Warcraft Wiki talk:Wiki bots
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Proposal - Permit bot activities on the main account
- Aim
- I propose eliminating the requirement to create a wholly separate account for tracking bot edits.
- Rationale
- This policy was written from 2006 to 2010, before Special:BotPasswords became a feature in 2016.
- Now its possible to manage bot "sub-accounts" with refined control over permissions settings; without any of the profile/web-session baggage that comes with a full account.
- Bot Tracking
- I believe the original intent was, in part, to identify which edits would be marked with 'b'.
- However, in brief testing moments ago, I determined that the 'b' only appears when two conditions are met:
- Using the API (ie, my manual edit to WP:Sandbox/9 didn't get a 'b')
- When the bot sub-account is granted a high-volume editing permission with [[Special:BotPasswords]
- As such, this legacy reason no longer applies given there are additional security steps to mark edits with 'b'.
- Proposed replacement
- Making a separate bot account should become optional; however, the use Special:BotPasswords should be compulsory when managing bots with a 'main' account.
This proposal is by DDC (talk) 23:37, 19 August 2021 (UTC)
- I think Kaydeethree (via Discord) gave a rather good concrete reasoning to why do a separate account:
- "separate bot accounts are so we can temporarily ban bot accounts if they're acting up without limiting the owners of the accounts from responding to on-wiki messages. that's about the only reason"
- — Surafbrov T / C 00:37, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
- An honest question -- how many people have been granted the bot flag that arn't already reachable by other means such as Discord? Also, you could issue a 30-minute ban if there was an immediate need to stop accidental vandalism. DDC (talk) 18:51, 12 November 2021 (UTC)