On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 8:46 PM, Frances Hocutt <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I have. What I took from that thread was "the more information you
> provide, the more likely it is that ops will be able to contact you if
> your bot is causing problems" and "there should definitely be some way
> to contact the person running the bot, whether via talk page for a
> logged-in bot or via email or similar." Is that accurate?
>

Yes, that is accurate.


> If so, there's still ambiguity in the "more information is probably
> better" and it would still be useful to know how much is enough.
>

I'd say at the least you'd want:
* An identifier that isn't going to be confused with many other bots.
** No spoofing browser agents!
** No generic agents such as "curl", "lwp", "Python-urllib", and so on.
** For large frameworks like pywikibot, there are so many users that just
"pywikibot" is likely to be somewhat vague. Including detail about the
specific task/script/etc would be a good idea, even if that detail is
opaque to anyone besides the operator.
* Some way to identify how to contact the operator, without relying on
other headers in the request (e.g. the login cookies). This could be a
reference to a userpage on the local wiki, a userpage on a related wiki
using interwiki linking syntax, a URI for a relevant external website, an
email address, etc.


-- 
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Mediawiki-api mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api

Reply via email to