Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-8-20140207192128

Hi all,

I'd like to experiment with something friendlier than template:i, which you may recall looks like this:

 Hello. Welcome to Wikia!

The Wikia Community Central is a wiki designed to coordinate Wikia's many communities, help users find help with their wikis, and learn about all the latest news.

We'd love to have you contribute to that cause, but this does not fall within the scope of the Community Central wiki and is being considered for deletion'''.

There are several options open.
 * There may already be an existing Wikia where your content would be relevant. Please use our cross-wiki search or peruse our wiki hubs to find one related to your interests!
 * If there is not already an appropriate project, you can start a new Wikia.

Whichever you choose, make sure this information is copied somewhere else since it will be removed from here in about a week from the date this notice was added.

Other articles that may be helpful to you include: what Wikia is not, spam.

How many people skipped over reading that? Well that's what I suspect most people having it added to their posts do too! And it's not very encouraging to reach out and get an obviously pre-written response (which may even look automatic).

The type of posts we are talking about are the ones that don't seem to relate to Wikia, Community Central or wikias in general. They aren't the ones that say "the Glee wikia is the best/worst thing ever" that would be on-topic for Central, but they are the ones that say "Glee is the best/worst thing ever" or talk about how wonderful one of the characters is.

And, of course, they aren't the spam posts. Those will still be deleted on sight. But there are a lot of the misplaced ones that are created in good faith, and deserve a better response than we are giving them now!

So here's what I propose: If you want to help when you see a misplaced post, then please follow these steps:


 * 1) Check the author's profile header to see if they might have a wikia that they meant to post on
 * 2) Look for other wikias that might be more suitable for their post.  Try to make sure that the type of post is suitable for that wikia or wikias.
 * 3) Consider whether there is a topic they could create a wikia about that would be a good home for their post.
 * 4) Write a message to point them towards one or more of these places.  The message should be friendly, fit their specific case (so not a form letter), and individually helpful.
 * 5) Give yourself a pat on the back, or shoulder if you can't reach that far, for helping a newbie.

I think this could make a big difference in how welcoming and helpful we are in this very common situation.

Thanks all!  