FANDOM Staff Blog

Hey gang!

On September 15th (now September 21st and currently live), we are launching a new experiment to bring more relevant products to our fans. In the traditional ad slots, you may start to see contextual ads featuring collectibles, memorabilia, and other items which are related to the wiki you are viewing, from gaming consoles to Funko Pop figures and lots more. Additionally, you will see a Shop link under the staff-controlled Explore tab of the local wiki navigation.

These elements will click through to a new storefront, built by vendor IntentX, that will connect you to products related to topics covered by the roughly 100 wikis in the initial experiment. For every purchase made through these links, Fandom will receive a portion of the …

Hey gang!

I have some big news regarding the Unified Community Platform. Based on your constructive feedback we have been collecting, validating, and iterating on, we have decided to pause all UCP migrations while we address some of the critical community-raised issues which are blocking current workflows and migrations. Although no date is set, we want you to be prepared that this pause could last until October.

As users have been reporting bugs, we've been discussing them. We knew about some of these issues, but it was hard to identify when an issue reaches critical mass and informs us that we need to pause and say “hey, there's simply too much to keep going right now”. We're currently building a process internally to more efficiently esca…

Hey gang!

Our teams continue to roll out features to the Unified Community Platform. Blogs are now officially one of them and available on all UCP wikis.

As always, Blogs are optional and can be toggled on/off via the Admin Dashboard depending on the needs of a particular wiki.

Any wikis that have chosen previously to have a blog as part of the experience will see that reflected automatically when migrated to UCP.

There’s not a whole lot of difference between the new Blogs feature, however, comments now use Article Comments 2.0 (based on the same Feeds tech that you can find in Discussions and the new Message Wall). The Blog content itself continues to be a wikitext page similar to regular article content.

We’ll start migrating legacy wikis wit…

Hey gang!

Today, we launched the first round of enhancements for Discussions, which come as part of the continuing work on the Unified Community Platform that we announced last year.

The focus of these enhancements is to make Discussions a better place to… well… have safe, awesome, organized discussions with your communities.

The enhancements will be coming in waves. Here is what’s being included in the first wave:

• We’re introducing a new way to view Discussions as a whole, taking design language from the Forums and modernizing it for 2020. The regular view for Discussions remains as an option, but the new Condensed view will feel more like home to long-time Forums users. The option to switch between Regular and Condensed is in the new “View”…

Hey gang!

In what may come as tough news for some of you, we have made the decision to not port Chat onto the Unified Community Platform. While live engagement with community members is incredibly valuable (especially in times like these), it has become clear that the Chat feature we currently have is not satisfying the needs of our users beyond a very small group.

Chat has been in a tough spot for a long time. It is not easily moderated, is not mobile friendly, and generally has an antiquated user experience. Chat has been around since 2011, and for a variety of reasons was never maintained and never expanded beyond being part of the experimental Labs section of Wiki Features.

The overall use of Chat simply did not merit additional support o…

Hey gang! (I am channeling my best inner MisterWoodhouse because he is on a much deserved vacation)

Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve reached another milestone in the United Community Platform initiative, a minor technical tweak that has some big and exciting social ramifications. On wikis using the UCP, you will now begin to see some users referred to as members of the SOAP team.

This is just a new, combined name for two groups familiar to our editors. The VSTF (Volunteer Spam Task Force) from Fandom and the GRASP (Gamepedia Rapid Anti-Spam Patrol) from Gamepedia have merged into one team. We decided to give the group a new name, since we didn’t want to favor one platform’s history over the other. All the members of the team came up wit…

Hey gang!

The 2020 US election is coming up, so we are partnering with Gamers.Vote, a non-partisan group, to help promote voter registration among gaming communities.

Gamers represent the largest potential voting bloc in the United States with over 133 million possible voters. As such, Gamers.Vote wants to get eligible gamers to level up their civic duty by helping you register to vote. When we do our civic duty, we all win.

Gamers.Vote and Fandom do not care how you vote, just that you exercise your right to vote. As they say on their website, “No issues, no party preferences, no political agendas…” So just vote!

You may start seeing Gamers.Vote promotional materials on various Fandom and Gamepedia communities starting today.

We have put toget…

Update: 7/24/20 - The login system has now been merged. Thanks for your patience as we tracked down some bizarre issues. Two known issues remain that we're working on, but did not hold up the rest of the work: BotPasswords on Gamepedia aren't working and there are a number of users who had oddness with their renames. If your rename looks odd, please so we can get you in a batch for the fix.

Hey gang!

As many of you are aware, we have been working on unifying the login systems of Fandom and Gamepedia as part of the Unified Community Platform project.

I am happy to announce that this incredibly complex work is nearing completion (or already done, depending on when you read this)! One piece that needs to be called out, however, is the fact that…

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.

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

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 placin…

Hello all,

Today, I write to you with some sad news. As is the case with companies around the world, this year has brought about unexpected and unprecedented financial challenges brought on by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, we’ve unfortunately had to make the painful decision to make cuts to our Wiki Manager and Content Teams.

Wiki Managers and Content Team Members come from our communities, where they have shown their incredible talents as editors and volunteers, so we’re heartbroken we’ve had to say goodbye to some of them as members of the team. Fortunately, you’ll still see many around as admins, Councilors, and continued valued members of the community.

We would like to underscore that we are incredibly proud of the work tha…