User blog:Kirkburn/Finding the latest activity on your wiki just got simpler!



Good morning!

Today we are launching two new products on Wikia. We've been studying what users click on around the site, and consistently the highest clicked links on the skin and My Home are recently changed articles. To surface that info more prominently to everyone, we have been working on two changes:

The first is a new section in the sidebar called "Latest Activity". This is a streamlined version of the Activity Feed that displays only changes to content namespace articles, and replaces the "Community" box on the sidebar.

The second is a form of the Activity Feed that can be embedded in any article using the tag  . We believe that the ideal place for the activity feed is on a wiki's homepage so that new visitors will see that your wiki is active and find the freshest content. There are also some great search engine benefits to having all the most recently changed articles linked from the main page. Soon, all new wikis will come with this tag installed on their main page by default and we hope that existing communities will choose to embed it as well. Finally, there are lots of cool customizable parameters which you can check out on Help:Activity Feed.

We are really excited about these two new products and feel that they are key steps to improving content discovery and getting new readers engaged and addicted to wikis. We look forward to hearing your feedback, and would especially like to see examples of how your community is using the Activity Feed tag.

Finally, on another note, you may notice an updated login popup today: this is one small part of our efforts for more consistent design across Wikia. More updates will be coming over the next few weeks.

Thanks, George