User:Rick Block/10th/4

Bot frameworks

 * When I created Rick Bot there were several bot frameworks available. None of them did exactly what I wanted, which was to serve as the page uploader usable from the Unix shell.  The basic pattern of the tools I had written was


 * curl page | awk | ??


 * It would have been possible to use curl as the final pipe target, but the existing frameworks managed the bot login, metered change rates, presented diffs of a change to the current contents (with manual approval), etc. (none of which curl does).


 * So, I modified replace.py from Pywikipediabot to do what I wanted.


 * Current alternatives are listed at Creating a bot, and include frameworks for PHP, Perl, Python, .NET, Java, Javascript, Ruby, etc.

next
 * Rather than deal with "human formatted" content, most bots now use the MediaWiki API