programming language and license
 * Running times, if known
 * Author and maintainer of the software (preferably with a link to their user page on StrategyWiki)

Currently authorised bots
At the moment there are only a couple of bots authorised to run on the site, namely one mass-upload bot, and Boothby.

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.