Forum:Send every user a message

Is it possible to sent every user a message? If it is, could someone tell me how. -- Darth Stefan Talk http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/lostpedia/nl/images/e/e5/Stefan_handtekening.PNG  16:16, October 14, 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, usually the sitenotice is used for this; I'm not certain, but you might be able to use a bot; though I wouldn't have the slightest idea what the command should be. Mark (Talk) • (Contribs) 16:21, October 14, 2009 (UTC)


 * Darth, are you talking about email message or simply make a message appear on everyone's talk page? --DaNASCAT 20:42, October 26, 2009 (UTC)

This is fairly simple using AutoWikiBrowser. See wikia help or the page on wikipedia. I think I put some notes in there regarding operation on Wikia. Once you install it, the easiest way to generate a list of users is to get a database dump (see Special:Statistics, bottom of page) and use awb menu item tools.Database Scanner to load it up. Choose namespace tab for User talk: only. Choose Title tab to eliminate / in title. Press start. You now should have all user talk pages listed in your AWB list. Now click the more tab in the pane next to the list pane. Click the append/prepend checkbox "enabled". Click radio button prepend. Type your message into the box below. Go to the Options tab and uncheck all the automatic changes checkboxes. Go to Start tab. Press start. If you are not logged in, it will prompt you. See wikia help page for configuring AWB if it wants to log you into WP. Once logged in, you will see your message at the end of the talk page. If everything is right, click save on the start tab pane. Bot operation: If you are on the wikia central checkpage (see help) or are an admin, you should see a Bots tab appear after pressing start button on the start tab. Go to the bots tab. Click auto save. After hitting save on the start page, the list will be processed in order of occurrence from the list pane.

Sorry if I was unclear- There is a pretty good awb community at WP for getting help on it but I'd be happy to help if you have further questions. If you have time, it would be nice if you could add a section to the Wikia help page on how to use the database scanner on a practical task like generating a cleaned list of User talk pages. I don't think AWB docs cover it very well. The wikia help docs were not entirely cleaned of mentions to genealogy wikia after being moved there, but I think some of the Regex example scripts should probably be moved so people can learn by example rather than the RTFM method, which I personally abhor.

While AWB is simple and powerful with extensibility using custom modules, I don't regard it as the best bot tool. If you want to do fairly sophisticated bot operations, are a programmer comfortable with odd languages like Python, then I would recommend you use pywikipedia instead. I point our contributors to AWB due to its ease of use/ installation. 20:57, October 26, 2009 (UTC)