- Monday: Product Support & Stars
- Tuesday: User Generated Content (UGC) Team
- Wednesday: User Experience Team
- Thursday: Engagement Team
- Friday: Ad Experience Improvements
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. Now, Fandom is launching "Progress in the Making", a blog series that showcases the real changes made based on community feedback, including new features and tools. The series invites continued input from the community to help keep improving the platform.
During these last days, you have been reading our previous blog posts talking about the importance of keeping an optimal experience for our users and readers, and also how to help editors in their mission of creating and curating content on Fandom. Alongside these priorities, we usually think about how any new visitor could find our platform and could think about going further here after finding the information and other content they were looking for.
And this is how the Engagement Team starts. As the name suggests, our main goal is to give reasons to our visitors and readers - most of them without an account created - to be engaged with us and become a Fandom user. And, eventually, become an editor, an admin, and basically a top contributor to our overall platform and an inspiration for others - as Fandom Stars do.
Therefore, the next question is: how would be the best way to engage them? The same user community gave us the answer: invest in a better experience with Interactive Maps. Maps has been one of the most beloved features since the implementation 2 years ago, and some of the most recurring feedback we've been receiving was related to improving its utility with a range of different suggestions. We identified several areas of improvement for the feature - and our community has been welcoming our work with a really positive response - so we decided to put a significant effort on this area.
Nevertheless, the Engagement Team has other areas where they are working on. Blog posts, Discussions, Talk Pages and Message Walls, Comments, User Profile, Achievements or user activity and permissions are also part of the current team ownerships.
What have we done so far?[]
Maps progress tracking[]
This is an example of a map where the progress tracking feature is enabled.
As mentioned above, improving the experience with Interactive Maps has been our priority. The first main project we have been working on has been the addition of a feature for progress tracking, specially addressed to video game players, to allow them to register their progress in real life from a game based on the markers of a wiki map. For this project, we started with different iterations of an experiment only on gaming wikis.
These five months have been really useful to us to prove our original proposal for users was actually effective, and we decided to spend this period of time to search for the optimal version of the feature, also including significant extra options and refinements based on the feedback from our own community.
At the beginning of this month, we were finally able to launch it globally for the rest of wikis, now with a better option to turn it on per-map basis. In the meantime, we added some refinements during the experimentation, like the data storage in the account, the restriction on ID markers to be unique and less than 64 characters, adding less opacity to completed markers, or offering a customization of the "complete/incomplete" description.
New ways to embed maps on pages[]
All the features and improvements implemented on different aspects of Interactive Maps have been developed in parallel throughout this year. While we were experimenting with the progress tracking feature on gaming wikis only, at the same time we have been offering other refinements for the overall experience with maps and also for the rest of verticals.
In this example, the map is integrated next to a text column to optimize the full width of the content area.
The other main project the Engagement Team has been working on is the new ways to embed maps on article pages. While a map is created in their own namespace and was able to be transcluded on an article page using its full width, the community expected more optimal ways to combine this content with the rest of elements (text, images, videos, other maps). There were tweaks like using tables, infoboxes or CSS, but offering a native solution was a reasonable demand from users that we agreed on working on as a priority.
For this case, we opted for a testing period - starting late June - allowing volunteer communities to start using our preliminary options, and to help us to work in the next months to improve the performance based on their feedback. Similar to the experiments with progress tracking, the involvement of our communities and their editors has been vital, because most of the valuable feedback has helped us to consider how we should move forward.
Finally, last week we were able to launch these new ways to embed by default for all the wikis. And to mention some of the improvements based on feedback, we added wikitext support to captions, we refined the map width, and we added tooltips; in addition to a future roadmap based on other suggestions.
Other areas[]
The previous and current development on Interactive Maps includes other minor updates and improvements, but in addition to these two big projects, in April we also added the fullscreen tool for them, another significant request from the community that we have also been refining lately.
However, as we mentioned above, maps hasn't been the only area the Engagement Team is responsible for. Talking about social activity and permissions, in July we launched a restriction on wikis aimed at children, requesting users to auto-confirm their email if they want to edit or publish on articles, comments, walls, talk pages or Discussions.
In the end, they also made improvements on Notifications, Message Walls, but also Discussions and Profiles.
What's coming now?[]
Everything we have told throughout this blog seems like a lot, but in reality it has only been six months of development. Moving forward, we have already planned our roadmap for the rest of this year and beyond, and we would like to present some other new projects for future events like Community Connect 2025.
As we already mentioned in previous technical updates, part of our roadmap is heavily based on Interactive Maps. On the one hand, we're currently working on adding some performance improvements, mainly using canvas to display markers. We also have significant feedback from the community about maps that we would like to implement, and we're currently working on it.
On the other hand, adding a search function for maps is also something we would like to explore, based on some community requests. In addition, after the successful implementation of maps embedding on article pages, we would like to offer solutions for external embedding.
Finally, the community of editors also showed some interest in using tables to register their progress tracking, in the same way they are currently able to use maps.
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