User blog:MisterWoodhouse/A change to Shared Help on the Unified Community Platform

Hey gang!

One feature which will not be making the jump from legacy Fandom to the Unified Community Platform is a feature called Shared Help. We’re making a specific callout about this because of the nature of the feature and how you might have some content which needs saving. Thankfully, we’ve managed to put in a very easy code change to make sure your content will not be lost with this change.

What is Shared Help?
Shared Help basically takes Help pages from here on Community Central and transcludes them to Help pages on your individual wikis.

Why are we not porting it?
We’re replacing those transcluded local Help pages with redirects to their Community Central sources, allowing users to come where they can get the best platform help and staff attention, rather than unintentionally placing the burden on local admins and editors.

What might you need to do?
If you have custom content on any of the transcluded Help pages (the vast majority of our wikis DO NOT!), you might want to back it up onto a separate page, if it's useful.

If you are on the legacy platform still, just throw the custom content into a different page on your wiki and you’ll be all set. Unfortunately, we are unable to do it on an automated basis because the scale of the distribution could cause overall platform disruption. Having staff do checks off all 400,000+ wikis for content to manually backup is not an option either, as it could take months.

If your wiki has been migrated to the new platform, you’ll need to go get your custom content by adding the following to the end of the URL for the page which had custom help content on it:

?redirect=no

That will prevent you from being redirected to Community Central and you’ll be able to snag the content for preservation.

An initial look at the data suggests that very few wikis have custom content on any of these Help pages, but on the wikis which do have it, the content might be worth preserving, which is why we’re making this callout and adding the “escape pod” for the custom content.