FANDOM Staff Blog

Hello, all!

A couple of weeks ago, we announced Fandom Editor Rewards, a comprehensive program to express our gratitude for exceptional editors in new ways.

In that post, I teased that there was another way to get your hands on cool stuff from Fandom coming soon. Today, I am happy to announce that we have created a merchandise portal on Design by Humans with a selection of brand new Fandom swag designs.

While you are more than welcome to buy this merchandise, this isn’t about selling you Fandom t-shirts, mugs, hoodies, etc. You can buy items if you want, but this is ultimately about having a better way for our Editor Rewards programs to source Fandom merchandise to you, for free, than we have had in the past. I could go into incredible detail, …

Hello, all!

Welcome to the August edition of This Month at Fandom, your monthly recap of all the things you may have missed on the platforms. We had some pretty cool things happen this month, so let’s dive in!

On August 20th, we at Fandom published our first video game, an awesome action-adventure roguelike with RPG elements called UnderMine, developed by the incredible two-person team at Thorium Entertainment. The game has been a great success, currently sitting at Very Positive in Steam ratings after just over a week in Early Access. Not a PC gamer? Fear not! UnderMine will be hitting the Xbox Game Pass and Nintendo Switch in 2020!

This is a new venture which allows us to explore how our expertise in the gaming space can be leveraged into e…

Hello, editors!

Back in April, when we announced the formation of the Growth Organization, we teased 5 things, the pillars of our 2019 work:

• Platform improvements, addressing major community wants and needs
• New wiki-focused features and editor tools
• In-person and digital events to connect with our awesome community members
• Better ways to recognize and reward awesome editors
• Better ways for contributors to communicate with staff

To date, we’ve announced the first steps on 3 of those 5 things: platform improvements, wiki-focused features and editor tools, and better ways for contributors to communicate with staff. Today, I am happy to announce our first steps on the 4th pillar: Editor Rewards.

All summer, we have been piloting new ways to recognize …

Wikis are full of information, and organizing that information leads to a better experience for readers exploring your wiki. Categories are a part of our communities that add grouping and association to pages. They’re also a very wiki-centric concept; as such, there is less general research available under that term, and we rely on more of the data Fandom collects to determine the Best Practices. For research purposes in the non-wiki world, the Category is most akin to a web model called “topic clusters”, but categories also have elements typical of tags (aka labels) common in blog posts.

While there are many methods of moving between wiki pages, only a few show highly organized clusters of pages. The most common of those used for navigatio…

Main Pages are the central points to focus on for many communities. They are often, but not always, popular landing pages where readers enter a community (and the greater Fandom network). They create the first impression for some visitors, and are the navigational crossroads for others. However, there is a lot of tradition around Main Pages that may not be ideal choices for today's wikis.

One thing that takes getting used to is that Main Pages are not nearly as "main" as many think they are. In fact, Main Pages might be the most popular pages on some communities but are very far down the list of others. With global search engines pointing to individual articles on a wiki, Main Pages are often not the primary "entrance" into a community's a…

Hello, all!

It is with immense pleasure that I get to announce we are publishing our very first video game! The game is called UnderMine and was developed by Thorium Entertainment. UnderMine is an action-adventure roguelike with RPG elements. If you enjoy games like The Binding of Isaac, The Legend of Zelda, Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy, Moonlighter, and Enter The Gungeon, you are going to LOVE UnderMine.

Here’s how the team from Thorium describes UnderMine:

How many genres can one game belong to? We would have preferred all of them, but you’ll just have to settle for most of them. UnderMine stirs a delicious pot of genre soup, taking only the highest quality ingredients from each. We took the procedurally generated madness of the craziest rogue-…

Hello, wiki admins!

Today I am pleased to announce the release of our newest feature on Fandom, the Wiki Analytics Admin Dashboard! This feature comes to us from Gamepedia, where admins have been enjoying all of this glorious wiki data for about a year now.

This new analytics suite will give admins deeper data points to help inform their decision-making. We have provided data that we believe gives good insight into how your wiki is performing on several different fronts, but there is no one way to interpret the data – it is up to each wiki team to decide how they leverage the data to grow and strengthen their communities.

Within the dashboard, you can see the following metrics:

• Top viewed pages

• # of page views (daily over the past 30 days)

• Most…

Hello all!

Welcome to the second edition of This Month at Fandom, our monthly digest of things you may have missed on the platform!

Let’s dive right in!

This month, we announced two new programs. In early July, we opened the doors on our official Discord server for Fandom and Gamepedia editors. We now have over 1,000 members on the server and folks are enjoying the increased access to staff as well as cooperation with fellow editors from other wikis. If you haven’t checked it out yet, click the link above and get yourself online and verified!

We also announced the Fandom Official Community Partnership Program, bringing the very successful Official Wiki program on Gamepedia over to Fandom. Our first set of Official Wikis on Fandom have been gre…

Did you know that 99.95% of the people on Fandom are readers, not editors? Admins tend to focus almost exclusively on the needs of their fellow editors, since readers leave no visible trace. Yet while wikis can’t exist without editors, their content is useful and enjoyable to a far larger audience. Many more people rely on the content you create and appreciate your work than you might have thought. It’s crucial that you keep this in mind when organizing your wiki’s local navigation bar, to make it as useful to your audience as possible.

(Can’t be bothered to read all this? Jump to the bottom for a summary!)

Fandom’s User Experience Research team has looked into how users typically move around on a wiki and where they click (and where they don…

Hello, all!

Today I am excited to announce another new project here at Fandom— our official bug bounty program. This program is starting on D&D Beyond, but we intend to expand it to our other platforms over time, arriving on Fandom and Gamepedia sometime next year.

A bug bounty program is where we invite skilled security researchers/ethical hackers (AKA “white hat hackers”) to try to find security issues in our applications and report them to us responsibly. In return, we pay them bounties of different amounts depending on the severity of the vulnerability they report and the impact it could have to our users and our business. By leveraging the skill and tenacity of white hats, we can better improve the security of our sites while pursuing o…