Help:Bots

A bot is a piece of software that makes automated edits on a wiki and also helps human users to make semi-automated edits. Bots are most often used in short runs to make repetitive edits to many pages, such as moving a group of pages to a new category, fixing links to disambiguation pages, or to search for misspelled words and replace them with correct ones.

Bot flags
As bots can make many edits during their run, their edits can overwhelm the recent changes list, making it difficult to see and respond to edits by human users. For this reason, bots that have been tested and approved by a wiki community can be given a '''bot flag. '''A bot flag is a setting in the MediaWiki software that hides bot edits from the recent changes list. Bot edits can always be revealed by clicking "Show bots" in the Recent changes header.

How can I flag an account as a bot?
To receive a bot flag, please contact a member of the Community Team to request it. Your request should include a link to a public discussion on your wiki, showing that the community approves of the use and flagging of the bot.

Important notes
Bots on Wikia must use a limited editing rate so that they don't overload Wikia's servers. For most bot programs, a rate throttle is built in, so you don't need to worry about this. However, if you find your bot making more than one edit per second, then it's time to slow it down.

A bot account's User Profile and Talk Page should:
 * Clearly identify the account as a bot
 * Link to its owner's user talk page for questions
 * Encourage users to have the bot blocked by an admin if its automated edits are causing damage to the wiki — the block can be lifted after the causes for the damaging edits are understood and fixed.

Resources
For more information on using and making bots, see AutoWikiBrowser, Pywikipediabot or Creating a bot.

Please visit the Community Central Forum to find other bot users for help in using bots for specific tasks.

Further Help & Feedback
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