FANDOM Staff Blog

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…

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 …

As of September 22nd, we are now unblocked, thanks to the fantastic work done in this "all hands on deck" situation. Read more here.

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 an…

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…

Update: October 29th - Forums migration has officially completed.

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 op…

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…