How should a bot earn enough reputation to perform the actions necessary for that bot?

Question

We all know it: bots that chat. There are also bots that flag, or perform other actions. And usually we like them for doing that, like our dear Smokey.

So every now and then, a new bot is created, and usually you would ask a question using that bot or suggest enough edits to get the reputation necessary for that bot to operate.

Instead of suggesting 100 edits, Undo has found a more efficient way, namely by awarding a bounty to a placeholder answer in the Sandbox.

Now someone could frown on this action or not, actually it is the least intrusive way to get the bot the reputation necessary (I guess no one really likes a bot to suggest 100 edits just for the sake of earning enough reputation).

The question is: is this actually the best way? Was this action allowed or should we look away because it is Smokey? Should we maybe have a special bot user status which derives the privileges from its master user? Anything else you want to share on this?

Related:

• Are bots specifically allowed or prohibited in Stack Exchange chatrooms?
• What should be the limits for chat bots interacting with regular users?
• What exactly is "artificial inflation of reputation", and where is the line?

Answer 1

As this is a discussion topic, let me just post the obvious thing.

Stack Exchange needs to have a process for requesting, granting, flagging, and revoking specific privileges for bot accounts.

Bots fall outside the scope that the rep system for human users is supposed to govern. Bots should not be allowed to vote on questions if it's not in their description, for example. And assigning a "reputation" to an account which is not supposed to interact directly with other users is just misleading and pointless.

Answer 2

I think it's stupid.

Of course, I'm not a big fan of bounties under any circumstances... But abusing the sandbox to get rep into a sockpuppet while preventing others from using it for its intended purpose is pretty clearly not a purpose bounties were ever intended to serve... Same goes for Protect.

I've revoked both.

If you want a sockpuppet to have reputation, then earn it. That's what I do with my sockpuppets, and I certainly have a lot more opportunities to abuse the system than y'all do. If you can't play it straight while creating your bot, what confidence can we have in the bot being honorable once it's up and running?

Answer 3

Ask and Answer Questions

This is the most basic way to earn rep on any Stack Exchange site. If you are a bot owner, you are (likely) a power user in a few specific tags or technologies. Answer questions, post canonical Q&A pairs. If you have enough rep, you won't care about letting your bot account earn ~100 rep for your content in order to get the association bonus.

Without an official policy, edits (which have already been discussed) and actually posting content are really the only way to get the required rep.

As for the issue with "fans" or maintainers of the bot voting on the question not because of its quality, but because of the user, one possible solution to that would be to disassociate the bot user from the question(s) or answer(s) after the required rep has been earned (if this does not remove all of the rep earned or lost from the post. If it does, that's a separate issue and disassociation is not scalable for this purpose).

Since disassociation removes all rep gained and earned from the post at any point in time, another option would be to make the post(s) Community Wiki after the rep threshold has been reached. Again, a discussion would have to follow if this is considdered abuse or misuse of the Community Wiki feature.

Answer 4

There's a few precedents for this in terms of the chatbots we've had over time. While smokey's a little unique, both in terms of its management, and its role, I think many of the things people have done in the past with bots would work here. No chatbot on the site has actually earned its own way into chat by posting its own answers. There's always been human intervention.

Instead of suggesting 100 edits, Undo has found a more efficient way, namely by awarding a bounty to a placeholder answer in the Sandbox.

is a little abusive. While a hundred suggested edits is hard, there's ways to get them (superuser has tag fixups, and that's a good way to trickle in/find things that need editing). That said, the simplest thing to do would be to take smokey out and answer a question or two.

I just so happen to have a sock with 1600+ reputation off 4 answers on superuser. Granted, 1.5K of it was off a Hot Network Question.

I stayed away from that due to evidence that Smokey's relatively high profile can unfairly inflate post scores.

Rename smokey while doing edits and answers on one of the other/smaller sites. No one's really going to check who a user is when they vote right?

(Though I wonder if 200 rep here associates. Then smokey can post an answer here and we might have a problem that solves itself through voting)

Answer 5

If we're being entirely technical, this kind of thing isn't allowed. It's using two accounts to give one of them access to privileges or tools it wouldn't otherwise have access to without some other form of effort (like writing a post).

If we're throwing some real practicality in, then as long as the bot isn't being used for the real nefarious stuff like sockpuppet upvoting or opinion inflation, and as long as this kind of thing doesn't become a regular thing, I don't see an issue. Ideally, there should also be a legitimate reason for needing to do it - like "we need access to X privilege for a project we're doing", rather than just "I want my bot to have rep".

While it is possible to write posts, these posts often get their voting inflated by the community behind the bot, particularly in the case of popular bots like Smokey. I'd argue that a one-off direct transfer via a bounty is better, because (a) someone pays for it, and (b) it doesn't unfairly displace other content because the voting on it is higher than it would otherwise be.

Answer 6

tl;dr

Artifically increasing the reputation level grants the robot a level of moderation it simply did not earn. The users providing reputation may have earned it, but the bot did not, therefore the community has no reason to trust it with moderation powers.

However, we need to find a way to resolve this question because the rate of spam and abuse is increasing, and human moderation is linear, so we should enable users to make bots that have some ability or power - but they should also be held accountable for bots they deploy.

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History of reputation

Reputation was originally intended to track closely with a person's ability to help others, through question and answer upvotes, and was designed from the start to provide opportunities to moderate content on the site as one gained reputation.

Eventually it was extended to other useful operations on the site, such as editing, but only in a very limited manner. Other desirable objectives are awarded using badges primarily to avoid turning reputation into a payment system of some sort.

When bounties were added they were very vigorously debated and ultimately designed to limit abuse so that reputation still largely represented a person's ability - and as they are currently used bounties aren't altering this because users typically only apply bounties to hard problems, and the users that answer these problems well are obviously deserving of their reputation.

Robot hasn't earned community's trust

All this leads to the conclusion that a robot, by the site's definition, that can't ask and answer questions without human aid, nor edit without human aid, cannot earn reputation.

If anything, reputation can only be given it - undeservedly so.

We don't award reputation for flagging. If that is the only value the robot has, then there is no way it could or should earn reputation.

Possible courses of action

As such I don't believe this is a valid course of action. If a robot is provably useful, then questions here on Meta should be used to bring up the usefulness and whether it can or should be integrated into stack overflow's code base.

Alternately, it may be worthwhile to take the tack of an existing robot - the community user. Stack Overflow may be willing to provide accounts with certain restricted abilities - and they may choose the easy way by providing reputation - or they may have hidden fields and flags that allow this for reputationless users. Regardless, this should still occur outside the normal reputation system, and the bot should not be treated as a user of any kind.

A third option is to convince the community of the utility of flagging, and provide reputation for flagging. In the past such proposals have failed, but if the level of spam is such that this is useful now, then it may be that it's worth revisiting. This will, however, have to allow users with 1 reputation to flag so a bot may then earn reputation doing what it can. Perhaps 1 rep for a good flag and -10 rep for a rejected flag, for instance.

Conclusion

At this point the bot should be guiding users to act, as it is currently doing, but automating actions should not be provided to the bot until it reaches the needed reputation level without human interference on its own.

Artificially increasing the reputation level grants the robot a level of moderation it simply did not earn. The users providing reputation may have earned it, but the bot did not, therefore the community has no reason to trust it with moderation powers.