StrategyWiki:Guide/Bots

Enforced!

This page documents an enforced policy on StrategyWiki. It has wide acceptance among editors and is a standard that everyone should follow. Except for minor edits, please make use of the discussion page to propose changes to this policy.

For more details on requesting a bot account, see the Bot request page.

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. 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.