Help:Welcome tool

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The Wikia welcome tool is an automatic process that helps administrators welcome new, signed-in editors. The goal is to show new contributors that there's a community on the wiki and to help connect them to administrators, so they know where to go if they have questions. When a contributor makes their first edit, the welcome tool leaves a message for them, and creates a user page.

The message is signed by the administrator who edited the wiki most recently. This is to help the contributor find someone who's available to talk to them if they need it. If no administrator has recently edited, the message will be signed by a member of the Wikia Community Team.

Finding the new editors
Assuming they don't find you first, there are two simple methods you can use to find new users:
 * Welcome messages are created by FANDOM. You can check that user's contributions to see who has been welcomed recently.
 * The welcomes are shown on the recent changes page, after clicking the 'Show bots' option.

Customising the welcome tool
Administrators on each community can customise the tool in various ways by editing certain pages in the MediaWiki namespace.

Messages
Depending on whether a community uses talk pages or Message Walls, different messages need to be changed to customise the welcome tool experience.

However, in both cases, edit MediaWiki:Welcome-user-page to change the user page that the tool creates.

The various variables that can be used in the messages have these meanings:
 * $1: the page that the new editor edited or created
 * $2: the talk page of the person leaving the welcome
 * $3: the signature of the person leaving the welcome
 * $4: the name of the person being welcomed

Other notes

 * Welcome messages will not be left for users with flags such as administrator, bureaucrat, bot, staff, or helper.
 * Welcome messages will not be left by administrator accounts that also have the bot flag.
 * Welcome messages will not be left to signed-out users as of 11 September, 2017.