On 2/18/07, xaosflux xaosflux@gmail.com wrote:
These usually get rejected over at [[WP:RFBOT]]. The last one rejected I can find is [[Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Welcomebot]], with the reasonable basis that it was being proposed by an operator that was indef blocked.
Some of the issues that come up with this perenial proposal are: *Dealing with dynamic IP addresses when welcoming anons and *Being "personal", the idea below about putting a random (rotating) contact on the message may address that, but without leaving specific instuctinos the new user may try to reply to "you the welcomer" by editing their own talk, and noone will be watching it.
I personally think welcoming should be done by new page patrollers and recent changes patrollers and basically anyone, not by some sort of welcoming committee or bot. Any time you see somebody with a redlinked talk page create an article that does not merit a warning, welcome them, thank them specifically for the article, and point them to a useful page like a related WikiProject. Perhaps we could use the sorting features of projects like [[User:AlexNewArtBot]] a bit more and get newbies welcomed by people from projects related to the articles they create.
Any purely automatic welcome should not be done by bot, but coded into the software, keeping the beautifully redlinked user talk page that is useful for vandal patrolling. Anyway, why should we welcome anyone who doesn't edit? Once people have edited, we can start talking to them, thank them for their edits, and point them in new directions. Enculturation of newbies cannot be done by bots, and a welcome bot will lessen the chance that a newbie gets a personal welcome related specifically to his edits.
Kusma