People who write bots usually need to supply their products with a testsuite. However, many features need logging in (such as upload), and some of them even require sysop access or higher. What we do now? We create a group account and make it's password accessible to anyone (in fact, we can't prevent some badguy from capturing this account). Of course, it causes a hole in security of the wiki. It's normal for Testwiki, but even there it's impossible to grant sysop flags or higher to all, to test blocking, pages protection etc.
I suggest the following solution of this problem: we create a special user group, say "bottest". Accounts in it (simply referred to as 'bottesters' below) should have some limitations:
- bottester can't change the password of it's account.
- 'bot' flag should not work while account is flagged as bottester (all edits will be visible in RC).
Bottester should be able to:
- delete pages, but only created by itself or other bottester.
- block itself or another bottesters.
- unblock bottesters blocked by itself or other bottesters (and only by them).
- assign any flags (bot, patroller, sysop, bureaucrat) to other bottesters, or drop
these flags from bottesters.
etc.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement