On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 4:27 AM, Marcel Ruiz Forns <mforns@wikimedia.org> wrote:

I wonder if Marcel means "crawlers".
Toby, do you mean when referring to spiders? Yes, I think they are equivalent terms. Do you think we should change the naming there?

Hi Marcel --

Here's some documentation from Google where they use bot, spider and crawler to refer to the same thing.

Googlebot is Google's web crawling bot (sometimes also called a "spider"). Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

Clearly Wikipedia et al. uses bot to refer to automated software that edits the site but it seems like you are using the term bot to refer to all automated software and it might be good to clarify.

-Toby