Feed The Beast Wiki:Bots

Bots are user accounts used by an automated program that modifies or monitors wiki pages in a certain way. Such programs are commonly used to perform repetitive tasks, such as fixing links after a page move. Edits made by bot accounts are by default hidden from the recent changes log, because bots perform these edits in large amounts during a very short period of time, which would quickly fill up the log with unimportant edits.

Rights

In addition to those of autoconfirmed users, bots are also granted the following rights:

• Extended wiki API access. The API (application programming interface) is a special interface intended for direct communication between the wiki and a program. Although contributors and higher users also have access to the editing API, bots have a higher rate limit, meaning that they can use it more quickly in a short period of time.
• Being hidden from the recent changes by default. Because of the large amount of edits made by bots, their contributions are hidden from the log, unless the "Show bots" option is explicitly enabled by the user.
• Automatically marking their own edits as patrolled. Contributor or higher ranked users may see if an edit is patrolled and mark them as such, which is a simple method to see whether somebody has checked the edit. Because bots are automated and perfrom a large number of edits, patrolling them would be a tedious and unnecessary task.
• Not triggering the "new message" banner when making a minor edit to a user talk page. The purpose of this is that a bot may be configured to automatically archive old talk page messages so they do not clutter the main talk page. If it were to do so on a user talk page, it would normally trigger a notification for the respective user. With this right the notification will be suppressed if the edit is marked as "minor".