Help talk:Bots

Where to get a Bot?
It'd be nice if it would also have some links on where/how to get a decent working bot code. --Light Daxter 19:25, October 2, 2009 (UTC)


 * There are two main bots for use on wikis - AutoWikiBrowser and pywikipediabot. AWB is probably the easiest to work with. Beware compatibility issues though. Kirkburn (talk) 15:15, October 5, 2009 (UTC)

Read-only bots
Does a bot that only downloads many pages at once need a bot flag? --WGH, 22:28, October 30, 2010 (UTC)
 * No. But the bot flag makes this a bit more efficient (e.g. normal user can get 500 pages per each request via API, with 'bot' flag it can get 5000). 23:23, October 30, 2010 (UTC)

Limited editing rate?
The page says that a bot should use a limited editing rate, which is perfectly fine. However, the word limited is very subjective. What would be the limit, in terms of edit per minute, or request per minute? Right now i'm working with 60 requests per minute (1 per second) but I was wondering if I could speed up the process, or if it was still too heavy.

Basically, the bot fetches all the pages from a category and its sub-categories, builds a list, and update the list if data has been updated. The bot runs once a day at midnight (EST) (I assume the traffic is lower at that time). See the bot page.

Thanks

Hunter789 19:02, June 13, 2011 (UTC)


 * As a side note, I have not asked to flag the bot as a bot yet since it is still in development. Hunter789 19:05, June 13, 2011 (UTC)

Answer by wikia staff
This was answered by uberfuzzy on the community forums. No exact rules, but more like general helpful guidelines.

As you said on that talk page, your edit rate of 1/sec is a good baseline to start. If its running late night/offpeak times, you could probably let it run faster without too much problems. It also depends on what you are doing. Provided your not hammering us non-stop with 100s of requests a second for solid blocks of minutes, you probably wont even show up on Ops' logs/radar (though the chain reaction of internal mediawiki actions from updating categories/redlinks/etc might, but only if you are doing something very wrong, or very right ;P). I dont think you grasp the amount of edits/actions/pageviews does every second already, a few more from a bot on one wiki wont matter in the large scale of things for the brief period of time.

Most bots I run I generally dont put a throttle in, and let it just go at the pace that the server can handle the actions. Generally, most edit actions I've noticed take about 1sec from open connection, send, response, close. When I do that, I usually put some sort of loop logic in, so that every X things, it does a sleep for Y seconds (usually something 100/1 or 1000/2), just to give a little pause/break for my connection and the server. (I also tend to use that window to save some sort of continue data, so that if it does crash, I can resume from a known point, not at the top of the list.) Remember that doing an edit is fairly "cheap" to do, provided theres not dozens of templates that have to update, but moving/deleting pages may be a little more "expensive" and take longer to process, so when doing these, may want to look at adding delays/throttles, just to give a possible chance for things to update.

Something to look at, is look in the api docs, for the "maxlag" param stuff. You can actually set up your bot to detect when our servers are reporting they are loaded up, and to slow down for a while. This rarely happens on Wikia (and usually not that often on wikipedia anymore either), because of how our databases are now spread across multiple clusters, and have lots caches infront of the actual servers. You should also try to detect when your saves/actions are failing, and if you fail a whole bunch, or get a bunch of "cant resolve host" type errors, to stop, because it usually means the servers are having a fit, and are not available. I'd say about 80% of the code you are going to write to make a good bot will be error handling. There is only one "correct" condition, but there are dozens of ways it can fail.

Something else to remember is that bandwidth is cheap and large, but connections to server are finite. Once your flagged a bot, your account will be able to grab more data in a single request (500's turn to 5000's as an example), so try to do more per request when you are getting data.

--uberfuzzy, lover of bots and api's 08:51, June 15, 2011 (UTC)

Hunter789 14:28, June 16, 2011 (UTC)

Talk page
Can a blog post that is designed to alert the community of the Bot's presence and reasoning be redirected to instead of the owner's talk page? THis blog also acts as a request blog. --http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110823111447/custombionicle/images/4/43/TDG.gif ( Talk ) 10:42, January 26, 2012 (UTC)
 * "Link to its owner's user talk page for questions"

Bad link in help page
There's a link near the bottom that says in its poppup that it's heading for Community Central. But on the Civilization Wiki it goes (as the {Status?) bar near the bottom says it will) to the non-existent Civilization:Forum:Index. I've lost track of how interwiki links go, so I can't fix it myself. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 08:12, February 10, 2013 (UTC)


 * There is currently a bug with interwiki links not working properly in Shared help. I've updated the link in this edit, but if you check the link at w:c:civilization:Help:Bots, you'll notice it takes you to http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Forum instead of http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Forum like it's supposed to. I've filed a bug report at Special:Contact/bug related to this.
 * Jftr, Help:Improving Help Pages. Could you ask them not to "fix" this? I am relying on the c.wikia.com/wiki link behaviour.--PedroM 13:33, February 20, 2013 (UTC)

Can humans be bots?
Can human (living) users be bots technically? Ismael Perez (Talk) 03:52, January 12, 2014 (UTC)
 * Sure, it's a tactic that admins here on Central use all the time. We just flag ourselves as bots using Special:UserRights, and then we can manually do sneaky edits that nobody will see and won't flood RecentChanges or WikiActivity. This is useful if a stupid spambot posts a zillion images and we need to delete them.
 * Note however that the ability for administrators of a wiki to flag themselves as a bot is not a standard ability (nor is it standard for bureaucrats). The usual course of action is to use Special:Contact to request bot rights so Staff can add them. Community Central is one of only a handful of wikis where admins have the ability. Thisismyrofl (talk) 04:05, January 12, 2014 (UTC)
 * So how can admins be bots to do edits manually? By creating another account? Ismael Perez (Talk) 04:57, January 12, 2014 (UTC)