Thread:Reguyla/@comment-188432-20130922175518

Heya :) Just happened to notice that you're replying to welcome messages across several different wikis. Since you appear to be new to Wikia, Inc., you may not realise that all these welcome messages are bot-created and the signatures are fake.  The bot signs with the name of the last admin to edit the wiki, or if the wiki is particularly inactive, the last Wikia Staff member (i.e. paid employee).  They're not an attempt to actually engage you in conversation, so replying on your own user talk/message wall page is precisely like talking to a robocall.

You might want to see Help:Welcome tool for more information.

Also, when using a user talk page, like w:c:history:user talk:reguyla, you generally want to reply on the page of the person who's talking to you. This ensures they'll get an alert that tells them to check their talk page. If you respond on your page, the only way they'll know you're talking to them is if they happen to come back to it. You're familiar with Wikipedia, apparently, so you'll recognise this behaviour. And, like Wikipedia, some at Wikia try to have their cake and eat it by keeping the conversation on one user talk page, but manually putting something like "Please return to my talk page" onto their correspondent's page. Whichever method you use, it's important to do something that trips your correspondent's message alert.

If, on the other hand, you're at a wiki that employs the Message Wall — like this one — you'll get alerts wherever the message begins. So if you wanted to reply to this message, I'll get an alert about it and return to this very spot. That's obviously quite different than Wikipedia, and some wikis really prefer Message Walls for that reason. But there are a variety of technical reasons why other wikis hold on to the older user talk pages, so a good skill to have is knowing how to respond in both environments. 