Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-1713281-20140129045228

You all know the drill by now; if you're not an admin, your post will be deleted.

So we need a serious discussion on the issue of bots on the wiki. So that we're on the same page: four people have bots on the wiki that have provided various functions; Nathan, Jamie, Kevin and Matt (or M1shawhan, as you may know him). Matt is no longer active with us, and Nathan and Jamie have both had to devote more and more time to life outside the wiki. As a result, most of our site's bot functions have all but ceased. We've managed so far, but I think that with this new year, we need a new stance on the problem.

We have over 800 pages sitting in the various move categories, and that number is likely much higher when you take into account the individual comic issues under the Comic Volume move category that will need to be moved. Add on the fact that the queue grows every day, and that the oldest pages in those categories have been tagged since 2011, and we have a pretty bad situation.

While I've been a bit busy with work, and haven't time to grind out edits, I've been looking into our options for restarting our automated functions. There's a few that I think we ought to explore, and hopefully one of those will be a good fit.

Firstly, we have bots that are already set up. I know Kevin has a bot, but I'm not sure his bot is set up with page moves. Jamie and Nathan's bots are still around, but without getting them back into daily editing, I don't know that those will be much of an option either.

If we look outside the Database, we have two options. The first one is somewhat obvious: Create a new bot maintained by one of the active admins. I'd be willing to say that I'd maintain the bot, but I'll be very honestly when I say that I have no idea how to do any of that, and my workload right now leaves me little time to sit down and learn. If someone else would want to step up and try, that'd be amazing, but I don't recall anyone in our previous talks being familiar with the workings of bots.

We could also look into getting someone else from the Wikia community to help us out. Community Central's help pages said to try asking in the forums to see if someone would be willing to help with bot functions. I also thought about seeing if the DC side would be able to help out, as I assume they have someone over there that has a bot.

It's late, and this may be a little ramble-y, but I feel as though I've conveyed my opinions and the basic options we have. Even if we can't get a permanent fix right away, I wanna see us get something together to help alleviate the backup in the queue at the very least. 