Changes: Help:Bots

Revision as of 18:20, 27 September 2016

A bot is a piece of software that makes automated edits on a community and also helps human users to make semi-automated edits. Bots are most often used 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 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 community or explicit permission from a bureaucrat, showing approval of the use and flagging of the bot.

There are also 0 global bots linked on the special user group rights page.

Important notes

Bots on Fandom must use a limited editing rate so that they don't overload Fandom'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 community — the block can be lifted after the causes for the damaging edits are understood and fixed.

Check Page

AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) makes use of a whitelist called a 'check page'. On Fandom, if this page exists locally on the community (in the format of Project:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage), the bot's username (or the username the bot will run on) will need to be on this checkpage in order to operate on the wiki. If the checkpage does not exist, there is no restriction and AWB can be run without requiring the whitelist. This is done to restrict unauthorized bot programs from being run on communities.

Resources

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

Please visit {{#NewWindowLink:http://c.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Forum%7Cthe Community Central Forum}} to find other bot users for help in using bots for specific tasks.

User blogs on bots

{{#NewWindowLink:http://c.wikia.com/wiki/User blog:RansomTime/An Introduction to AutoWikiBrowser|User blog:RansomTime/An Introduction to AutoWikiBrowser}}
{{#NewWindowLink:http://c.wikia.com/wiki/User blog:RansomTime/An introduction to Pywikipediabot|User blog:RansomTime/An introduction to Pywikipediabot}}
{{#NewWindowLink:http://c.wikia.com/wiki/User blog:TyA/Pywikipedia|User blog:TyA/Pywikipedia}}

Further Help & Feedback

Browse and search other help pages at Help:Contents
Check Fandom Community Central for sources of further help and support
Check Contacting Fandom for how to report any errors or unclear steps in this article

@@ Line 12: / Line 12: @@
 ==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.
+Bots on Fandom must use a '''limited editing rate''' so that they don't overload Fandom'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:
@@ Line 20: / Line 20: @@
 == Check Page ==
-[[wikipedia:Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser|AutoWikiBrowser]] (AWB) makes use of a whitelist called a 'check page'. On Wikia, if this page exists locally on the community (in the format of [[Project:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage]]), the bot's username (or the username the bot will run on) will need to be on this checkpage in order to operate on the wikia. If the checkpage does not exist, there is no restriction and AWB can be run without requiring the whitelist. This is done to restrict unauthorized bot programs from being run on communities.
+[[wikipedia:Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser|AutoWikiBrowser]] (AWB) makes use of a whitelist called a 'check page'. On Fandom, if this page exists locally on the community (in the format of [[Project:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage]]), the bot's username (or the username the bot will run on) will need to be on this checkpage in order to operate on the wiki. If the checkpage does not exist, there is no restriction and AWB can be run without requiring the whitelist. This is done to restrict unauthorized bot programs from being run on communities.
 ==Resources==
@@ Line 52: / Line 52: @@
 [[ru:Справка:Боты]]
 [[zh:help:機器人]]
 [[Category:Help]]
 [[Category:Administration help]]