On 01/01/2013 08:38 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
On 12/27/2012 11:13 AM, Petr Bena wrote:
Someone once suggested we create a control panel
for bots. I think the
first step would be to create a page where we could see overview of all
bots we are running on projects.
This assumes that "we" are "running bots" on projects. That
might be correct for some bots, but not for all. Many users
have a bot account that they use for various purposes at
various times. Trying to build them into a control panel is
just as unlikely to succeed as trying to schedule regular
users. Which articles do you plan to edit next Tuesday, and
how?
He may have misspoke on the "we" part. However, for wikis with bot
approval processes (e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_Approvals_Group ), there is
tracking on what bots work on (due to the potentially disruptive nature
of an active bot on a large wiki).
A bot approval group could certainly encourage people to participate in
this dashboard. For the bot writer, all it should take is a HTTP POST
to the dashboard every few edits to check in (which could be a simple as
"350 edits for task XYZ in the last hour", in appropriate format).
Many bots work on more than one task, so knowing which task(s) they are
currently working on in a big-picture view could be quite useful.
Matt Flaschen