Technical Updates: October 4, 2024
Eyo lovely people, and welcome to October already! This month does not only mark the start of the spooky season, but also the start of the last quarter of the year! As usual, I will be taking you through a selection of changes that happened since the last Tech Blog two weeks ago. You can expect some noticeable bug changes, potential experiment announcements, and even platform-wide noticeable changes that happened since. If you have questions or suggestions about anything technical related, the comment section is always a good place to reach out. So let's see what happened this time!
- 1 Notable Changes
- 2 Recent Fixes
- 3 Development Updates
- 3.1 Engagement
- 3.2 Monetization
- 3.3 Platform team
- 3.4 User Experience (UX) Team
- 3.5 User Generated Content (UGC) team
The…
Experimentation Announcement: Registration Form Update
Hello everyone!
I recently shared the roadmap the Engagement Team had for 2024, and while it was primarily influenced in Interactive Maps, they are also working on different areas. During these last days, the team has been working on different updates for the registration form, and today I’m sharing more details about a related experiment we’re performing to ensure our work is useful for people interacting with it to create a new account.
Experiment Name: Registration Form Update
Test Launch: Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Test Closes: 2 weeks
Type: A/B Test (for logged-out users)
Will Be Tested On: 100% of logged-out desktop users (50% control group and 50% variant group) using English language
Hypothesis: Our plan is to bring a better registration form UI…
Experimentation Announcement: Editor Impact Notifications 2.0
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the second run of the Editor Impact Notifications experiment! You can read more about the first one in the Experimentation Announcement: Impact notifications blog. In short, we experimented with sending a notification to users with an estimation of the impact their edits have in terms of pageviews as an incentive to keep going.
That first experiment sadly ran into some data processing issues, due to which we could not draw a trustworthy conclusion on how this feature did, which prompted us to rerun it.
- Experiment name: Impact Notifications (still)
- Test Launch: Thursday, September 26th
- Duration: 4 weeks
- Will Be Tested On: 100% of our logged-in users on English wikis using desktop with at least 1 edit
- Type: A/B test…
Technical Updates: September 20, 2024
Hiya lovelies! I hope September has been treating you well. As those of you who've been following our Technical Updates series already know, this will be the second of two update blogs this month. If you're now here, this is the place to be in case you'd like to get a quick overview of what's been happening on the platform. I'll be sharing a selection of bug tickets that have been fixed between the previous tech blog and now, as well as inform you about general changes and experiments we may be or will be running. The comment section remains a good place for you to let us know if you're encountering a certain issue (in which case, please share some links and ideally even a video or screenshot about what the issue is) or if you have general…
Fandom Publishes New Policy Regarding Offensive Language
Policies are the backbone of how we protect user safety on Fandom and ensure a welcoming experience to fans of all backgrounds and beliefs. As part of that mission, we regularly review our policies to ensure that they are as clear as possible and contain all information about how we approach user safety. These reviews can lead to us adding important new clauses to pre-existing policies, creating brand new policies to fill in gaps, or formally documenting rules that are already largely in practice so that our standards can be applied consistently and fairly.
One policy we are releasing today, the Offensive Terms Policy, is a reflection of that last option - it’s not so much a new rule, but it’s formalizing something publicly that has been an…
Helping New Users With Suggested Pages
Hello, hello, hello, my lovely people! Nope, this isn't the second Technical Update blog of September, that's for this Friday. Since I recently took over from Antonio as the Product Support team's liaison with the UGC team, I am writing this to bring you all up to speed with the latest feature update on Fandom: Suggested Pages.
If you've been around the past months, this may sound already familiar to you. Before making the decision to productize this feature, we ran it as an experiment to see how it would work on our platform. As such, we've talked about it before in an experiment announcement blog as well as Technical Update blog blurbs. However, since we did tweak the end result from the experiment based the received feedback, I'm going to…
Experiment Announcement: Desktop Drawer V2 and Mobile Drawer V1 Validation
Hello everyone!
Over the past few months, I've been discussing in blogs how Fandom's UX team is dedicated to decluttering your desktop and mobile experiences. Our aim is to create well-defined areas for the content you and your communities generate, while also leaving room for elements like widgets that encourage logged-out users to explore a wiki beyond the first few pages.
(I've written an entire blog post about this in our Progress in the Making series, which you can read here: link)
We're continuing this journey by experimenting with two tools: the Mobile Drawer and the Desktop Drawer. We're launching two new experiments this week to gain further insights into how users interact with these features. More details below!
Experiment Name: Des…
Community Partnerships September Update: Gaming Highlights
Hi, everyone! We’re back with another installment in the Community Partnerships blog series -- our regular update focused on sharing recent wins regarding collabs that bring content partners together with Fandom wiki communities. Today, we’d like to share the latest highlights from the Gaming Partnerships team, who focus on growing relationships with game publishers and developers that benefit Fandom's editor community, as well as introduce a new member of the partnerships crew! Without further ado, I'll turn things over to Jieyang, Tots, and Ran for the latest:
- 1 Introducing our newest Partnerships Manager
- 2 New Gaming Partnerships
- 2.1 Black Myth: Wukong
- 2.2 Kunitsu-Gami
- 2.3 Soulmask
- 3 Honorable Partnership Mentions
You may recognize Jieyang from gami…
Progress in the Making: Ad Experience
This year's Community Connect, with the theme "Gears of Progress", was a collaborative event where Fandom Staff, admins, and editors worked together to shape the platform's future. This teamwork led to new initiatives like the first in-person Hackathon and the Virtual Community Connect experience. Today, we conclude "Progress in the Making", a blog series that showcased the real changes made based on community feedback, including new features and tools. You can view all the blogs in this series in the table to your right.
There's something else extra special about this blog! It's the 1000th post on our Staff Blog!! Further proof that as a company we're always working towards building a bigger, better, and more collaborative platform.
Of cours…