User talk:JohnBobMead

Welcome!
Hello, JohnBobMead, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:


 * Introduction and Getting started
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
 * Simplified Manual of Style

You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome!  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 17:17, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Edit alerts
In the RFC about portals you wondered whether there is "a way to identify a page as being a stable/static topic, and that an alert be automatically created if it is edited". This sounds like the Watchlist feature (the second part of your remark, anyway). Have you looked into that? - dcljr (talk) 18:32, 30 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Dear JohnBobMead, I added every page in the portal namespace to my watchlist, and I can tell you it wasn't easy. So, to make it easier for others, I created a watchlist of all portal: pages over at the Portals WikiProject. It's in 4 parts, and to see the changes to those pages, while looking at one of the lists, you click on [[Help:Related changes|Related changes in the sidebar menu to the left of the screen.
 * By the way, right below the watchlist, there's a search results enhancer you might like.   &mdash; The Transhumanist   13:25, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Invitation, from the Portals WikiProject...
You are invited to join the effort to revitalize and improve the Portal system...

The Portals WikiProject was rebooted on April 17th, and is going strong. Fifty-nine editors have joined so far, with more joining daily.

We're having a blast, and excitement is high...

Our goal is to update, upgrade, and maintain portals.

In addition to working directly on portals, we are developing tools to make portals more dynamic (self-updating), and to make building and maintaining portals easier. We've finished two tools so far, with more to come. They are Template:Transclude lead excerpt and Template:Transclude random excerpt.

Discussions are underway about how to further upgrade portals, and what the portals of the future will be.

There are plenty of tasks (including WikiGnome tasks too).

With more to come.

We may even surprise ourselves and exceed all expectations. Who knows what we will be able to accomplish in what may become the biggest Wikicollaboration in years.

See ya at the WikiProject!

Sincerely,   &mdash; The Transhumanist   19:50, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much
The RfC discussion to eliminate portals was closed May 12, with the statement "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time." This was made possible because you and others came to the rescue. Thank you for speaking up.

By the way, the current issue of the Signpost features an article with interviews about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

I'd also like to let you know that the Portals WikiProject is working hard to make sure your support of portals was not in vain. Toward that end, we have been working diligently to innovate portals, while building, updating, upgrading, and maintaining them. The project has grown to 80 members so far, and has become a beehive of activity.

Our two main goals at this time are to automate portals (in terms of refreshing, rotating, and selecting content), and to develop a one-page model in order to make obsolete and eliminate most of the 150,000 subpages from the portal namespace by migrating their functions to the portal base pages, using technologies such as selective transclusion. Please feel free to join in on any of the many threads of development at the WikiProject's talk page, or just stop by to see how we are doing. If you have any questions about portals or portal development, that is the best place to ask them.

If you would like to keep abreast of developments on portals, keep in mind that the project's members receive updates on their talk pages. The updates are also posted here, for your convenience.

Again, we can't thank you enough for your support of portals, and we hope to make you proud of your decision. Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   18:20, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

P.S.: if you reply to this message, please ping me. Thank you. -TT