User:RobinHood70Bot
 | This user account is a bot that uses a custom framework designed with C#, operated by RobinHood70 (talk). It is used to make repetitive automated or semi-automated edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually, in accordance with the bot policy. This bot does not yet have the approval of the community, or approval has been withdrawn or expired, and therefore shouldn't be making edits that appear to be unassisted except in the operator's or its own user and user talk space. Administrators: if this bot is making edits that appear to be unassisted to pages not in the operator's or its own userspace, please block it. |
Addressing Potential Concerns[edit]
- You can't run a bot unless it's approved!
Yes, I can. Per WP:BOTAPPROVAL, this bot should never be making any logged actions, plus it's a test bot covered under the paragraph starting with "Operators may carry out limited testing of bot processes without approval...". Both of these things qualify the bot as not needing approval.
- What edits will it make?
Per policy, since this bot is unapproved, it should not be making any edits—nor taking any other logged actions—at all. If I desperately feel the need for it to do so, it will not make any edits outside its own userspace, my userspace, or designated sandboxes. The main purpose of this account is to test the read-only functions on a large, mature wiki with lots of real-world data running with the latest software. Any test editing that needs to be done, I can do on my own testing wikis.
- Why not just use your own account?
This is a second account created specifically for testing by my bot and the framework that I'm developing. Like any good bot, it logs in and out as needed. Unfortunately, if I just use my own account, SUL comes into play, meaning that every time I run even the simplest test of my bot, I get logged out of every MediaWiki project everywhere. This is not particularly fun.
- The name violates the username policy
That's a topic of some debate. Since the account will never directly be used by a human, I contend that it's a bot. Others, however, think that only approved bots should start/end with "bot". In truth, I created this account name by accident, aware of the issue but just not thinking straight at all (a CFS moment, if ever there was one). Since it's been created, though, I'm going to continue using it for test purposes only. If you're someone who has come across this page and feel strongly that this account should be renamed or abandoned in favour of a non-"bot" name, I'm open to that.