Help:Bots

A bot is a piece of software that makes automated edits on a wiki, or that 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.

Bots on Wikia must use a limited editing rate so that they don't overload the servers by opening and editing many pages in a very short time frame.

Because bots can make many edits during their run, their edits can overwhelm Recent changes, making it difficult to see and respond to edits by human users. For this reason, bots that have been tested and approved by a Wikia community can be given a bot flag, 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.

To receive a bot flag, please contact a member of the Community Team with a link to a public discussion showing that the community approves of the use and flagging of the bot.