This Month at Fandom - March 2021
Hey gang!
Today is Meeting Day, the unofficial Parks & Recreation holiday marking the time that April Ludgate forgot March 31st actually existed and rescheduled all of Ron Swanson’s meetings for that date.
Ron had 93 meetings scheduled, which coincidentally is about 20 meetings fewer than Brandon Rhea has on a given day :)
In the spirit of large numbers which make the day special (and in keeping with tradition), we’re going to explore some cool community data right after I recap some BIG news from this month of March.
- 1 More is More
- 2 Wiki Rules and Blocking
- 3 Smash the bugs!
- 4 Domain Migration
- 5 Data Time!
- 5.1 The Mother of all Mother Boxes
- 5.2 In Memorium
- 5.3 Buddy Cop Show (but they’re superheroes)
- 6 Editors of the Month
- 7 In Closing
At the beginning of March,…
Bug Squashing Week 2 Roundup
Hey gang!
As promised, here is a rundown of all the bugs smashed in the second week of our pause to address quality of life bugs while the Design team iterated through all the great feedback we've received about the UCX preview at Community Connect. That public preview I promised? It was posted last night. Say hello to FandomDesktop!
This week, the following bugs were fixed:
- A bug with wiki-description-site-meta on FandomMobile not being fully secure
- A bug with code blocks in articles not displaying correctly on FandomMobile
- A bug causing cursor on search results to miss the pointer property
- A bug causing the upload form to duplicate the summary heading when manually adding a summary heading with no spaces (we're now being sanctioned by the UN f…
Introducing FandomDesktop, the new look and feel for desktop users
Hey gang!
One of the most often-asked questions throughout the migrations to the Unified Community Platform (UCP) has been, “what will the new design be for the platform?” That’s what we’re going to dig into today. You’re going to see what the new FandomDesktop experience looks like. You’re going to see what this project is and is not, the kinds of feedback we’ve incorporated, where we’ve drawn from lessons learned on both Fandom and Gamepedia, and what the different experiences for readers and logged in editors are.
A few weekends ago at Community Connect, one of the commitments we made is that “more is more.” More transparency. More context. More candidness. More information. This blog is really long, but it’s an effort to deliver on that …
Bug Smashing Week 1 Roundup
Hey gang!
As promised, here is a rundown of all the bugs smashed in the first week of our pause to address quality of life bugs while the Design team iterates through all the great feedback we've received about the UCX preview at Community Connect. You can expect a public preview of the UCX very soon!
On Tuesday, the following bugs were fixed:
- A bug causing the table of contents to show both numbered and bulleted styling
- A bug causing the Project namespace to not have the right rail enabled
- A bug causing updates to the Fandom Design System to cause issues with diff styling and icons
- A bug causing Special:SocialActivity to parse templates, breaking the page layout and potentially causing abuse
- A bug causing the characters F, D, and X to break gall…
Pausing new development to do some bug smashing
Hey gang!
Before we dive into the future of the platform and the new Unified Customer Experience (AKA UCX) - and we will VERY soon - I wanted to take some time to talk about an all-hands quality of life project we’re working on right now, as all but one of the migrations to the Unified Community Platform (UCP) are now complete.
Yesterday, all four wiki platform engineering teams took a pause on UCX and other development work and dove into UCP bug fixing mode. While these teams have been working on critical bugs consistently for the past few months, there has been a steady build-up of non-critical bugs which are best described as “quality of life” issues. These are things that don’t quite work just right, but aren’t completely breaking a feat…
This Month at Fandom - February 2021
Hey gang!
The shortest month of the year has come and gone, but what it lacked in length, February made up for in intensity! I’m feeling musically minded today, so all of the segments this week are titled with songs and lyrics.
- 1 Harder, Better, Faster
- 2 You say Goodbye, while I say Hello!
- 3 New Rules
- 4 We Are Born To Play
- 5 Don’t Stop Me Now
- 6 Hey Look Ma, I Made It! (Editors of the Month)
- 7 That’s It
While the news this week that Daft Punk has broken up after 28 years of amazing music is sad, we’ll always have their incredible electronic beats and one of the greatest live action Disney soundtracks of all time. Seriously, if you haven’t watched TRON: Legacy let, go give it a watch this weekend and see if you don’t agree on that soundtrack being absolute …
Fandom Acquires Gaming E-Commerce Platform Fanatical
Hey everyone!
I have an exciting announcement for you today. Fandom has acquired Fanatical, a leading gaming e-commerce platform based in the United Kingdom. Fanatical offers a growing catalogue of over 8,000 digital games, ebooks, and elearning courses from more than 1,000 official publisher and developer partners, and has sold 80 million officially licensed game keys and ebooks to customers in 200 countries. With more than 150 million gamers coming to Fandom wikis each month, this acquisition will introduce Fanatical’s passionately curated, unique product bundles to an even larger global gaming audience.
We’ve acquired Fanatical as a next step in our vision to be the entertainment and gaming fan’s first choice for community and experience …
Introducing the Wiki Rules and Blocking Policy
No, it's not an April Fools Joke. April Fools Jokes don't get blogged about 6 weeks in advance.
The bug with the banner not dismissing correctly has been ticketed for resolution with the engineering team.
Hey gang,
This blog is a long time coming and, for some of you, it is the direct result of feedback you’ve given about our policies. Fandom has historically sided with admins on the validity of their local blocks, even if the reasons for the blocks aren't fair. With the onset of our new wiki creation policy’s prohibition of duplicate wikis, the prescribed remedy that users create their own wiki on the same topic is no longer valid, as it fragments communities of editors and readers. Thus, the best long-term solution was to figure out how we …
Introducing Fandom's New Community Team
I’m excited to be back on the staff blog today to announce a big change to how we’re going to be working with our communities in 2021. We’re re-organizing our community teams—previously set up in verticalized teams like Anime, Gaming, and Movies/TV—to bring a much more strategic focus to our support for editors and wikis.
Some of you may also know that those teams were previously part of what we called the Growth org. We’re officially changing our name back to Community org, to better reflect the core function that we serve within Fandom.
Let’s go through some of the high level details about what that means.
There’s a few key reasons why we wanted to change our name from Growth to Community. The first is that the name “Growth” being applied t…
2020 at Fandom and Last Month at Fandom - Jan 2021
Hey gang!
Another year and another month have passed, so the time has come to take a look back at 2020 and January 2021, while dishing out some honors.
- 1 2020 was noteworthy
- 2 The Lockdown Editors of the Month
- 3 Editors of the Year for 2020
- 4 Editors of the Month - January 2021
- 5 Phew
For a lot of reasons, 2020 will be a year that gets referred to a LOT in history. Let's review some of those reasons.
- Basically every movie was postponed.
- Most big video games got delayed.
- All TV production shut down.
- Everyone found out that OMG, Mark is 24.
- Carol Baskin got thrust into the spotlight.
- One Piece hit 999 chapters.
- Tom Brady changed teams.
- We rolled out a new wiki platform.
2020 was also a year for some really big new arrivals, returns, and discovery.
- Genshin Impact …