To combat this, I would like to suggest the creation
of a new type of user
account that would just be used for bots. To have such an account the bot
owner would have to prove that their bot generates good articles, is not
harmful to performance (as Ram-Man has) and promise that the account would
only be used by the bot and would not be used for anything underhanded (like
violating policy by sneaking in POV edits -- I'm sure there will still be
people, like me, to sample bot edits to make sure nothing is going awry).
Then all edits made by the bot under a registered bot account could be
marked with a "B" in Recent Changes and would be not be displayed by
default. As it is, the 'hide minor edits' feature is useless for anybody
worried about vandalism since non-logged-in users can (for some reason that
totally escapes me) mark edits as minor. At the very least I wish 'mark this
edit as minor' would be disabled for non-logged-in users (as it was in a
previous version of the software).
Daniel,
I support both suggestions (I already suggested filtering RC during
earlier runs of the Ram-Bot). I'd like to add that there should be a
preference both for sysops and non-sysops to view bot-edits.
I'll implement the second suggestion (no minor edit checkbox for users not
logged in) if there are no objections.
Regards,
Erik