SmashWiki:Bots

This page documents an official SmashWiki policy, a widely accepted standard that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. If in doubt, consider discussing changes on the talk page.

A bot is an account that is capable of doing edits on a large, rapid-fire scale. Typically, a bot account is run by a particular user, who uses scripts to log in as the bot account and make edits.

To ease their main task of making lots of edits quickly, bot accounts have the following powers:

• They are always treated as autoconfirmed and established users.
• They can move pages without leaving redirects behind.
• They are allowed to skip human-confirmation processes (i.e. CAPTCHAs).
• They can use the API, and have higher rate limits than regular users do.
• They can edit user talk pages without triggering the "You have new messages" notice, done by marking such edits as minor.

Edits made by bots are naturally invisible on RecentChanges so that their stream of rapid-fire edits does not drown out other users' edits; the "Show bots" option can be used to see them, and they are always visible in page histories. Bots also may or may not be visible on WhosOnline; it is unclear what controls whether they do.

Bots are currently not capable of administrator actions, such as deleting pages or editing fully-protected pages. This is intentional; the only real reason to give bots such powers are in cases where hundreds of pages require immediate deletion or undeletion, which is not expected to be necessary in the foreseeable future. It also prevents regular users with bots from using their bots as administrator accounts.

If a normal user wishes to create a bot, they must get approval from the staff first.

A bot's actions are the responsibility of the user who runs it. Should a bot do something wrong, it is the user's job to halt it and undo what it's done.

List of bots on SmashWiki

• eXemplary Logic: Run by Toomai. XL is an incarnation of pywikipediabot and so has a variety of abilities, such as wiki-wide text replacements and (roundabout) category renaming.
• NotAnOuendan: Run by Fugudev. Originally a main account, but forgotten and re-purposed into a bot account. Has only been used to edit pages to both undeprecate them and remove unnecessary categories from them, so could conceivably accomplish any wide-scale search-and-replace task.
• PorpleBot: Run by Porplemontage. Text replacements and miscellaneous technical tasks.
• SmashWiki Bot: Runs autonomously. Manages Smasher/Tournament/Team mainspace redirects and fixes double redirects.