User talk:Toughpigs

Nzk13

I know you have blocked him from a few wikia's but may I see where he vandalized or did whatever he did wrong? Dmaster (Contribs) 04:47, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Welcome tool

The main reason for disabling it was signing messages under people's user names without their permission seemed very unethical.

The whole concept of automatic welcomes is a bad idea, in my opinion. It's not as welcoming to have a bot post a message on your talk page, than have someone actually notice you and greet you personally. And there's the whole welcoming vandals...

But I think there are a few users (mostly non-sysop) who wouldn't mind it signing their names. If it was possible to enable it to sign as the most recent from a list of volunteers, rather than 1 at a time, I guess that would be okay.

The new upgrades look useful anyway, if we could get the above setting. Thank you. -- Deltaneos (talk) 14:14, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, there's a couple of things we can do to adjust who signs the messages. Some wikis have chosen one person to do all the welcomes -- that's easy to do, just by putting their user name in MediaWiki:Welcome-user. Some other wikis sign as a team, either putting a link to "the admins" or adding their signatures to the message -- here's an example from the Bionicle Reviews wiki.

We haven't set it up to sign from a list of volunteers yet -- that's something we might do in the future, if we get a lot of requests for it.

You're totally right that it's better to get a welcome from someone personally -- problem is, that can happen hours later, when the person isn't on the wiki anymore. When someone gets a welcome while they're still on the wiki, they seem to be a lot more likely to respond and ask questions. So automating the welcomes turns out to be a really powerful tool.

I agree that welcoming vandals isn't really optimal, but I think it's better to err on the side of being nice. I'd rather treat everyone like a potential new friend, rather than treating everyone like a potential vandal. You know what I mean?

So, anyway -- would you like to set it up to sign a particular person's name, or a group of people? Let me know what I can do to help. -- Danny (talk) 19:02, 23 March 2009 (UTC)