RuneScape talk:Bots

Suggestions and comments
It's fairly short, but I think this is complete enough to be made into policy. Please leave comments here. Thanks. Skill 06:30, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Support [[Image:Kandarincrest.gif|33px]]  C  hicken  7 [[Image:Kandarincrest.gif|33px]]  talk 07:06, 22 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Support--Zeeus 04:13, 29 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Support -- Pointy 03:18, 28 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Support -- Dragon Lilly3 00:50, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Added it to the policy category and took off construction tag as it doesn't look like much else will happen here. Skill 04:34, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

hiscores bot
I have no idea where I should be suggesting this and I have no idea how to create a bot nor do I know if what I'm suggesting is even feasible but I just updated the number of people in the level 30 hiscores and most were off by 20,000 people. Is there anyway we could create a bot that could check the hiscores and give a daily update of the numbers?-- 20:22, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
 * The biggest problem I think wouldn't be the technical feasibility (it's pretty simple) but rather this part (point 7) of rule 7 which forbids automatic, repeated queries to the RS website. If it were manually directed that would be fine, but that defeats most of the point of having it done but a bot. Skill 00:43, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
 * So if we did have a bot that could automatically fetch the hiscores but only did so when prompted by someone instead of being done at a preset and repeating time, would that be following the rules in the same way the calculators do? Is this feasible?-- 00:53, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that would work. It's probably simple enough to do so as well, though there's no specialized interface that would allow for this so it would have to be scraped off the page. But that's not too hard to do most likely. Skill 01:03, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok, well as noted above, I don't know the first thing about how to create or program bots but I don't want to just say "hey we should do this" and ask you or anyone else to do all the long and complicated work. So, considering my considerable ignorance on the topic, do you have any ideas how to proceed?-- 01:22, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I know how, and would be happy to do this, provided i remember :) email me at computer-dude at opposite-of-coldmail dot com immibis 09:02, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion-Transparency bot
I just thought of a bot we could have! A Transparency bot! It could add transparency to pictures needing it!

17:45, 13 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Total votes: 3
 * Oppose: 2
 * Support: 1

Disscussion
Support As Suggester

Comment - Sorry for asking, but what is transparency? >.<  17:56, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Awnser Transparency is the checkered grey backgrounds you see on most of the images on this wiki, Programs like Paint.Net, Gimp, Etc 18:20, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Oppose Transparency is something that is next to impossible to automate. ~Nightgunner5 talk▄▀ 22:42, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Oppose - It is impossible to add transparency automatically. - 00:51, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Oppose - Not only is it impossible, but this is the main source of some users edit counts. (Kytti Khat, Karlis, ETC...). This is mainly what they work for, and that the way it should stay. 02:59, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Oppose - It simply would be impossible to automate. 13:34, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

GEMW Update Bot
I'm writing a GEMW Update bot. It will run once daily from my computer, and update prices in the RuneScape Wiki's GE Market Watch that are over a week old. Since the GEMW prices don't get updated nearly enough, I'd think this would be a welcome improvement. Please comment with Support or Oppose. ~Nightgunner5 talk▄▀ 22:41, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Total Votes: 3 Supporters: 3 Opposers: 1

Update: I can't figure out how to edit pages using the bot. I followed the instructions on MediaWiki.org. 00:14, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Editing via the API came out in 1.14, but Wikia is using 1.13 still, as 1.14 is in the final test stages before release. I expect the switch will happen early March. The prices are updated automatically by a bot already with no price older than 7 days(I think if I remember every day was viewed as too often, besides I remember when some items has prices that were 59 days out of date). - 00:47, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I think the 1.13 is incorrect on that page, as every thing I have read that talks about editing via api requires 1.14. - 00:54, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay, I'll skip writing the bot. I noticed the other bot while I was checking if mine would work. I wonder what the other bot uses to edit pages though :-/ 01:01, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * SmackBot uses AutoWikiBrowser to make the changes. Generally it is run on a daily basis only updating items that have changed since the last run, and ignoring any with the date of the data.  Saturday and Wednesday it updates items that haven't changed too: this is just to ensure there is a set of points for any future graphing/analysis process, and to show that hte page hasn't been forgotten.  I might reduce this to just Saturdays. Rich Farmbrough, 11:18 27  February 2009 (GMT).
 * TehKittyBot uses PyWikipedia to make edits, although I sometimes use AutoWikiBrowser. - 21:15, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Oppose - Don't we already have SmackBot? 02:59, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Indeed we do, and SmackBot does a very good job of updating the exchange pages, so I don't think we need another one... 13:10, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Support - I believe having one more bot wouldn't hurt. Some prices are old and smackbot doesn't seem to update and ,as you stated, the new bot can update prices that are weeks old. 13:18, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * They could conflict with eachother if they somehow had different criteria (e.g. one goes by name, the other by ID). If there are items that haven't been updated by SmackBot, then give us some examples and I'm sure Rich will be able to sort it out. 13:27, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I have seen a few, but the most recent one I saw was unfinished potions. I'm not too sure what it was. I'll go check out some items that are not updated yet. 14:03, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Here are some of the few that are about to reach 1 week of unchanged price mark.Grand Exchange Market Watch/Herblore, Grand Exchange Market Watch/Construction flatpacks, and Grand Exchange Market Watch/Other. I know smackbot works hard and I appreciate it, I just think that it would be helpful if smackbot updates price with items starting with maybe 0-M and the new bot N-Z. 14:18, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * My bot works using the ID of the items as supplied in the GEMW pages. It finds items in need of updates by looking at Category:Grand_Exchange_by_date_updated and moving down the list until an item's price is less than a week old. Here's an example of the debug output. 15:07, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I can't see a problem with any of those. If nothing has changed in the week then SmackBot doesn't need to do an update. Just doing an update on the date too often would be too much of a burden on the servers, and takes away the information of when the price last changed. 15:43, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * My bot would only do items that are over a week out of date, so I don't see any problems with server load. 16:01, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I can see GEBot working alongside SmackBot. Since SmackBot uses a different method of finding items in need of updates, we get the best of both worlds and minimal collisions. My bot even protects itself from collisions by checking for edits before it updates the page, and I think that SmackBot does the same. 16:30, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how having two GE bots could possibly harm anything. If it means more up-to-date prices, then I'm all for it. I often look on here to see just how much money I'll lose training skills. The extra 200 coin price difference that could have occured in 3 days makes a huge difference when buying in bulk. I support another bot. =D 17:49, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

SpellCheck Bot?
From User_talk:Rs4life07: Why not get a bot to do this? There could be a semi-protected page that it would read spellings to change to and from, and it would patrol the Wiki using Special:Random! I'd be glad to make one. 18:38, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

So, what do you think? 18:54, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Total votes: 3 Supporters: 2 Opposers: 1

Discussion

 * Strong Support - We can finally take care of all those inconsistencies! Plus, Nightgunner5 would program the bot in PHP, which is the perfect language for this sort of thing.   19:06, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment A proof of concept for the config file can be found here. 19:36, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Oppose - I don't mean to be the black cloud or anything, but I think this was tried on Wikipedia a while ago, and didn't do so well. The problem is that there could be many false positives, and it would be maddening to try to find them all. Perhaps if it were a fully manual bot (the bot would find it, but a user would have to confirm every change), I would support. Butterman62 (talk) 21:32, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The bot would change exact matches, meaning if the config file contained, it would change fial to fail, but not final to fail.  21:36, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's not really a spellcheck bot... more like a find and replace bot. It'd be useful for correcting "American" spelling. ;)  21:44, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The problem is, there's too much margin of error. For example, what if someone's signature has "Fial" in it? Also, there's way too many words to prevent all possible messups. Even meta's bot policy discourages it, as they say, "It is not technically possible in most languages to automatically correct spelling mistakes without a significant margin of error". Butterman62 (talk) 21:50, 2 March 2009 (UTC)