Wikibooks:Pseudo-bots
When to use the flood flag
Administrators should use the flood flag to avoid flushing other edits and actions from the RecentChanges (RC) feed when doing similar, repetitive changes. Such actions must never be controversial, as using the flood flag decreases the amount of oversight they may receive. Abuse of the flood flag is treated as abuse of any other administrator tool would be. Examples of acceptable use would be deleting many spambot pages, or deleting a large number of pages after consensus has been achieved at Meta:Requests for deletion or blocking many open proxies. Unacceptable uses include attempting to circumvent legitimate oversight of any controversial action, regardless of whether it is an administrator task or not. Bureaucrats may wish to use the flag when renaming indefinitely blocked accounts with inappropriate usernames.
In some cases, a bureaucrat may remove the flood flag to force an administrator's edits to appear in RC. This should be done in cases where the administrator has forgotten to remove it, or when the changes should be seen by default in RC.
The flood flag is set and removed using Special:UserRights.
Room for abuse?
One issue with the proposal as it stands is that there is room for abuse from administrators; if an administrator is making contentious edits or actions, he or she would be able to toggle the flood flag to prevent them from being seen or monitored from Recent Changes, which is the primary source at which new edits are displayed and observed.
However, it must be remembered the administrators are already trusted with the ability to delete pages, block users, view deleted material, place protections on pages, etc. In the end, this added functionality should not require more trust than that sysops are already given.
Granting the flood flag is logged, and shown in recent changes. Administrators who abuse their admin rights (now including the flood flag) should be sanctioned.
Flood flag or bot flag?
This is intended to replace requesting temporary bot flags from bureaucrats. Administrators who would otherwise request a temp bot flag may simply flag themselves using the flood right.
Cases where a permanent bot flag should be given remain the same - the administrator should create a secondary account and request a bot flag as normal. Only temporary bot flags are replaced with this flood flag.
Which projects?
Currently, this configuration is only for Meta. However, other wikis may request identical or similar configuration through bugzilla after achieving consensus on their local wiki. The process of gaining consensus on a local policy (or on the use of this one) is to be completed by the local community, not Meta.