Community Central
Community Central

Lady Lostris Lady Lostris 5 days ago
46

Technical Updates: November 1, 2024

Hello hello! We're starting to near the end of 2024, which means there are only a few tech blogs left to share with you all. If you're new to this bi-weekly series, hi, hello, welcome, we love to have you! This is the place-to-be to check in on the technical updates of this platform. We'll cover a selection of user-facing bug releases that happened the past two weeks, as well as an overview of relevant experiments and changes to the platform. As always, if there's something you're encountering, do not hesitate to report on it in the comments. Alright, let's go over what happened these last two weeks.


  • 1 Notable Changes
  • 2 Recent Fixes
  • 3 Fixes in Development
  • 4 Development Updates
    • 4.1 Data Engineering
    • 4.2 Platform team
    • 4.3 User Experience (UXFCP) Team


Brand …



Read Full Post
Brandon Rhea Brandon Rhea 9 days ago
16

Overview of new anon editing changes and emailconfirmation requirements

At Fandom, ensuring that our platform is safe for all audiences is a vital part of building and maintaining a platform where the community can express themselves freely while fostering a space that's respectful, inclusive, and secure. Over the last several months, we’ve been giving a lot of thought to ways we can strengthen platform safety, including reducing the negative impacts of vandalism, in the least intrusive ways possible.

To that end, starting tomorrow, logged in editors will be required to confirm their email addresses before they can edit or comment on wikis where anonymous editing is disabled. Later this week, we will also be disabling anonymous editing on wikis that have had inactive admins or moderators for at least 7 days (wh…

Read Full Post
Lady Lostris Lady Lostris 14 days ago
1

Experimentation Announcement: Left Content Panel

Eyo people! As you may know already, over the past months, the User Experience Team has been experimenting with a mobile and desktop drawer. If neither of these terms ring any bells, feel free to check out past experiment announcements for these: Mobile Drawer, Mobile Drawer Variations, Mobile Drawer - Persistent User Setting, Desktop Drawer, and Desktop Drawer V2 and Mobile Drawer V1 Validation.

In short, these experiments are aimed to find that golden spot where widgets, such as "Others Like You Also Viewed" and "Popular Pages", can be shown to logged-out users to entice them to continue their exploration of Fandom pages without being too intrusive to those not needing the help.

Today's experiment announcement continues that goal for logge…

Read Full Post
Lady Lostris Lady Lostris 20 days ago
53

Technical Updates: October 18, 2024

Hiya lovelies! It's been another two weeks with lots that happened behind the scenes. As we're nearing the end of the year, the teams get busy building a roadmap for what we'll be doing next year. Every two weeks, we post these tech updates blogs to inform you all about a selection of public bug fixes that we tackled, as well as some ongoing or upcoming experiments and platform wide changes. If there is an issue you're encountering still, don't hesitate to sound off in the comments about it. Today is no different, so let's dive in!


  • 1 Recent Fixes
  • 2 Fixes in Development
  • 3 Development Updates
    • 3.1 Engagement


  • Several issues relating to syntax highlighting (misalignment) in the 2017 VisualEditor - Source mode editor have been fixed:
    • Incorrect line height…



Read Full Post
Brandon Rhea Brandon Rhea 20 days ago
2

20 Years of Worldbuilding: Recapping This Summer's Fandom Party and SDCC Adventures

On October 18, 2004, Fandom was born – the beginning of what has become the world’s largest fan-generated entertainment platform. It’s been a heck of a ride that’s now headed into its third decade of being the companion to 350 million fans worldwide.

This summer, on July 25th we kicked off our anniversary celebration with our annual, highly-anticipated Fandom Party in San Diego. This is a yearly event, held unofficially during San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC), that usually generates a lot of exciting buzz in San Diego, as it brings together fans, creators, and industry members in a celebration of fans and pop culture. This year, the theme “20 Years of Worldbuilding” was a tribute to the editors and fans like you who have come together over the ye…

Read Full Post
Lady Lostris Lady Lostris 4 October
52

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…



Read Full Post
CuBaN VeRcEttI CuBaN VeRcEttI 1 October
0

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…

Read Full Post
Lady Lostris Lady Lostris 25 September
12

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…


Read Full Post
Lady Lostris Lady Lostris 20 September
53

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…

Read Full Post
TimmyQuivy TimmyQuivy 18 September
10

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…

Read Full Post