BPWelcomeBot

What it is

BPWelcomeBot is an automated program, written by Chris Wilson to welcome new users to Beachapedia. Questions about this bot and its activities can be left on the author's talk page. Discussion of the bot, what it does, when it does it, and how it does what it does can go on BPWelcomeBot's talk page.

What it does

BPWelcomeBot first queries Beachapedia to obtain a list of users who are members of the group "editors". Once the bot has this list, it checks each user to see if they have established a Talk Page. If the user has a Talk Page, nothing is done and the Bot moves on to the next user in the list. If the user does not have a Talk Page, BPWelcomeBot creates one and adds the New Editor template. The contents of the template are shown below:

New Editor Template

---

Welcome to being an editor on Beachapedia!!

Beachapedia is a MediaWiki-powered coastal knowledge repository. What makes it work are the contributions of folks like you who have signed up to contribute their knowledge and experience in order to share it with others. There are a number of Help Pages to help you get started, including a video training session conducted by Mark Rauscher. If you are not familiar with wikis, there is an excellent tutorial on the Wikipedia site to explain some of the basics of editing. The list of help pages may not cover everything, and if there is something that should be covered, but isn't, feel free to ask for it. If you want to try out editing and formatting before you edit any real pages, there is a Sandbox that can be used for that purpose.

This message has been placed on your talk page automatically by BPWelcomeBot. It will not re-appear if you remove it.

---

The template contains links to help files and other information to help new editors get started making contributions to Beachapedia.

If a user removes the template from their Talk Page, their Talk Page continues to exist, even if it is empty, so BPWelcomeBot will not replace the template on the Talk Page during future runs. This is because BPWelcomeBot checks for the existence of the talk page rather than whether there is any content on the page

Comments

If you have any comments about this bot or its activities, you may contact the author (Chris Wilson) by leaving a message on his talk page or by leaving a note on the BPWelcomeBot Talk Page.

Source Code

The source code for BPWelcomeBot is on the Source subpage.