Apologies if Rob has already posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to make sure this was announced as widely as possible:

Developer Rob Church has enabled the [[Special:Makebot]] feature for Wikimedia wikis; this feature allows local bureaucrats to flag and deflag bot accounts on their projects.

Discussion on this proposal went on for quite a while, with almost unanimous support from both stewards and bureaucrats alike; it was approved by Jimbo (in March, I believe) for implementation.

A big thanks to Rob for working up a great extension (I've already used it on en.wiki, and it works beautifully), and to those who supported it's implementation.

As a side note, I suppose this means that stewards will be getting out of the bot flagging business on projects with local bureaucrats? (I've started a thread on [[m:Talk:Requests for bot status]] on the subject, if anyone would like to comment.) I may be being a bit bold in doing so, but I encourage those who read the list to make the communities on their respective wikis aware of this new responsibility for bureaucrats.

Essjay