Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-35301431-20130521143606/@comment-2200849-20130614143207

Let's clarify things a bit.

What Cap123 created and uploaded to GitHub at https://github.com/Cap123/PHSWikia is a web page that you can visit, input your Wikia user info and then use the interface to run a bot. You only need a web browser to use it, and neither PHP nor other dependencies are required. PHP is only required if you have a server and want to operate such a web page.

This implementation is quite problematic, though. In its current form, it's using the free Tokelau ccTLD ".tk," which has seen widespread usage amongst malicious actors. Even assuming the code of Cap123's website matches the code on GitHub&mdash;which is highly likely because of the syntax errors in runbot.php on lines 26 and 27&mdash;it's still problematic, because you are making connections to a third-party web host, which makes for an additional trust factor. Further, the connection is unencrypted HTTP, which makes it possible for someone to intercept your session and acquire the credentials.

To conclude, I believe bots that rely on a web interface should only be used if reasonable security is provided, which I'd define as a HTTPS-only setup with at least a self-signed certificate, and the environment being a VPS or dedicated server instead of a web hosting provider.

By contrast, wiki bots that use the .NET framework are Windows-only, and provide a GUI. Here, I don't see why the use of one version of the .NET framework over the others provides any benefits. An alternative could be a Python-based bot, like Pywikipediabot, as Python is a cross-platform language that's also available for the Windows operating system.