Thanks, Brad. That is helpful.
-Frances
On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 7:45 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjorsch@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 8:46 PM, Frances Hocutt frances.hocutt@gmail.com 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
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