u/profanitycounter is a spammy bot that all it does is let pieces of shit be proud of how much times they said the N word. It is spammy and exposes terrible words to children. u/aidgigi should be banned from the platform. Opinions?

I want to write a bot, but am nervous about letting Them out into the wild world of reddit. Advice?

I have just made my first bot and want to promote it a little are there any bad practices (like spamming) which I should avoid?

On the bottiquette wiki, the 'blacklist subreddits' link goes to a wiki for robotics for some reason.

Anyways, what are the 'should avoid' subreddits for bots? E.G /r/depression, /r/SuicideWatch

I have made a post over at /r/botwatch for technical inputs, perhaps someone here can tell me if the reason is not technical but etiquette related. If this post lacks detail, please feel free to ask me anything about the bot.

So whenever I get a request to add/remove a subreddit to/from a bot list, I first check if the requesting user is a moderator of that subreddit. If they are, then I make the requested change with very little question. If the requesting user is not a moderator, then hopefully that user also provided a link to some public statement or discussion where I can verify the bot policy of that subreddit. If they did not provide that link, I will do some investigation of the subreddit by reading the sidebar, checking the wiki, and searching. Failing that, I may message the subreddit moderators to follow up.

I do this to prevent malicious use of the lists. Supposing /r/NicheInterest gets a lot of use out of /u/GeneralNicheHelpBot and that bot checks the list, then /u/SpitefulCrackpot could try to deny the use of that bot to the subreddit (for a time) by falsely requesting the subreddit's addition to disallowed.

In the case of private subreddits, I can neither verify that the requester is a mod of the subreddit in question, nor can I verify the bot policy of the subreddit as I have not been given access. It should be obvious that granting me (even temporarily) access to the private subreddit is out of the question, so how should this be handled? While the risk to private subreddits from ill-mannered bots is somewhat mitigated by operating on whitelists, and as such for a bot to operate there it would have to do so via an authorized account, private subreddits should still be able to make use of the lists.

So my current thought is that I will always send modmail to a private subreddit in question as a way to get a verified mod response. Are there any problems with this idea, and should I consider any changes to this protocol for handling private subreddits inclusion on the lists?

It's mostly useless, and offers no way to delete its useless posts.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/25yx8g/rbottiquette_provides_centralized_lists_of_bot/

Check out the wiki: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bottiquette/wiki

/r/Bottiquette exists as a community-driven resource to help improve how bots interact with Reddit. Contributions and discussion are welcome at all times.

At this time, we maintain two central resources:

• The Bottiquette - A document detailing a set of guidelines for bot developers, indicating general behaviors that well-mannered bots should exhibit.
• The robots.txt Lists - A handy, parse-able set of lists containing information about which subreddit communities place general restrictions on bots. We get these lists from information provided to us by the community (usually subreddit moderators). Comes in JSON and YAML for bots, as well as standard Markdown for humans. There's more information about how to use these lists in the wiki.

If you are a moderator of a subreddit which restricts bots and you simply want to get yours added to the lists quickly, refer to these template messages.

If you are a developer looking to make use of Bottiquette, we hope you'll find relevant information both about general rules as well as some practical tips about implementation in the wiki. Let us know if you'd like to contribute. Feel free to open up discussion with the moderators, or make a post here in the subreddit.