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.

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 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.

How can I flag a bot?

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.

Important notes

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.

The user page and user talk page for the bot should

• clearly identify it 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 or Pywikipediabot.

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