Thread:CzechOut/@comment-3537355-20141216202716/@comment-188432-20141219153153

Oh, I should also stress a couple of points about bot etiquette on Wikia. You should make sure that you have a separate bot account. (Mine, for instance, is CzechBot.) And you should make sure that this account has what's called a "bot flag". When your account is marked with such a flag, your edits are not visible in the Recent Activities stream by default. This is good, because it means you're not flooding Recent Activities with trivial edits.

Admin, even Bureaucrats, are not capable of adding a bot flag. This can only be done by staff, via a Special:Contact. In most cases, and particularly in the instance of busy communities, you should start some kind of discussion, in which you lay out your intent for using your bot. Once the community, or at least fellow admin, approve, then you can file the S:C and be on your botting way :)

You may benefit by seeing how Memory Alpha, a fairly bot-rich environment, have set forth a bot policy.

Finally, and this is really, really important: until you understand better how pybot works, don't operate it in automatic mode. Only use manual mode. And for a few months after you gain the confidence to use automatic mode, I'd still strongly recommend visually watching the bot changes go through, until you're rock solid sure that you know how a particular bot run works.

Remember, bots are incredibly helpful, but they can also quickly do a lot of damage. Treat 'em with respect, and you'll be the star of your community. Treat 'em casually, and you might end up having to do a lot of cleanup work.