All The Tropes:Bots
Bots exist to help enhance your experience. You can fuck them, and you can kill them. But mostly you can edit pages with them.
The full list of bots is available at Special:ListUsers/bot.
There are three bots that are also marked as administrators. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords:
- User:Dai-Guard - operated by User:Labster. A hand-coded and thus general purpose bot using the Perl module Mediawiki::Bot.
- User:Gethbot - operated by User:GethN7
- User:WonderBot - operated by User:Looney Toons
Forms for applying for bot usage
Bot Policy
1. No matter who owns a bot account or the nature of the edits intended, all bots not running regular services (as in, constant) of a known nature (like InternetArchiveBot) must have the bot owner submit all technical information requested on the proposed fixes, including their specific changes in all details and the scope of pages, categories and namespaces affected. All staff must approve of these changes or at least a majority. This applies to all bot jobs done on an "as needed" basis. No "ex post facto" justification is allowed for any ATT user, all proposed changes must be agreed upon by staff consensus at a bare minimum PRIOR to the bot job duration.
For constantly running bot services providing ongoing service of known useful utility, such as preventing link rot and other preapproved tasks, they will otherwise be exempt from this policy until such time they need to modify it to do services outside the pre-approved remit they were authorized, in which instance they must still submit all needed information for prior staff approval before it will be allowed to proceed in either the short or long-term.
2. No "generalized fixes" that would damage ISO standard dating, American/British spelling, or any other changes like that provided by our existing page templates can be allowed. The only exceptions are those agreed on as necessary by appropriate review prior and even then the scope must be strictly circumscribed in accordance with bot policy.
3. If a bot causes an issue, the bot owner is fully responsible for fixing all mistakes made in good faith. Confirmed malicious use of a bot for any reason is immediate grounds for the permanent expulsion of the bot owner and their bot account from All The Tropes. As for good-faith mistakes, they must still be immediately subject to any penalties deemed appropriate by the staff of ATT, depending on the difficulty of repairing the scope of any damage. Any staff who have made either good-faith or malicious mistakes are not exempt by any means, they must suffer the consequences the same as any other user depending on the nature of the damage, how easily it was reversible, done, and intention.
Note, if such penalties include a temporary block from using ATT services, the bot owner must still be obligated to fix any mistakes they made, if feasible and appropriate, before the imposition of such a penalty, but only if the bot owner made the mistakes in legitimate good faith. Malicious use will not allow for this and should be fixed by staff.
4. If the bot uses an automated wiki tool like PyWikipediaBot, AutoWikiBrowser, or Perl's MediaWiki bot script (among other tools), none of their built-in functions that provide "generalized" fixes based on Wikipedia's specific standards can be allowed, unless none of those would break any of the aforementioned rules or any existing mandated ATT template and page code, and any purposeful circumvention of this after the adoption of this rule will be considered the same as malicious vandalism and be dealt with as specified in the previous rule.
5. Archival records may be requested and made available for all bot jobs done on an "as needed" basis and will be archived in a place mutually decided on by staff that are visible to all ATT users, in the interests of transparency, barring certain jobs done for technical or legal reasons that may involve private information or other legal situations that require confidentiality.
Original suggestion here for rule six: http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14133&pid=203773#pid203773
6. Bot rights are to be reserved for users who have shown a very high degree of competence and trustworthiness. Bots can exceed average API limits of MediaWiki and the potential for chaos in the hands of someone not to be trusted is high, so ATT staff reserve the right to demand (if the bot was used off ATT for other purposes) impeccable credentials proving the trustworthiness of the bot owner and their intentions. As for ATT regulars, the user (either staff or regular troper) must have shown a consistent degree of responsibility in following the rules and their editing history must have very high quality to allow them to be considered for the right to operate a bot, and staff will decide (with input from the community depending on the extent of the bot purpose) whether to greenlight the approved bot account.
Original suggestion for rule seven: http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14133&pid=203783#pid203783
7. Rollback, a user right for reverting edits automatically, this will be both a requirement for bot owners (to fix any mistakes their bots make) and a prerequisite before we grant bot rights. If a user proves trustworthy with rollback rights, we will consider their request for bot rights as a first priority since they have proven trustworthy with this elevated user privilege prior.
7a. All bot owners existing prior to adoption of this proposal will be granted rollback rights when it is adopted, and all bot jobs (as needed or constant) prior to policy adoption will be exempted from this policy in regards to filling out any forms on what job they wished to do or perform, only those established after will fall under these guidelines.
Original suggestion for rule seven: http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14133&pid=203821#pid203821
8. ATT staff reserve the right, for whatever reason, to ask a bot providing constant services, to discontinue doing so, for whatever reason we deem fit, pursuant to a consensual decision on the matter by ATT Staff.
9. Miraheze staff are the only parties who, for technical and legal reasons, are allowed to circumvent any of the above since they are the owners of our current hosting service, and if any of our rules conflict with theirs, then theirs take precedent.