User talk:Sannse

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Please add new messages to the bottom, thanks :) -- sannse (talk)

Lost in space
Hi

I have no idea what I'm doing. I want to create a space where my students can find links, add comments , post little bits of research , ideas , group projects , etc without the whole thing getting dragged down into a digital whirlpool. So, my first question is , can I screen contributors so that only my class can post ? If not, then I suppose I will make this just my own little space they can visit. I just want to avoid unwanted postings, or to be able to preview their posts


 * Wikia wikis are public, so anyone can edit... and we don't have pre-posting moderation on edits. The idea is that anyone can contribute and build the project. You are welcome to Create a wiki and try it out :) -- sannse (help forum | blog) 23:27, July 1, 2010 (UTC)

Flag Bot Request
Hello Sannse, I'm the new admin of Italian Uncyclopedia. I am here to request bot flag for the user GenBot. Thank you. -- 12:45, June 21, 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi, please can you mail us via Special:Contact, and we will have a look -- sannse (help forum | blog) 23:27, July 1, 2010 (UTC)

Hi.
Hi Sannse! I saw on your User page that you are from the East Coast of England. What city? I came from Wolverhampton, and moved to the US in 2002.

- The Only One  Thank God, any more would be a disaster!


 * I lived in Clacton-on-sea, and moved to the US a year ago. And what a great move it was! -- sannse (help forum | blog) 23:27, July 1, 2010 (UTC)

Ayuda
Perdón por escribir en español, pero necesito ayuda. Un usuario de wikia viene a mi página web a poner comentarios ofensivos. Se trata del usuario Pokemon shiny. Cada vez que borro sus comentarios pone otros nuevos. Yo ya dejé la wiki en la que él es administrador, así que quiero que él me deje tranquilo en mi web. El Polo [http://marowakysugarrote.jimdo.com/eventos/evento-cubone-shiny/ ¿Participas? ] 19:51, June 23, 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but staff's members can not do anything about it because it is a topic unrelated to wikia. I suggest you speak with Pokemon shiny and reach an agreement. -- 21:33, June 23, 2010 (UTC)

Session loss
There's been some serious problems with session loss on Uncyclopedia lately. Slightly more details can be found at your talkpage there. 81.165.225.23 22:31, June 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi, the techs are looking in to the session loss problems... they seem to have improved, but they are still working on it. Sorry for the problems -- sannse (help forum | blog) 23:27, July 1, 2010 (UTC)

Caught up!
Sorry I've been slow on this page people, lots going on everywhere! Please remember that the best way to get staff help is via Special:Contact, there are more of us looking after that email than looking at this page :) And remember that you can get great help from other users on the Central Forums -- sannse (help forum | blog) 23:27, July 1, 2010 (UTC)

Repeated vandalism to a user page that no administrator deals with
Someone created a user page without the consent of the user AsukaMomoko and should be deleted. However, the administrators do not delete this user page and allow various puppets to recover these content. This user page should be deleted immediately without delay.67.212.81.105 15:37, July 10, 2010 (UTC)
 * I see the page has been deleted -- sannse (help forum | blog)

Delete my wiki?
I made wiki page awhile ago for myself, and no longer want to use it. Might you delete it and redirect the link to wikia's homepage? [] Vahi786 The comic maker. 03:09, July 12, 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi, sorry for the delay... it's almost always faster to ask for this sort of change via Special:Contact, but I've done the deletion. -- sannse (help forum | blog) 04:40, July 23, 2010 (UTC)

Please delete my wiki
Hi, for reasons I won't get into here, can you please delete every wiki I have made? Thanks! :)

Here is my user page: http://libertyanytime.wikia.com/wiki/User:RBLibertarian


 * Looks like you've been helped via Special:contact already :) -- sannse (help forum | blog) 04:35, July 23, 2010 (UTC)

I am being bullyied by a VSTF user by the name of charitwo
Me and him have been having a long amount of ugliness. He's banned me twice, and each time it was overturned. It is often for stupid reasons, such as one time I got banned, when I typed nothing, nothing at all. Another time Charitwo was completely off topic, I asked him to get back on topic, banned. One time my friends were on my computer, changing my nick, banned. I tried explaining to Joeyaa and Charitwo to what happened, and neither one helped me. Charitwo ignored me and Joeyaa said "Well that computer is banned." and said I was nick spamming, but all I did was quickly try to change my name, but it was to late and I was banned. I get no warnings. Oh yes. I remember One time I user was spamming cap locking and typing short messages; flooding, all that annoying hell. I told him to stop or he would be blocked, but I accidentally hit caps lock. Guess what, that guy who was flooding, didn't even get a warning, he got to go free, but I got banned. Most of the time these bans have been overturned. It has been Charitwo who has blocked me without warning for the dumbest of sorts. Another user Nelo Angelo97 has had similar experiences. I was requested by IRC staff to change my name after my friends changed my name, I tried telling them that, but Joeyaa beat around the bush and Charitwo ignored me. I do apologize for any trouble given and if this is the wrong person to message, could you please point me where to file a complain? Thank you for giving me some of your time, as I am sure as a Wikia "general" your time must be valuable. Peter Griffen Boy 05:02, July 12, 2010 (UTC)

For some strange reason, my computer will not allow me to upload some pictures I have screen captured. However. I have two pictures and a copy of paste of what happened twice of my blocks. http://battlefield.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Peter_Griffen_Boy/Bullied_by_Charitwo_part_2. < That link is when he blocked me for accidently typing one small sentence in caps lock, by accident. I tried to explain, and I was ignored. http://battlefield.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Peter_Griffen_Boy/I_am_bullied_by_wikia_staff< although that is text form, I have not said a word, and Charitwo bans me. The second part is where I tried to get him to tell me why he banned me, again, I just got nothing of an answer. Peter Griffen Boy 17:43, July 12, 2010 (UTC)


 * I've answered you elsewhere, I understand that this is about a continuing issue, and the channel ops are agreed on the bans -- sannse (help forum | blog) 04:34, July 23, 2010 (UTC)

How I would want to watch blogs
What happened to User blog:Sannse/How do you want to watch blogs? I started a forum thread about it here: Forum:Watching the staff blog. An update on this topic would be splendid. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 03:57, July 17, 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi, we added the ability to watch blog listings for new posts. All you do is follow the listing, and any new blog posts witht he right category on them will trigger an email. I still hope that we will get rss feeds in the future, but this is a good start! -- sannse (help forum | blog) 04:42, July 23, 2010 (UTC)

Is there...
... any way to disable the new feature that splits blog comments into pages of 10 comment? Thanks. 04:18, July 17, 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi, please see here for an update -- sannse (help forum | blog) 04:44, July 23, 2010 (UTC)

Favicon Use
I would like to use the disney favicon please


 * Sorry, I don't understand this question... There's help on using favicons here though -- sannse (help forum | blog) 04:46, July 23, 2010 (UTC)

New Wiki
Hi Lisa, I was just wondering how do you add a contents page to your new wiki and add a background? (Daniel Macgregor 15:48, July 21, 2010 (UTC))


 * Hi, I'm not sure what you mean by a contents page... but if you give details on the forum, I'm sure someone can help. That's also the best place for all the help you need on customization. This edit was how I adjusted the background for this wiki - you'll need to do something similar on your wiki with the same mediawiki page (and don't forget to switch the skin in your preferences to "custom"). -- sannse (help forum | blog) 04:55, July 23, 2010 (UTC)

So you want to talk about the Wikia community...
I'm moving this conversation here based on what was said at Forum:Uncyclomedia's complaint on Wikia.

Let me clarify why I think Wikia's commitment to community is diminishing. It was never one event, but a pivotal event was the introduction of the Monaco skin. I'm not sure you remember, but there was alot of back and forth, but the essence of the situation was that lots of admins felt that the new skin was being pushed on Wikia wikis primarily to introduce advertising and make Wikia have the capability to add new features. The problem with how it was done was that the information given about the change was often slow in coming or sometimes just misleading or wrong (this was especially true concerning the appearance, placement and size of ads). Ultimately, Monaco was rolled out and most Wikia accepted the change with some even welcoming it. At the time I was an active admin on WoWWiki and worked directly with Gil on trying out some new advertising schemes to increase revenue with hopefully minimal user experience disruption and impact.

The Monaco skin deployment seemed like a nadir for Wikia in that the community was largely against the move and Wikia was perceived to have handled it very badly. However it did establish the community as a force and was somewhat unifying among the various wiki leadership groups. The following interactions between Wikia and the community were smoother and Wikia appeared to have learned some lessons. My experience following the Monaco debacle was largely positive as Wikia seemed to be working cooperatively with WoWWiki admins to try out new things that largely only benefited Wikia, but showed that WoWWiki folks were understanding about the need to improve Wikia's revenue situation, since we shot down the primary domain change from wowwiki.com to wow.wikia.com.

The relationship between Wikia and the community seemed to be trending up. Then Wikianswers appeared. It was a strange concept that seemed to emphasize a sort of ambivalent bifurcated environment of mostly anonymous users asking questions and a group of largely registered users dedicated to answering questions or correcting problems with answers from anonymous users. As I was semi-retired from WoWWiki, I moved to Answers to try to answer the torrent of World of Warcraft questions. I was overwhelmed, but Angela and others from Wikia seemd to be happy to answer questions and tell us about new features at the forums. Around that time I was not just trying to answer qiestions, but also help build the infrastructure for the new Answers structure which seemed to have largely diverged from Monaco and had no clear administration.

To me the decline of Answers support was the sign of the decline of Wikia community commitment. Wikia released and started to encourage sub-answers wikis (as I like to call them) with topic specific sets of Q&A and lots of questions were migrated off the main Wikianswers, but very little support or information came out for the sub-answers wikis. They didn't even have alot of the features or structure of the main Wikianswers or Monaco, so updating them was lots of shooting in the dark and missing. Fortunately the forums were still there and the small answers community tried to help each other as Wikia staff participation rapidly declined. I must admit I got pretty snotty as things got worse and I'm still in a bad mood. The rock bottom for Answers was the message at the top this forum post w:c:Answers:Forum:New Skin issues from Angela:
 * Staff are no longer monitoring this forum, so please send bug reports using Special:Contact.
 * Questions about CSS fixes should be asked on Wikia's central forums so that other Wikians can assist with this. For example, how to add or remove elements from the skin is something that can be done with CSS.

Through all the Answers drama, Wikia staff help at the Community Central Forum was rapidly declining also. Lots of changes were announced via various blog posts, but the impression I got was this was mostly one-way communication as bugs and requests were mostly rebuffed or given vague, unhelpful answers. The brief golden age of Wikia and community cooperation seemed to be over.

...and here we are. -- Fandyllic  (talk &middot; contr) 7:04 PM PST 21 Jul 2010


 * Interesting notes / thoughts there Fandyllc (not quite sure of what term to describe them by).
 * I have steered clear of Answers in the main but has a look when they stuck the widget on 'my' wiki and thought at the time it appeared it was a bit of a strange diversion from the Wikia sites main area (in depth content on a niche subject area) & a bit too much of a jumping in on a new idea to be trendy (ditto Blogs and now facebook connect). Most of the so-called questions/content wanted deleting as they were not question's bur abstract statements. Answers to me was / is trying to pull editors from Wiki's main sites. The Sub Answers sites idea probably have some value linked with the big wikis but alot of it looks more about the numbers and quantity over quality. (generating search engine traffic ?)


 * I'll add a few comments about central to the pot from my 2 years on wikia. - Some of the revamp of central > community central appears to have been started then abandoned with the main hubs having a make over & the forum re-arranged, then progress has appeared to stop wirh lots of blind alleys and a search system that fails to help find wikis IMO. The increasing addition of bits that people then feel a need to turn off / medle with will case a increase in support needs/ long term upgrade issues as the pool of people who know what has been done is small and all these changes will not get documented on individual wikis (the big ones have the skills base to maintain their sites to a higher degree). I see problems from users who cannot even grasp the basics of templates meddling with JS & CSS (I only understand a few bits of it as im not a programmer and dont wish to be). The Wika reasy built site being the attraction of bring my content here along with rhe open collaborative nature (like wikipedia without rhe rules), without having to create a site from scratch and host it my self.


 * I found that after i started and found i needed a bit of help that Sannse, Uber and other Wikia Staff and Helpers pointed me in the right direction when some of my early customisation attempts and templates (imported from wikipedia) would not work. But can see that as the number of new wikis has grown exponentially they cannot support them all. The RTE is a major staling point as it hides templates and it is obvious that users are failing to understand them at all. The failure to integrate the Help and specialist Wikia sites such as the templates wiki etc into Community Central properly so that new users can find the support they require to become a part of the larger community is not helping in my opinion. Users will quickly give up. I think most of the more successful (growing) new wikis have probably been started by users who have left/splintered from other projects and very few 'new users' succeed in creating a wiki of any size. Wikia is failing to help create the communities it talks about IMO by hiding behind special:contact at times or appearing to brush users off to the forum since the revamp. A FAQ/How to Guide section for common questions that has a bit more structure than the Forum, but is more concise than Help pages and then links to more detailed Help pages on wikia, wikipedia and Wikimedis/mediwiki sites etc. may be an idea to collate some of the knowledge in a more accesable form (some of my 2cents worth for now) - BulldozerD11 11:43, July 22, 2010 (UTC)
 * It's hard, because I agree we have a lot of things to work on. But I know that if I say: "yeah, we want to improve help", "yeah, we want to make Community Central a real destination with useful content", "yeah, we need to make sure that users don't feel pushed off when we suggest they go to the forums", then it's going to sound like empty words.


 * What I prefer is to say: "this is what we are doing right now". We've drastically increased the number of blog posts, and started internal changes at Wikia to make sure we have clearer lines of communication for new features. We are most certainly reading and passing on feedback from blog comments, even when we don't have the time and space to answer each in detail. We have been promoting the blog, forum, and Community Central with spotlights, increased links from all wikis, custom adverts in place of paid ads, changes to default email notifications, and direct messages to new users. We are trying to make sure that the questions that can be answered by the community go to the community, so that we always have time to reply to email about questions that have to be answered by staff.


 * And then there is the work going on to review Wikia as a whole and work out where we are going and what we should look like in the future. It's hectic! Which means that we are going to miss some things, and be slow at others. And it means we are going to try some things that don't work out as planned and have to pull back. I just hope that you will trust that we very much care about the community, and are very aware that you are exactly the reason we are here. The journey may be bumpy at times, but it's one we are very glad to be taking it with you all. -- sannse (help forum | blog) 22:02, July 22, 2010 (UTC)
 * (p.s. and to everyone with messages I haven't replied to above - I'll try to catch up with those tonight!)