Board Thread:News and Information/@comment-26143371-20150824191701

Hi everyone,

I recently made a bot-account for this Wiki (NoWayBot). In order to get the actual bot-flag I need a community agreement. The bot flag basically does nothing but hide the edits from Special:WikiActivity and Special:Recentchanges. This is useful when there are many similar edits made by the bot in a very short time-frame, which would otherwise span the two named pages and make them unusable. If you wish, you can still see all edits by showing [ bot edits] on the Recent Changes.

The edits the bot will do are mainly minor changes which need to be performed on many pages. Common use cases are renaming categories or applying template changes to all pages that use them. As an example what can be done with a bot take a look at the changes I've made on [ The Krusty-est Place On Earth] and the [ Squeaky Voice Teen] pages. I've done similar edits to more than 1000 pages and I'm sure nobody went to check them all. Thus those changes should never have shown up in the first place, because some other users edits might have gone unnoticed while I was doing those changes.

All the edits will usually be semi-automated. This means that I will check them before they are published. The worklfow basically is like the following: I make some rules what needs to be changed and AWB (the software I'm currently using for this) will make a list of pages, go through them and make the required changes. I can then look at the diff to verify that the change is what I intended and finally publish the updated page.

What I need you to do now is say if you approve the use of this bot or if you disapprove it.In case you don't it would be appreciated if you would tell me the reason for it.

Thanks! 