User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Technical Update: March 8, 2017/@comment-11733175-20170308232857/@comment--20170309160627

As for the login via API only being over plain HTTP, users can login through Helios directly over HTTPS. The way to do this is to POST username and password to https://services.wikia.com/auth/token and get the "access_token" from the response and set that as the "access_token" cookie for your bot. You'll just need to update your bots to use that as the login method, rather than the MediaWiki API.