FANDOM Staff Blog

Featured Video has been a controversial feature. It helped achieve the goal of removing a lot of ad clutter and performance issues on wiki pages, but the content just didn’t work. Way too many videos are of too low quality, and many of them quickly fell out of date or relevance. Plus, the video player is really big, the videos were made almost entirely without community involvement, and they were added above community content.

As a result, we have a product and content on the site that editors resent and doesn’t provide the right value to the broader audience. It made money for Fandom, but it cost us a lot—for many of you, that includes your trust in us. A lot of talented people tried to make it work, but no matter how good the intentions m…

It’s been a long time since you’ve seen a meaningful update to Discussions, leaving communities feeling rightly frustrated with the state of Discussions and with Fandom for not providing long-awaited features. Honestly, we don’t blame you. You weren’t wrong.

For the last eight months, we’ve been taking a long, hard look at our priorities and the things that we need to focus on in order to create a better community experience. There’s a lot we’re going to be announcing over the coming weeks and months because of that, but right now I’m excited to say we have some fresh improvements for Discussions that will go live next week!

When analyzing how people use Fandom, we see that there are a lot of users who drop in on your wiki, find what they’re…

For a while now, we've wanted to fix many of the outstanding issues with one of our widely-used but under-developed products: Portable Infoboxes. With the help of the Vanguard volunteers, many of our communities over the years have adopted these adaptable templates to put their best faces forward on all platforms. This has been especially apparent with the rise of mobile devices, where we've made recent changes to improve the look and feel of infoboxes for a clean user experience.

As useful as these infoboxes have been for mobile presentation, there was a lot of room for improvement to help communities show off their data and content in the way that they wanted to. So, in addition to fixes and a new look on mobile web and the Fandom app, we…

It’s been awhile since we announced that Fandom and Curse Media have joined forces, and we owe you some updates about what we’ve been up to in the last few months. Since then a lot of you have asked what coming together means for the future of Fandom, what our plans are, and a lot of other great questions that we weren’t able to answer yet. Today we’re excited to finally begin sharing some information about the progress we’ve been making and some of what you can expect to see happen in the coming weeks.

To start with, we want to introduce you to something we’re calling Project Crossover.

The goal of this project is pretty simple: We want to encourage and facilitate knowledge sharing, cooperation, and collaboration between Fandom users and Gam…

We are excited to announce that Fandom and Curse Media are joining forces! Curse’s network includes properties like their wiki services Gamepedia, D&D Beyond, Futhead, and Muthead. By coming together, Fandom and Curse Media solidify our exciting new venture as the #1 online experience for entertainment and gaming fan communities.

For years, Fandom and Curse Media have shared a common mission: to provide online tools and resources for communities in the entertainment and gaming spaces. By joining forces and combining knowledge, we are able to expand our resources and provide better support to our communities.

As we work through the details, our teams are being purposeful and thorough in making decisions on how Fandom and Gamepedia in particul…

Categories are a simple tool that are a pretty fundamental part of organizing a wiki. What you might be surprised to know is that they also create some issues for how high a community’s content shows up in search results.

We’re going to walk you through a simple category redesign we’re releasing tomorrow that keeps the same basic look and functionality, adds personalization, and addresses the SEO issues.

Categories are a foundational part of MediaWiki and have existed since the beginning of the software. A few years ago, we developed new display options that included Category Exhibition. Communities could enable this and display gallery items visually.

It’s a pretty solid idea. There’s value in readers being able to explore categories visuall…

Back in August, we teased the beginning of a new product initiative to build on the successes of Wiki Modernization and Mobile Modernization. Today’s the day we get to talk with you about it.

This is going to be a long post, so buckle up!

You’ve heard us talk a lot about Wiki Modernization and Mobile Modernization over the last year and a half. Not only did those efforts improve the look and performance of the site through design updates and a reduction of advertisements, it also played a big part in increasing the number of people using your communities. Check out the historical level of wiki editors from 2014 through 2018:

As you can see, the number of editors went up and down, but there was a general downward trend — we were losing contrib…

Back in August we announced that wikia.com domains will be migrating to fandom.com. We've been doing a lot of prep work for testing the SEO impact of the migration, so we wanted to give you some insight into the process, talk about how the test is going to work, how we’re going to keep your traffic safe, and answer any questions you may have about it.

The basics are that in early October—we are aiming for next week, and we'll let you know the exact date once we have it—we will be migrating approximately 3,200 communities to the new domain structure. Those include roughly 600 English communities, while the rest are international communities across 11 other languages. The international communities will also test out the new language path that…

Sigh. I wish I was posting about something more uplifting and fun. Instead, I need to write this in my best Hulk voice:

EUROPEAN UNION WANT TO HURT WIKIS. GRRRR.

Randomly smashing things wouldn’t help here, so I’ll try to explain what’s happening and how you can help. This is me still in Hulk mode, but with glasses on.

Who do you think should be responsible for an edit on a wiki? Or a post in Discussions?

This is not a trick question. And if you’ve been a part of FANDOM for a while you would probably answer:

The entire wiki community has a shared responsibility for keeping the content up to date and well organized. Similarly with Discussions, we’re all responsible for keeping the conversations interesting and civil.

But it’s the user making the …

We've done a lot of work this year to improve the mobile experience. First we worked on a lot of backend changes so the mobile site would load faster and perform better. Most recently we've been rolling out more changes to the mobile web design to enhance the experience.

You may be wondering, why make changes to mobile web? Put simply, if pages look more visually engaging and of a higher design quality, we’re more likely to see return visitors to communities. Not only that, but better-looking pages attract higher quality ads—and the higher quality our ads are, the fewer of them we need. Just like how we were able to slash desktop advertisements by 30% in 2017, we believe that a better mobile design will allow us to have fewer mobile ads and…