Board Thread:New Features/@comment-5275700-20161013173857

Discussions continues to evolve, and one area of focus for Fandom is surfacing this activity on the wiki. Below I’ll discuss two new options that can help make admins, editors and readers more aware of conversations happening in Discussions.

This week, the Discussions Activity Feed became available. With this embeddable “widget” it’s possible to show recent or trending Discussions activity on a main page, project page or any other wiki page. It’s quite versatile, and can even be filtered to only show content from specific discussion categories. A feed on a main page could showcase posts in a “Q&A” category to help expert editors answer questions from new community app users. Or a project page might include a feed of reader suggestions from an “article improvements” category. Check out the help page for all of the details, and take a look at some examples on the Overwatch Wiki and Civilization Wiki main pages.

The other exciting addition is the Discussions Feed script now available on the Fandom Open Source Library. We’ve had several admins asking about a RecentChanges-style feed for Discussions activity. The Elder Scrolls Wiki was one of the early adopters of Discussions and has been one of the most active communities. One of their admins, longtime user Flightmare, went ahead and built one! Our developers did some further optimization of the Discussions code to make sure this performs optimally, and all are now welcome to make use of this new tool. Check out Special:DiscussionsFeed on TES Wiki to see it in action.

For both of these additions, we’d love to hear about how you’re using them and what more you might want them to do. 