FANDOM Staff Blog

Hey everyone! It’s been a long time since I last posted a staff blog here—almost two years, in fact. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Brandon and I’m the VP of Community at Fandom. I lead a team of around 70 people who support your communities, including many of those you know—like MisterWoodhouse and the Wiki Manager team.

I’ve come back to the staff blog today to tell you about an exciting announcement: we’re holding a virtual Community Connect on March 6th and March 7th! You may have some questions about what Community Connect is and why that’s important. Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. And for those of you who remember the staff blogs I used to write, you’ll remember that I cover things in more detail than you probably asked fo…

Hey gang!

Hope you all had safe and joyous holidays :)

As 2021 kicks off, let’s talk about search engine optimization (SEO) or, most succinctly, Keeping Google Happy. Some of you already know this, but it bears repeating often: search results account for the overwhelming majority of visits to the platform, with 90% of total traffic to the wikis originating from Google searches. It is the primary source of any established wiki’s traffic by a wide margin. There are no exceptions. None. This is a result of Google recognizing that the Fandom platform of wikis is the #1 authority on imagined worlds and, thus, reward your wikis with top search results. It is a fantastic way to attract an audience which is intently interested in the content covered …

Hey gang!

It has been just over a year since we introduced The Loop as our new video series going into the JW Player at the top of select wiki pages, in many cases replacing the Featured Video content from years past. As we continue to gather data and experiment with different video types, I wanted to give you a recap of the work we have done and what you can expect from us in 2021.

For those of you who are new, JW Player is a video unit which shows up at the top of an article page for logged out users (and logged in users who set their preferences as such) once per community visit and plays The Loop or Featured Video content. What is The Loop? It is a weekly, vertical-specific mini show produced by Fandom’s original content team to cover th…

Hey gang!

Today, I am thrilled to announce that a long-requested feature is getting its first release: search for Discussions posts!

New in the Special:Search page on the Unified Community Platform is a Posts option which allows you to search through Discussions posts. This has been a major user request since we first launched Discussions.

For now, default search behavior will not change, so you’ll need to enter Special:Search to get to the Post search tab. This first release is desktop-only and will not include Discussions results in the Everything tab or advanced search options. Next year, we plan to start experimenting to see how we can best surface relevant Discussions content in additional ways while respecting user intent with their sear…

There has never before been a time when our digital habits have so radically changed in a short period. How we experience streaming media, games, and the world outside our homes have dramatically shifted. Even if — over the last 6 months — we have gone outside less often, our relationships with computers and mobile phones have also changed. We would like to follow up on some of our earlier bulletins and describe the trends before and during the global pandemic, and where we are projecting they are going in 2021.

Spoiler alert: the mobile revolution continues, stronger than ever.

Fandom users have crafted a fantastic assortment of wikis since the beginning of the platform. The care and voice of wikis is evident in the rich experiences shown o…

Hey gang!

Just a short announcement from me today. We have changed the permission set on Community Central today and restricted the blog creation permission to moderators and up. This is due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of blogs created on Community Central are either spam or in the wrong place.

This is the first step we’re taking in a multi-step plan with our admin team to make Community Central more focused and less noisy.

The ability to reply to blog posts is unchanged. The ability to create blog posts on your wikis has not changed. This was simply about creating new blog posts on this specific wiki.

Thanks!

Hey gang!

What a month it’s been since we last… wait… it’s been 8 months since we did one of these? 2020, right?

At the end of October and into early November, we held another one of our “edit jam” events, focusing on Halloween-related wikis. The event, Hocus Focus, was a lot of fun and helped improve 7 wikis. These “edit jams” are definitely a blast for us and we hope they are for you too!

The Mandalorian returns and is still a monster hit, with the continued adventures of the eponymous bounty hunter and his little green friend sending Wookiepedia traffic way out beyond the Outer Rim!

Wookieepedia has seen its traffic nearly double since Season 2 begin, which is a massive jump for one of our highest traffic wikis already. Some major fan favor…

Hey gang,

Today, we have a big announcement. After nearly two years of working together to bring Fandom and Gamepedia wikis onto one platform, we will be starting to migrate all Gamepedia wikis to a Fandom.com domain in early 2021. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the primary ones is to ensure that Gamepedia wikis and the hard work editors put into them continue to rank well in search results.

I know this is a big change, but that search result visibility makes it a necessary one. Over these two years, changes to Google’s algorithms—meaning, the secret sauce Google uses to determine how pages show up and rank in their search results—have negatively affected Gamepedia’s search engine optimization (SEO). This affects how read…

Calling all witches and warlocks!

Bubble, bubble, we’re in trouble, and we need YOUR help sprinkling some magic across Fandom for the Halloween season.

I know what you might be thinking.. isn’t Halloween just a conspiracy invented by the candy companies? Possibly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t join in on the fun too!

So you know what that means.. it’s that time of the year for another spooky editing marathon, and the Movies/TV/Anime Team wants you involved!

Not a witch or a warlock? Well, that’s ok! Mortals are welcome to join too. Who knows, maybe you’ll actually be transformed into a witch after this. No promises though.

From Wednesday October 28 to Tuesday November 3, Movies/TV/Anime will be organizing an effort to focus editors to contribute to…

For context, we paused Unified Community Platform migrations at the end of August to put "all hands on deck" for critical development to resolve some blockers. Read more about that here.

Hey gang!

I am very happy to announce that, in addition to the critical bugs getting fixed, our teams have also successfully released our first version of the new Social Activity Feed as well as the 2010 Editor onto the Unified Community Platform.

You will now see tabs in Recent Changes for Social Activity (Message Wall and Article Comments) and Image Activity (Special:NewFiles).

Social Activity gives you a look into recent changes on Message Wall and Article Comments, with useful links for context.

Image Activity loads Special:NewFiles within the tab structure…