Board Thread:Administration/@comment-25428589-20150723154526/@comment-26538818-20150723234526

Underscorre wrote: Hey, it's Tom, and I'd like to propose that we establish a new bot account on this wiki.

Before I begin, let me just explain what a bot account is. A bot account is an account that has been tagged so that its edits won't show up in Special:WikiActivity or Special:Recentchanges (unless "show bot accounts" is ticked). Why would we want this? Bot accounts are generally used in tandem with external pieces of software that allow them to make a lot of edits, very quickly and automatically (or semi-automatically). They are used to perform bulk tasks without (too much) effort on the part of the bot operator. Due to the large amounts of edits they perform, they are tagged as bots so that they will not clog up the wiki's activity.

So, why would we specifically want a bot? We've had bots in the past, however they are no longer in use. Recently, I noticed the huge amounts of talk pages of deleted mainspace pages we have - you can see them by looking through Special:AllPages (the majority of the pages that are not comments are talk pages of deleted pages). I wrote a PHP script that uses the MediaWiki API to go through and delete these. If this was to be run on the wiki, it would need to run as a bot due to the huge number of pages it would be deleting. Otherwise, it would spam up the RC. Cleaning up these pages is something that has to be done to keep the wiki free of clutter, but there are so many of them that expecting a human to delete them all is unreasonable. Having a bot would mean these pages could be deleted automatically.

There are a number of other uses for a bot account. For example, fixing the category rules proposed here, cleaning out Special:BrokenRedirects, or automatically adding to pages, among other things.

According to the help page on bots, Wikia staff will not grant an account a bot flag unless the community approves of them doing so. Therefore, I ask you to vote below on whether or not you think me creating a bot account would be a good idea. To clarify, I would create a separate account to my current account, through which bot edits would be made, and I would continue to edit normally on my current account. The bot will need admin rights for some of the tasks described above, so if you would not want that, you can vote on that too. I have written the code already, and tested it on both a standard MediaWiki installation I have installed on a personal server, and a sandbox wiki hosted on Wikia.

Thanks for reading, please leave your votes below.