User talk:Sean-Black

Leave a message on my English Wikipedia talk page, or email me it the message is urgent.

Welcome back!

Hey, Sean! Glad to see that you've come back. Your edits in the past few days have, of course, been stellar. A lot's changed since you were last here. You might want to start in a really basic place, Tardis:Help, because it has auto-updating lists of help and policy pages. Please don't hesitate to drop by the forums and forum:Panopticon in particular. We can use your opinions about several ongoing issues! You can also know take advantage of the chat feature if you need to get in touch with someone more quickly. Just click on the "join" button in the right rail of most any page.

Because I don't know you at all, I was wondering if there were any particular editing goals you had in mind, or any projects you'd like to pursue. Many of the other admin here have particular editing foci. All of us are generalists, for instance, but it can be said that:

• Skittles the hog likes to create and edit articles about documentaries
• Tangerineduel has a thing for the PROSE, PROSE, and PROSE ranges
• The Librarian, though not an admin, stays within the magazine ranges
• User:Revanvolatrelundar tends to like prose fiction as well, and is our resident FP scholar
• User:Mini-mitch does quite a bit of work with pruning and maintaining photos
• and I tend to spend a lot of time with templates, javascript and CSS

It'd be cool to figure out what you're into, but the choice is yours whether you'd like to divulge your secrets :)

It's hard to know where to begin with respect to what's changed around here since 2006. You might also want to check out the current revision of {{welcome}} just to see the way the wiki is presented to new users these days. There are some helpful links there, too. A few of the policy differences since you were last here include:

• We're moving towards a ban on importing text from wikipedia. This was commonplace back in 2005/2006, but as of now it's absolutely forbidden to import wikipedia text into in-universe articles. It will likely soon be entirely banned, as Wikipedia and Wikia are running two different and incompatible CC licenses these days.
• The prefix system has become much more elaborate, and can be seen at tardis:list of prefixes
• Vandalism policy is much more developed than it was. The kind of vandalism you experienced on your user page 5 years ago would now lead to immediate banning. Indeed, we now have a blocking policy, which wasn't really the case back then. Naturally, because the wiki has grown, we're also much more prone to vandals than we used to be. Judging from the logs, blocking was relatively rare in 2006 (except in the month of March). Nowadays, since we're a bigger target, we have more blocking going on.
• Administrator functions are now in a new "wrapper" called the "Admin dashboard" — at least, if you use the wikia skin — which wasn't at all the case before.

There's probably tons more — I'm sure that the manual of style is completely different to its nascent 2006 self — but those seem to me to be amongst the more obvious differences. Anyway, great to have you on board again. Hope to see you around often! If there's anything I can do to help, please let me know.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:25: Wed 12 Oct 2011 

p.s. If you'd like, please feel free to change your status from inactive to active at the Tardis:Administrators page. Oh and, if you retain a preference for the monobook skin, please be aware that it is currently under heavy construction, since no one ever bothered to do it before. You may therefore experience some turbulence using it. A good rule of thumb these days is to clear your cache often.

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:Can we disable visual editor please?.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 22:35: Tue 20 Dec 2011 

Christmas cheer

Happy holidays!

As this fiftieth anniversary year comes to a close, we here at Tardis just want to thank you for being a part of our community — even if you haven't edited here in a while. If you have edited with us this year, then thanks for all your hard work.

This year has seen an impressive amount of growth. We've added about 11,000 pages this year, which is frankly incredible for a wiki this big. November was predictably one of the busiest months we've ever had: over 500 unique editors pitched in. It was the highest number of editors in wiki history for a year in which only one programme in the DWU was active. And our viewing stats have been through the roof. We've averaged well over 2 million page views each week for the last two months, with some weeks seeing over 4 million views!

We've received an unprecedented level of support from Wikia Staff, resulting in all sorts of new goodies and productive new relationships. And we've recently decided to lift almost every block we've ever made so as to allow most everyone a second chance to be part of our community.

2014 promises to build on this year's foundations, especially since we've got a full, unbroken series coming up — something that hasn't happened since 2011. We hope you'll stick with us — or return to the Tardis — so that you can be a part of the fun!