Board Thread:Administration/@comment-25428589-20150723154526/@comment-25428589-20150725120957

Pastaguy64 wrote: Great idea keeping the wiki free of clutter is certainly a good thing for a bot to do, however would it be possible for somebody to take control of the bot and use it for more malicous purposes, sorry if this seems like an obvious or stupid question I just have no idea how these work. Hey, I would have control over the bot, so as long as it remained under my control (which it will do) there is no reason to believe it would be used for malicious purposes. The only way someone could get control of the bot is if they were to gain control of either my computer, or the account, both of which are unlikely to happen :)

And anyway, the actual flagging of the bot only means that it will be hidden in recent changes. The "bot" part of it which actually automates edits is an external piece of software completely unrelated to the flagging of the account as a bot. Technically, anyone could create a bot that would perform malicious actions, regardless of the decision here, since the MediaWiki API is open to everybody.

Basically, it's highly unlikely that the bot will be used maliciously, and if someone was determined to use a piece of software that edits automatically to attack the wiki, the decision made here would have no impact on their ability to do so.