How to Report Bugs to Wikia
Good day Wikia!
Every now and then, it’s important to remind our community about the important role you, our readers and editors, play in keeping our wikias free of pesky bugs. Helping squash bugs is the most intense but satisfying part of my job here at Wikia. We do the very best job we can to prevent bugs from appearing on your wikias but, considering how many features we are constantly tweaking, releasing, and testing, it's inevitable that some will always get past us.
- 1 What is a Bug?
- 2 Things to Ask Before Reporting A Bug
- 3 Reporting a Bug
- 4 Seeing If a Bug is Fixed
It's important to establish first what constitutes a "bug." A bug, in the sense we are using it, is when our code causes something on your wikia to look broken or display incorrectl…
Guest Blog Post - Message Wall
Welcome to today's guest blog post, written by a Community Central contributor. Today we have a blog post by Mismagius Star. Mismagius edits on many wikis, including wikis about Pokemon. His username comes from Pokemon, and you can see a picture of the original Mismagius on his user page
This blog post is all about Message Walls. This feature is used on many wikias now, and it's one that I personally find invaluable for keeping track of conversations. Masmagius Star gives a useful overview of the feature for the beginner, and help with customizing the greeting for the slightly more advanced. I hope you find it helpful!
Choosing the Right Admins
Back in May, I talked about how to become an admin. Today we're going to look at this from the other side: how should you choose a new admin?
The choice of admin or bureaucrat on a wikia is a very important one. A good admin can grow and nurture the wikia, and make it thrive. A bad one, at worst, can cause major disruption and destruction.
There are different views on how many admins a wikia needs. Some prefer to have many, to divide up the admin tasks between them, and to make sure some are always available. Others prefer a strong core of the best candidates, to make it easier for them to work directly together and in tune. I would advise starting with a very small group for a new wikia, and then deciding how many works best for your commun…
How to Get Unblocked
Recently I talked about why staff don't change admin decisions to block. But that didn't answer the related question of how do you get a block removed on Wikia.
Of course, the first way is to not get blocked in the first place! I've often heard people protest their block when they were clearly doing something wrong. So if you get blocked because you replaced the main page with "aasdkadkj" then my answer to you is "don't do that then".
But even if you act perfectly, there are reasons that you might get blocked. There might be a misunderstanding, or you may have broken a rule that wasn't obvious, or you may have come across an unreasonable admin.
So my first advice is to take an honest look at your actions. Is this really a bad block, or were you do…
Guest Blog Post - Screenshots and Chat Logs
Today we have another great guest blog post written by a regular contributor of Community Central. This one is by Master Ceadeus 27!
Cead is generally to be found here on Community Central, as well as on Monster Hunter Fanon where he's admin and bureaucrat, and is working on his own fanfiction series. He is also admin/bureaucrat on World of Tanks Wikia, The Boondock Saints Wiki and others.
In this blog post, he is going to talk about a question that staff often hear: "why won't you look at my chat screenshot? It shows someone misbehaving!" It can be hard to say no when this happens, because often we believe those showing us the screenshot. But we have to be fair and consistent, and Master Ceadeus explains why that means not accepting screens…
I Want to Be an Admin
People on Wikia want to help. It seems to be a characteristic of people around here, and is something really special about our community. Often that urge to help leads to questions like "please can I be a chatmod?" or "how can I join the VSTF?" So today let's look at that.
The most important thing to know is: you don't need to have rights or a profile badge to be helpful. Of course you need to be careful about not trying to take on a role you don't have - there is a difference between being helpful and trying to take over from those whose job it is to manage the wikia. But there is a lot you can do without the admin profile badge, and a lot of pride and satisfaction you can get out of doing it.
The route to becoming an admin or getting other …
Guest Post - Your Wikia, Internationalized
Welcome to the first in a new series of guest blog posts. This will be an occasional feature, with posts picked from among the best written by the Community Central community.
Today we have a guest post from Yatalu. Yatalu is the founder of the Hvetshran wikia, and an admin on Language Brigade, Role Play and many other wikias. She is also a Dutch helper and has edited on more than 600 different wikias!
Recently Yatalu wrote an excellent blog post about linking your wikia with similar sites in other languages. We were very impressed with this useful post, and so wanted to share it again with the Staff Blog readers
How You Can Work Through an Admin Dispute
A few weeks ago I talked about why staff don't remove bad admins. But that's only half the story. Bad admins still sometimes need to be removed, and that's what we will look at next.
Young wikias tend to be run almost completely by the Founder. They set up the wikia, make the decisions of its content and scope, and choose who else should have admin and bureaucrat rights. At this stage, it's generally best for unhappy people to vote with their feet. If they don't like how the wikia is being run, then it's a good time for them to move on and find or start a better one! It's a form of survival of the fittest, or in this case, survival of the best managed wikia.
More mature wikias tend to be run by admins selected by the community and will often ha…
Turning Readers into Editors
Did you know that the majority of Wikia's views come from readers, meaning people who don't click the edit button or even have a Wikia account? Clicking that edit button for the first time can be daunting—your contribution will immediately be available to the entire world—but there are ways that we all can help break the barrier between reader and editor.
One of those ways is the recently-launched Wikia University, a quickly digestible source of how-to information for Wikia—including how to make your first contribution. Wikia is also always hard at work making sure our interface is the best it can be, by finding how people interact with Wikia and lowering barriers for entry. But there’s a great deal that local communities can do as well in …
Stand Up and Speak Out
A while ago I was asked about online or cyberbullying and harassment, how to deal with it, and how to help those affected by it. I thought I would share some of those thoughts on this blog
In any community there is good and bad. And when things are bad online they can be very bad. There can be nasty comments, over-aggressive reactions, and all sorts of bickering and conflict to disrupt the wikia.
Of course, even in the best wikia communities not all interactions will be nice. Disagreements are part of life, and can be a healthy part of a community working out what the right choices are for them. But in the past there have been extreme cases around the Internet where normal disagreement and clashes have gone way further into harassment and bu…