My Farewell to Fandom
One of my all-time favorite episodes of television is “All Good Things...,” the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It reflected the idea that all good things must come to an end, wrapped up an incredible chapter of storytelling in a neat bow, and left room for bigger and better adventures yet to come.
In that spirit, I have some news to share with the community: tomorrow, February 28th, will be my last day as a member of Fandom Staff. I’ve worked at Fandom for 15 years, and as Fandom seeks to chart a new course to boldly go where no one has gone before (note my continued love for a good Star Trek reference) in how it supports communities, it’s time for me to head off on a new adventure of my own.
As I look back on my experiences, …
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…
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…
Celebrate 20 years of worldbuilding for Fandom's 20th anniversary
If you’ve seen the global navigation today, you've probably spotted it – we gave the Fandom logo a little makeover! Why, you may ask? Well...
Fandom’s turning 20! That’s right, Fandom – formerly Wikia, formerly Wikicities – was founded just about twenty years ago, on October 18, 2004, and we’ve officially kicked off the run up to our birthday. Celebrate with us as we journey back through two full decades spent documenting, exploring, and celebrating the worlds of your favorite games, movies, shows, and more, all for the love of fans.
Our online celebration is just kicking off now and will run through October, our birthday month, with the official campaign hashtag (on social media, if you want to share): #fandom20.
Off-platform, the party’s al…
Community Connect Interview: Better Ads for a Better User Experience
- Be sure to also read Part 1 of this blog series, "How Fandom is driving engagement to improve the user experience"
One of the biggest topics at last month’s Community Connect was about the ad situation on the Fandom wiki platform, and how one of our primary goals this year is making genuine improvements to the user experience – including improvements to the ad experience. We talked about some of that in the Staff Blog yesterday, “Driving Engagement to Improve the User Experience.” And today we put a finer point on the problem: “it sucks” is an exact quote you’ll see later in this interview.
We want to dive deeper into that topic, particularly the part about ads, because we went into a lot more depth at Connect than we could include in that o…