A guide for contributors

A repeating pattern consisting of the robot face, clipboard, stack of books, and floppy disk emoji.

So you decided to help out with some of the work that goes into growing and maintaining Botwiki. First of all, a huge thank you!

All our work is organized in the Botmakers Slack group, so be sure to join us! And below is a breakdown of the areas where our team needs help and a list of tools that we use.

Submitting bots

With so many creative bots out there, it takes time to find them and properly document them. Our main Contribute page links to the bot submission and resource submission pages. When adding new content, keep in mind our submission guidelines.

And here are some tools that we use internally.

Sidekick

Sidekick is a helpful Slack bot that, among other things, keeps track of new bots added to the botsin.space Mastodon instance. Every notification posted in the dedicated #bot-feed channel contains a link that takes you to the bot submission page and prefills the name, description, and adds a link to the bot.

Look out for the “clipboard” 📋 emoji to know which bots should be submitted.

A screenshot of a Slack message with a

When submitting a new bot this way, make sure to mark the Slack notification with a ✔️ (here’s a guide on how to do this in Slack) to let other volunteers know to skip the same bot.

A screenshot of a Slack message with a

The order in which bots are submitted doesn’t matter, so feel free to work on any bots you like.

Submit to Botwiki bookmarklet

We also have a bookmarklet that lets you prefill this information from the bot’s online profile page. Currently Mastodon and Twitter bots are supported.

More guides

We will be updating this page with more guides as we develop formal processes for our volunteers. If you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to reach out!


Latest from the blog

Cheap Bots, Done Quick suspended, this time for good

So long, and thanks for all the bots.

Twitter shutting down free access to their API on February 9

I keep saying it's an end of an era quite often these days.

How do folks get into creative botmaking?

Sharing the stories of our early botmaking days.

What kind of bots are posting in the fediverse?

Exploring the bots people make and follow in the fediverse.

Visit the blog

Enjoying Botwiki?

Consider supporting the project!

.