Friendly Bot Defacto Guidelines
These are not official guidelines, but rather how the current process seems to work. I am taking some liberty with this, but I hope by exposing these that more consideration goes into how friendly bots are implemented in the game.
So you figured out how to make a bot that is meant to be friendly to the game. What's next? Well, alerting someone in the "Group Holding Power", perhaps several, could be the next step. Some do it in game, some do it through the forums and some do it through IRC chat. Usually some sort of description of the bot and its purpose helps the GHP understand whether the bot is friendly. Typically this is done by contacting GMs and perhaps administrative developers about the bot. Once this is done and they have no apparent problem with the friendly bot, it can be tested in the game. Afterwards, should any players or GMs have problems or questions about the operation of the bot, it would be able to handled without any shock that the bot is doing what it is doing, should it be operating as it was described.
Friendly bot scripts, like all scripts for TMW, would be free to share within the community, as the Friendly Bot page suggests. This has yet to occur.
The Future of Friendly Bots
There are a few potential paths that point to changes in how friendly bots are handled. One is the server hosting the friendly bot. Another is finding a way for the bot to be integrated into an NPC script. An still another may be the friendly bots continue as they have, but with more formal guidelines in how they enter the game. All these ideas have yet to be put in place. Thoughts on the server hosting the bot would give credit to the bot creator, who would send the bot script to the server for it to host.
