User talk:Original Authority

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Block
I regret having to do it, but I'm going to have to block you for a couple of days. In chat you acknowledged, in front of several witnesses, receipt of the message in which I told you that you would be blocked if you continued asking that question over and over again. Then, you left an unsigned message on my talk page, once again requesting information on how to get and set up a bot. I therefore must block you, to impress upon you the fact that I was dead serious. I don't block quickly or often, save for situations of attack against the wiki. So when you hear me tell you that you're getting close to being blocked, you need to listen.

Your block is only for two days, and in the meantime you are able to leave a message here on your talk page, if you wish to protest or ask questions. 16:50: Mon 19 Sep 2011

Why I won't help you get a bot
I do want to make my position on helping you get a bot absolutely clear, so that you won't have to ask me again. Bots are extremely powerful. They can easily rip apart the fabric of a wiki if you don't know what you're doing. And you simply have not displayed the most basic knowledge of wiki structure or operations. When I talked to you about getting a bot, you couldn't find the help wiki, you couldn't find help files on your own wiki(s), you couldn't successfully upload a wordmark, you had no real knowledge of template coding.

And I'm not saying that to make fun of you. We all need to start somewhere, and it is good that you are thinking big at ths early stage in your knowledge of how to run a wiki. But you need to take the time to edit in one place long enough to understand the way that a Wikia wiki is laid out, and indeed the way that the MediaWiki software works. I myself edited wikis for essentially the whole of the 2000s without having a bot. But now that I have one, I don't tend to make a whole lot of errors with it. I tend to be able to use it with greater precision, because I understand the MediaWiki software pretty well.

No wiki on which you are currently an admin is in any way big enough to even need a bot, anyway. But I will give you a tip for that time in the future when you do need a bot. Categories are the lifeblood of a bot. Bots require categories in order to perform virtually any function. If you put Cat A insdide Cat B inside Cat C, then put Cat C back into Cat A, you will create what Nyssa once called recursion. This will cause your bot to die. Well, not die exactly, but it'll run down the rabbit hole you've created and never come back up for air. It'll just go around and and around in circles. So when you're starting out a wiki, pay attention to the category tree. Bots require good, clear category trees in order to function properly. One of the problems of this wiki that I'm still having to struggle with is the fact that no one in the early days of the wiki paid attention to a category tree, or structure, that made logical sense. Long before you get a bot, you need to build a category structure that will allow the bot to actually work. So, you should probably Google "category tree", and spend some time understanding category theory.

If you want to use bots really effectively, you'll also want to spend some time learning a markup language called "regex" or "regular expressions". It's supposed to be a timesaver, but frankly I find it quite a mindbender sometimes. Success with regex is a whole lot of trial and error. Unless your changes are really big — on the scale of at least hundreds of pages — it's usually less time to hand edit pages than it is to come up with some regeex expressions.

Finally, I think you fundamentally misunderstand what a bot can do for you. On a wiki of less than, say, a few thousand pages, a bot can't do all that much for you. A bot simplifies repetive edits over the span of thousands of pages. It can't actually write articles for you. If you'd like to take a peek at the raw code of a bot, you can take a look at tardis:Spelling policy/user-fixes.py. Basically, a bot takes one word or phrase and replaces it with another. The most creative thing a bot can do is change words on a page, typically based upon what category that page is in. And that's it. It's not magic. It doesn't write articles. It doesn't help you actually create a whole lot. The simple fact is that, with wikis the sizes of yours, you just don't need a bot.

So I hope you don't think I'm being mean or anti-community-spirit. But I do have very good reasons for not acquiescing to your request. Please let the matter drop, as I can't keep dealing with it. 16:50: Mon 19 Sep 2011