User:InternetArchiveBot (sometimes referred to as IA Bot) is a bot that adds archive links of URLs from Internet Archive to Wikipedia articles. In the past, after adding an archive link to an article, it would then add a post to the talk page describing the changes it made and requesting that human users review its edit to ensure its quality (see this example). InternetArchiveBot's talk page post functionality was discontinued in February 2018. An RfC in July 2018 found consensus that "the wording of the post is modified to give users permission to delete posts if they want to. Since talk page posts normally can't be deleted by other users, it would remove that restriction.
" This created an exception to the WP:ARCHIVENOTDELETE guideline, which states that "[a]part from the exception described in WP:OWNTALK, discussions should be archived, not blanked.
" Edits deleting InternetArchiveBot's posts do not violate WP:ARCHIVENOTDELETE, and they are legitimate edits that should not be reverted.
How I remove IA Bot posts
editI sometimes remove IA Bot posts manually, but most often I remove them using regular expression applied to article talk pages through WP:AutoWikiBrowser, which is a semi-automated editing interface. I do not remove IA Bot posts that have received a human reply.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Most of the time, I do not edit talk pages just to remove IA Bot posts (this is especially true when I'm using AWB). This may appear to be the case because they are the most significant part of some of my talk page edits, and in some cases they may be the only part. I often insert “==Untitled==” to untitled sections where necessary (this is common in older article talk pages). Excess blank lines are also common in older talk pages, and I make sure to take care of them as well. Sometimes I remove talk page headers from articles that don’t need them per Template:Talk header#Should this be added to every talk page?. Because of this, I regard my edits as "general clean ups" and not edits made solely to remove IA Bot posts.
Watchlist flooding
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The RfC from July 2018 allows editors to remove IA Bot's posts with the assumption that such removals will not "lead to any mass-flooding of watch-list(s)
".
It wouldn't be accurate to describe watchlist flooding as many users receiving watchlist updates in a short time frame; rather, it occurs when individual users receive so many watchlist updates that their watchlists become unnecessarily cluttered. There are different degrees of watchlist flooding (they could be referred to as mild, moderate, and severe).
If an editor were to remove IA Bot posts from random talk pages en masse (the assumption that the pages are randomly chosen in this example is important), 300–500 edits per 24-hour period would likely not produce any noticeable watchlist flooding. 1,000 edits in a 24-hour period may produce mild watchlist flooding for some users. 5,000–10,000 edits may produce either mild or moderate watchlist flooding for some users. If the articles are not randomly chosen, on the one hand 10,000 edits made to some of the least viewed and watchlisted talk pages could cause no watchlist flooding whatsoever, and on the other hand as little as 100 edits to the most viewed talk pages could cause moderate watchlist flooding.
What I mean by this is that it is almost impossible to determine exactly how many edits within a 24-hour period would definitely cause watchlist flooding without taking other factors into consideration. Maintaining a low number of daily edits will generally help to avoid flooding, but a larger number of daily edits does not necessarily indicate a high risk of flooding.