Forum:New features on Wednesday, March 18th

Hi everyone! We have three new features that we're excited to be releasing tomorrow, and I just wanted to give you a quick heads-up with some information about them all. In addition to enabling video thumbnail previews in the Rich Text editor, tomorrow morning, we will be releasing the Wikia Welcome Tool, Category Select, and more Edit Page Enhancements.

Wikia Welcome Tool
Welcoming new contributors is a really important task on a wiki. When a new person shows up to help, we want to make sure that they feel appreciated, and connected to the community. Some wiki communities work really hard to make sure that every new contributor gets a welcome. Unfortunately, it's also a big chore, and there are a lot of communities where it doesn't happen.

Wikia has developed a new feature that will make the welcoming process a lot easier -- the Welcome tool! It's an automatic process that will welcome every new contributor, leaving a welcome message that the community can customize.

When a contributor makes their first edit, the Wikia Welcome tool leaves a talk page message for them, and creates a user page.

Hi, welcome to (Wiki Name)! Thanks for your edit to the Article title page.

Please leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! -- (signature)

The talk page message is signed by the admin (or Wikia staff member) who's edited the wiki most recently, to help the contributor find someone who's available to talk to them if they need it. The message is left one minute after the contributor's edit, so they'll get the message while they're still on the wiki.

We've been testing this on a dozen wikis over the last week, and the results have been really positive. On the test wikis, new contributors have been responding to the messages, reaching out to admins with questions. It's helping to create connections between contributors and admins, opening up the opportunity for conversations and collaborations.

There seems to be a real advantage to this method, even for communities that currently do their own welcomes. A welcome message left by a person can happen hours later, when the contributor isn't there anymore. Automating the welcomes accomplishes the same goal, but it's a lot faster, and active contributors don't have to spend time on a routine task.

Each wiki can still have its own specialized welcomes. The whole system is completely customizable by the admins, by editing the following pages:


 * MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user is the welcome message that's left for logged-in contributors.
 * MediaWiki:Welcome-message-anon is the welcome message that's left for anonymous contributors.
 * MediaWiki:Welcome-user-page is the user page that's created for logged-in contributors.
 * MediaWiki:Welcome-user -- You can use this page to change the signature that's left in the welcome message, or to turn the feature off. There are three settings for this page:
 * @latest -- This is the default setting. This means that the message will be signed by the latest admin to make an edit on the wiki.
 * Username -- If you replace @latest with a contributor's username, then all of the messages will be signed by that contributor.
 * @disabled -- This turns the feature off, so nobody gets a welcome message. If you turn it off, you can turn it back on again by replacing this with @latest or a username.

Because the new welcome tool has not yet been translated to other languages, we are only releasing it to English-language wikis for now. If you have any questions about the Wikia Welcome tool, please contact a staff member for help.

Category Select
On Wednesday, we're also releasing a new Category Select tool site-wide. Using this tool, you'll be able to add categories to pages in two new ways:


 * 1) From the article itself: At the bottom of each article there is a new "Add Category " button, this allows users to add categories to any article without going into full edit mode.
 * 2) From a new category section in edit mode: While in edit mode there is now a separate box for categories which allows you to add categories by simply typing their name and clicking enter without wikitext.

You can still access the raw category wikitext by clicking on the code view link in the left side of the category section. If you would prefer to disable Category Select all-together, you can do so within the Editing tab of your personal preferences and checking the "Disable Category tagging" option. For more detail about this feature, please see the help page.

Edit Page Enhancements
After taking in some of the feedback that you provided, we're also releasing a modified version of the edit page enhancements that went out last week. Here is how the edit page on Monaco will change for wikis that do not have the Rich Text editor enabled: These changes will not affect Monobook. If you would like to tweak how these changes display on your wiki, you can find out more information about doing so here.
 * In order to make more room for the edit window, the site notice, wiki tagline, and talk page message notification are not displayed on the edit page. Additionally, the size of the page title has been reduced (rather than eliminated, as it was before).
 * A bar at the top of the preview window now displays with a bright red background to make it clear that the edit has not yet been saved.

More Information
If you have questions or comments or need help with any of these features, please contact a Wikia staff member. Thanks! --KyleH (talk) 22:21, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

I've got a
question. If we leave a template at MediaWiki:Welcome-user-page, will the template be placed? And also if we want the signature to be inside at table how do we place it? &mdash; 22:40, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Templates are supported; however, please use subst: on your templates wherever practical for performance reasons. MediaWiki:Welcome-user-page is the user page that is created (eg: User:KyleH), and it doesn't accept any parameters.  MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user and MediaWiki:Welcome-message-anon are the User talk pages (eg: User_talk:KyleH) that are created, and they do support 3 parameters: $1 is the first page that the user edited, $2 is the talk page link of the user signing the page, and $3 is the signature of the user signing the page (this only supports the standard MediaWiki signature though; if you want something more complex, you'll probably have to manually enter a signature here).  To enclose the signature in a table, edit the Welcome-message pages and put $3 where you want the signature to appear. --KyleH (talk) 23:11, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Is this fine? Or do we have to put brackets around $3 and $2? &mdash; [[Image:BalisticSig.png]] 23:42, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Just putting $3 should be fine, without the $2. $3 will add your whole signature, so if you've got the talk page link in your sig, that'll appear.
 * Since I see people already customizing, here's the default code for MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user:
 * Hi, welcome to ! Thanks for your edit to the $1 page.
 * Please leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! $3
 * $1 is replaced by the name of the page that the contributor edited. $2 is replaced by User talk:Admin-name. $3 is replaced by the admin's signature. -- Danny (talk ) 23:48, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Is it possible to have the "SUBST:" effect on talk pages created, but have the MediaWiki pages still update when the welcome templates do? // masterConjurer ( Talk ) 00:05, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, but there's a trick to it: You need to create the MediaWiki message BEFORE you create the template (or delete/temporarily rename the template before creating the message).  If you do that, MediaWiki won't process the subst: until it is actually placed on a user/talk page. --KyleH (talk) 00:23, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * And then if you update the message it'll break because it'll actually subst it. I think the real solution is to know if the trick we've always been using is compatible with the message. ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) (tricks) (current topic)  Mar 18, 2009 @ 01:36 (UTC)
 * I had assumed that templating tricks would not work, but if they do, my night will be easier. I personally have not checked yet.  // masterConjurer  ( Talk ) 01:40, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Category Tag question
Has this bug and its update been corrected for monobook, is it going to be disable for monobook ? --
 * CategorySelect is now only enabled for Monaco. --KyleH (talk) 23:58, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Two Questions
I have two questions.

Welcome
We at the Club Penguin and Club Penguin Fan Fiction wikis take pride in manuall adding Template:Welc to every page by hand. Is there a way to disable the Automatic Welcome so that we can continue our proud tradition of maintining welcome articles? —This unsigned comment is by TurtleShroom (talk • contribs). Please sign your posts with ! 00:23, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Look up. If you add @disabled to MediaWiki:Welcome-user then it will be disabled. &mdash; [[Image:BalisticSig.png]] 00:26, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

MonoBook?
How many of your nifty new features will be available on good old MonoBook? Some of us still use it, and it would be very eaningful to use it there. MonoBook needs to be updated too! Don't leave it in the dust! —This unsigned comment is by TurtleShroom (talk • contribs). Please sign your posts with ! 00:23, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * We support Monobook for users who prefer the familiar editing environment that it provides, and we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Because we are committed to providing that familiar editing interface through Monobook, we are not releasing any new features for it.  If you want to try out the new features, I encourage you to give Monaco another shot. --KyleH (talk) 01:01, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Timestamp
Is it possible for the welcome message to include a current timestamp ? Some users see an early welcome date as a sign of honor or something. // masterConjurer ( Talk ) 00:40, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The signature used in MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user and MediaWiki:Welcome-message-anon ("$3" parameter) includes a timestamp for the time it was left. It isn't possible to leave a timestamp without a signature though.  (At least I think it isn't; it may be possible to fake it using magic words and parser tags or something of that nature.) --KyleH (talk) 01:01, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Is there someone who would know if and how it could be faked? // masterConjurer  ( Talk ) 01:13, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Welcome-user
Is there a setting that disables the signature without disabling the entire tool? // masterConjurer ( Talk ) 00:49, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yup, just remove the $3 parameter from MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user and MediaWiki:Welcome-message-anon. --KyleH (talk) 01:01, 18 March 2009 (UTC)