Forum:Request for a bot flag

Hey guys, just a quick (hopefully) proposal. Another user Dinoguy1000 wants to perform a couple of tasks with AWB (Auto Wiki Browser). What's this? Auto Wiki Browser is a tool editors use to perform repetitive tasks. For example:

• Supposing the name of an article got changed (e.g. Nazca Gods → Earthbound Gods → Earthbound Immortals). If you wanted to change all pages that still call them "Earthbound Gods". It'd be a long and tedious task. Whereas AWB can be used to sutomatically perform these tasks much quicker.
• Or imagine you wanted to add or remove something like category from a couple of hundred pages. AWB can do it much faster.

Of course there's a downside to this. Supposing you wanted to check the recent changes to see new editions being made. If somebody's using AWB, you're going to see a massive flood of edits that are mostly the same, making it harder to see other changes. To prevent this accounts that are used to perform massive repetitive tasks are often given a bot flag. This will cause any edits it makes to not appear on the recent changes unless you click "show bots".

I'd like if we could give the account Dinobot1000 a bot flag. But before it can get one, the rest of the community should be okay with it.

Reasons you may be against it would be: You may see it as edits would be made "behind people's backs". Unless you check for bot edits or look at its contributions, you won't know what edits it's making.

we have another bot: AnimeBot, operated by Dantman. It's mostly been synching templates and technical pages from the ACG network.

For more information, you can look at Wikipedia's page on bots.

So please let us know if you're in favour or against. And feel free to leave comments or questions. -- Deltaneos (talk) 18:10, September 7, 2009 (UTC)

Support

• D.Kaiser
• Mpanty
• Bluedog187

Discussion

Before I give my vote, I would like to know: what exactly does this user plan to do with the AWB? Are the changes he makes reversible (in case of a mistake)? Is this user really trustworthy - I'm asking this because I haven't really seen him do much around this Wikia and I find it suspicious that a user suddenly asks for this sort of thing. Please forgive me if I sound paranoid.PoirotH 18:04, September 9, 2009 (UTC)

By all means, please be suspicious of me and my motives - if I can't properly assuage your fears, I shouldn't be trusted with this, after all. =) A list of current tasks I plan on doing with AWB can be found at User:Dinobot1000#Current tasks, although they're rather open-ended at this time. All changes I would make would be easily reversible via "undo" or "revert", and unless I'm mistaken, it's possible to mass-revert changes made by a particular user (never having needed to do so myself, though, I can't really say how it's done). As for who I am and where I'm from, I spend most of my time on Wikipedia as Dinoguy1000, where I am an administrator. Because of this, I usually don't spend a great deal of time on here (indeed, it's not unusual for me to go months at a time without even looking at this wiki), but I have been semi-active here in the past, in particular contributing to Template:CardTable2 (something I'd like to look into again at some point) some in late 2007/early 2008. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 18:15, September 9, 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your speedy reply as well as for your neatly detailed answers. I must say, you are quite eloquent, a quality I rarely see in this Wikia.PoirotH 18:20, September 9, 2009 (UTC)