Forum:Streamlining user welcomes

In the recent changes, you can often find people that will leave a welcome message on a new user's talk page seconds after they register. Many will often use a customized template to do this.

I find that there are a few problems with this:

We have the Wikia bot for a reason.

For those of you that don't know, the Wikia bot currently welcomes all anonymous editors after their first edit. It also can be set up to welcome registered users after their own first edit, but get this, we had to disable this feature because people insisted on doing it themselves (Wikia bot has no way of knowing if a user has already been welcomed).

We're not a meet-and-greet site where our time should be spent refreshing the recent changes to see if any new users need to be welcomed. We have a bot that is able to do that job for us, and, quite frankly, should be doing that job.

"Personal" welcomes are not really personal

The argument always seems to come up that we can't have the Wikia bot take care of welcoming because the way it does things is not "personal."

The reality is that everyone who patrols the user creation log is going to welcome a new user with a template.


 * template (n.) - A generic model or pattern from which other objects are based or derived.

Not only is there nothing personal about using a template, but a given new user would not be able to tell which was left by a human (or care, for that matter). See for yourself: the "personal" welcome, and the Wikia bot welcome.

If the end result is the same, why are we concentrating on something a bot can do?

We don't need creative variations of the same template

That particularly applies to the welcome template. In fact, being overly artistic in a welcome template can make things more confusing to a new user. This welcome message starts out by affirming the wiki's mission is to find Makarov. Yes it's thematic, but we want to keep things simple and to the point; new users should know where to go for help if they are lost, and being cool doesn't mean anything if they can't even find the help pages.

In any case, I propose that we utilize the Wikia bot for all forms of welcoming, as "personal" welcomes are not very practical. 19:28, July 2, 2011 (UTC)