User blog:RansomTime/An Introduction to AutoWikiBrowser

Like my guide to Pywikipediabot, this guide hopes to be an introduction to the use of Autowikibrowser on Wikia.

What is AutoWikiBrowser (AWB)
AWB is a "semi automated" wiki editor that can be used to make repetitive tasks easier. If set up correctly with either a bot or admin flag on the account, it can also run in a fully automated mode. One of the main advantages over Pywikipediabot is that AutoWikiBrowser features a full user interface - so you don't need to worry about being able to use a command line. It is designed only to run on Windows, although Linux users

Installation
Download and extract this .zip file. If you're running a version of Windows earlier than Vista, also install .NET framework version 2.0.

If you want to run AWB as a bot, you'll also want to contact staff about getting a bot flag (you should create a new account for the bot, and make a community discussion to ensure that people are ok with you using a bot, see Help:Bots for more info).

Once you've extracted the .zip, double click on AutoWikiBrowser.exe to run AWB.

Login
In the Options menu, click Preferences. Then click site. Change the project to Wikia and type your wiki's subdomain (the part of the url before .wikia.com) in the box below. You could also choose "custom" and type in the full URL for the wiki.

Then go to the File menu, and click Login/Profiles. In the Quick login box type your bot's name and password and click Login. If all goes according to plan, you should see a bar similar to the one below.



An Example Task
There are lots of things you can do with AWB, for an example, I'll run through a simple find and replace situation. I will be finding the phrase "Call of Duty" and replacing it with "CoD" on my test wiki. 1. Generate a list of pages you want to edit. In this case, it is all the pages on the wiki. Go to the "Make a List" box, then choose "Special Page" - then choose "all pages". Finally - choose the main namespace. 2. Enable Find and Replace by ticking the "Enabled" Button. Then Click the "Normal Settings" button and type your find and replace rules. Once you've done that, click "Done", then tick the box that says "skip if no replacement".

3. Check the "Skip" menu, and make sure that nothing is ticked (apart from "only genfixes" and Page doesn't exist at the bottom). Then, test the bot by going to the "start" menu and clicking the start button. AWB goes through the list of pages until it finds a page that it needs to change due to your find and replace rules, when it's found one, it will show the changes it has made. If you're happy, you can click "save" to go to the next page in the list.

4. If you're happy with the changes, and you have a bot flag, the "bots" menu will allow you to automatically save edits. Add a reasonable delay between the edits (you can leave the bot working on stuff whilst you do other things). Once you've ticked the "Auto Save" box, go back to the "Start" menu, and press start, and the bot will automatically go through each page and apply your rules.

Thanks for reading, I hope this gives you the info you need to start using AWB. If you need any more help, feel free to leave a note in the comments.