User blog:Withersoul 235/My Problems With UCP

Hey, all.

Recently, you may have come across the blog A Veteran Admin’s Concerns Regarding FANDOM and UCP, in which Death Battle Fanon Wiki Bureaucrat Big the cat 10 brought out his concerns regarding the Unified Community Platform (UCP). I am also a Bureaucrat on said wiki, and Big's blog inspired me to make my own blog in which I talk about what I consider to be the main problems with the Platform and how I think it can be improved.

I won't hold you waiting any longer, so let's just get started.

What I WON'T bash

 * The lack of JavaScript / CSS compatibility. Most of these are maintained by external developers, so it's up to them to make them work on UCP. This isn't Fandom's fault, so bashing them for it is really stupid.

1) The Editor
Arguably the most repulsive feature of the UCP is its abhorrent Editor. I have so many problems with it.

For one, it feels so clunky and inconvenient. As mentioned by others, uploading files takes far longer than it used to. The source editor formatting is ... really off-putting, to say the least. I have trouble identifying where there is syntax formatting and where not.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/f/f7/Ew_such_formatting.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width/700?cb=20200823103933

The Gallery feature is a bit more annoying to use now, and for some reason the options to set links on pictures and to style the gallery are now gone from the interface. (I use Source Editor)

The Special Characters modal takes awkwardly long to load (UCP has a general lag problem which I'll get to later), and when it does show face, it turns up pretty "squashed" and vertically too small. Also, where are the options to add Videos? Sliders? Slideshows?

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/e/ec/Ucp_symbols.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20200823105707

Also, you see these options?

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/3/31/Visual_options_ucp.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width/700?cb=20200823110600

Well, for some reason, only the Visual Editor has these, NOT the Source Editor, which is very inconvenient (Especially considering that stuff like categories were available for Source before).

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/9/95/Formatting_ucp.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20200823110851

Exact same here. Only users of the Visual Editor can easily apply this formatting. Source users like myself are left in the dark.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/e/ea/Ucp_linkbox.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/639?cb=20200823111157

Lastly, the link box will not properly load on VERY short pages. So if you've just started writing something and you want to use the link creation box rather than typing everything out, you have to hit several enters just so the box can load fully.

In my experience, the best way to fix these is as follows;


 * Unify the Visual and Source Editors. I think it's dumb how both Editors have "exclusive" features. Try to have as many tools shared between both.


 * Fix the link box so it automatically pushes the bottom of the editor down or something


 * Make the Gallery experience closer to Legacy. It's just so bland and limited now.


 * Fix the formatting. Please.

2) The Lag
The lag is a major problem with UCP that everyone loves to bash upon.

So many things in UCP take a long time to load, even on my hardware (Lenovo Legion Gaming PC, Intel i7 Core, 32 GB RAM, 8 GB visual RAM) and with marvelous internet connectivity. This varies from tabbers, user profiles, comment sections, message walls, blogs, editor components ... it's very off-putting, especially given how almost none of these lagged on Legacy.

As I am clueless towards what the cause of this problem is, I can't really give my cents on how to improve it.

3) The Social Parts
First of all, I would love to tackle the user profile masthead, which I believe has been seriously downgraded.

This masthead over here—

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/8/82/Ucp_profile.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20200823112049

—seriously cannot match this one.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/8/82/Legacy_profile.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20200823112259


 * I don't understand the motive about removing the profile fields in favour of the bio. Both of them were really cool and worked well together.


 * I also don't see the need to remove the Favourite Wikis sections.


 * The masthead tags look really bad and as far as I know, there's no way to change what they say.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/e/e1/Ucp_walls.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/518?cb=20200823112840

Here's UCP message walls...

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/a/a7/Legacy_walls.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/526?cb=20200823113002

And here's the Legacy walls.

Again, the UCP walls look really bad and quite honestly they hurt my eyes. I don't see why all of it has to be so translucent? Furthermore, I am annoyed by the lack of wikitext / HTML and template support both in Message Walls and in Comments; both of these saw frequent use of them on certain wikis. This includes things like Support / Oppose templates, Quote templates (I personally use these when dishing out warnings to quote rule-breaching statements) and more. I also don't like how the Quote button is also gone.

Lastly, why is it no longer possible for (un)locking and (un)deleting of threads to be accompanied with a reason, as on Legacy? This is something that Discussions also needs.

4) The Recent Changes
Ah yes, the Recent Changes.

You can probably tell that I am a fervent Wiki Activity user. In fact, I never use the Recent Changes. At all. In my view, it's really tedious to navigate. There's way too much info thrown at my face at once. Way too much text. It's incredibly chaotic, and I have even more trouble looking at it due to my autism. It's simply too crowded.

Recent Wiki Activity was perfect. It showed most changes happening on the wiki in a far cleaner way. You could preview threads and whatnot, see avatars, see all changes far faster ... It was more of a feed rather than the list that is Recent Changes.

I'm personally really salty about Wiki Activity being gone, especially since I horribly detest the Recent Changes feature. It makes it SO hard for me to track what's going on across my wikis. I feel like we should be given the choice, just like on Legacy. There are SO many other people who, just like, are forced to switch over to the "more advanced" alternative / the "pro" choice, even if they dislike it or it doesn't suit their needs.

I completely advocate Wiki Activity being ported to UCP.

5) Miscellaneous
Here's my Contributions page on a UCP wiki.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/e/e8/Ucp_contribs.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/562?cb=20200823115455

Again, it's SO chaotic and messy.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/witherverse/images/3/3a/Legacy_contribs.PNG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/552?cb=20200823115612

Here's the far better layout on the Legacy platform.

Also, editing the Wiki Navigation is really hard.

The removal of Tabview is really annoying for wikis that extensively used it, even if it sucks for SEO.

Lastly, UCP has lots of further design mishaps that make it awkward to look at. Such as external links, the headings, et cetera.

6) Closing
Since I intend to send this blog to both Fandom itself and a bunch of Wiki Managers, I highly recommend that whoever wishes to add something to this blog, goes right ahead and does so, so that Fandom may find its way towards your feedback as well. I really hope UCP can be improved to suit our needs far better than the pretty bad job it currently does.

I'll definitely update this blog if anything more comes to mind.

Cheers.