Admins, You've Got Mail Options
If you're an admin, you may have noticed that new email options appeared last week in your preferences. In June, we introduced improved emails for founders, including alerts to new edits, visitors, views, and an optional daily digest. We received a lot of feedback that admins should also have access to these emails, which makes sense. So if you're an admin, now you've got 'em!
These emails are completely "opt in" — you won't receive any additional emails unless you change your preferences. To do that, hover over your user drop-down menu in the upper right hand corner of the wiki you admin, then click on "My Preferences." On the first tab called "User Profile," you'll find "Wiki Email Options" at the bottom of the list. You'll see a box at t…
Tracking Contributions: Recent Activity
In my last blog post Tracking Contributions: Wiki Activity, I mentioned that wikis by their very nature have a lot of activity and changes happening. Activity on a wiki is kind of like footprints of the editors, leaving tracks as they edit. And it's important to monitor this activity taking place.
Now that you are armed with knowledge of how Wiki Activity works let's get a little more detailed and technical with Recent Changes.
Recent Changes, or as it's sometimes referred to 'RC', is much like Wiki Activity -- they both track contributions on a wiki. But Recent Changes records all of the activity. It's more of a technical feed of everything that's taking place on a wiki. With Recent Changes you can actually see everything that is happening. Don…
Managing Wiki Features Just Got Easier!
In the next week, you'll see a new button on the Admin Dashboard called Wiki Features. In this post, I'll tell you what it is, why we decided to create it, and how you can use it to improve your wiki:
Wiki Features is a new SpecialPage that will allow admins and founders to enable or disable more of Wikia's optional features.
We created Wiki Features so that some of our optional features, both new and old, can be controlled from one place. Right now we have Wikia Labs, where you can find some of the newest features, but there are no admin controls for other optional features. Often it's not even clear that those optional features exist!
For example, right now Wikia Labs lets you enable or disable Chat, Article Comments, Achievements, Category …
Tracking Contributions: Wiki Activity
Wikis by nature have a lot of activity on them. Once a wiki starts to attract a community -- whether that's two or three people or hundreds of people -- a lot of action can happen over any period of time. Editing, uploading an image, writing a blog post, leaving a comment, adding a new page, asking a question in a forum -- so much can happen! Because anyone can come and edit (and add any of the above contributions and more) it’s useful to be able to find all of that activity in one place.
As a good admin, it's important to monitor the activity on your wiki for a number of reasons. The main reason is to see what is being added and edited. This is your space, your community -- it's important to see what exactly is being edited and by whom. Tw…
F is for Forums
Have you stopped by to see what we’ve been up to on Founder & Admin Central recently? We've been busy!
One of our main goals for developing Founder & Admin Central is to create a place where the community can ask questions (and give answers) about administrating a wiki. We know that sometimes admins have very specific questions, and we think that a forum space best serves those needs. So, we recently built the Founder & Admin Central Forum — check it out!
The forum is divided into two main areas:
Stickied Threads is the hot topic area; you'll see this at the top of the forum as soon as you land on the page. There, you'll find current topics that have users weighing in, asking questions, and dropping knowledge.
Board Categories has four buckets …