TimmyQuivy

Hey gang! (I am channeling my best inner MisterWoodhouse because he is on a much deserved vacation)

Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve reached another milestone in the United Community Platform initiative, a minor technical tweak that has some big and exciting social ramifications. On wikis using the UCP, you will now begin to see some users referred to as members of the SOAP team.

This is just a new, combined name for two groups familiar to our editors. The VSTF (Volunteer Spam Task Force) from Fandom and the GRASP (Gamepedia Rapid Anti-Spam Patrol) from Gamepedia have merged into one team. We decided to give the group a new name, since we didn’t want to favor one platform’s history over the other. All the members of the team came up wit…

If this is the first you're hearing about the Unified Community Platform project, read this to learn more about the entire scope of the project before commenting.

As Fandom continues to roll out our United Community Platform this year, one reason you have seen us cite for creating this new platform is that it'll allow our entire wiki network to exist together on the same version of MediaWiki. This means, for communities already on the Fandom platform in particular, upgrading to MediaWiki 1.33.

That explanation might make a lot of sense for our oldest, most experienced users, but for many of our users, the term 'MediaWiki' is a mystery. What is MediaWiki and why does Fandom care about it? Doesn’t Fandom have its own unique code? Why does upgr…

In the first half of this year, FANDOM has been steadily rolling out HTTPS to more and more of our network.

HTTPS is a protocol that encrypts data being sent through a webpage, as compared to normal HTTP, which sends data in plaintext. FANDOM has already been encrypting and securely transmitting personal data - such as your login and password details - for many years, but it’s increasingly a web standard to transmit all parts of a website over HTTPS. That’s why we’ve been working to get our entire website HTTPS-compliant.

A few months ago, we finished making logged-in users able to use HTTPS on all single subdomain wikis (i.e.wikis without a language identifier, such as community.wikia.com, compared to ru.community.wikia.com), first using an…

Late last year, we updated the community on our plans to migrate FANDOM to the HTTPS protocol. This is something many of you have wanted to see, just as we have, and a lot more work has been done to help make this happen!

Since our last update, we’ve continued making changes to our codebase to make switching to HTTPS as simple as possible. To kick off the migration, in early February we enabled a preference that allowed FANDOM Staff members to opt-in to having pages served over HTTPS for a number of randomly-chosen communities. After fixing a few bugs and doing some extra future-proofing — making sure images imported through custom JavaScript use the HTTPS protocol, for example — we extended the use of HTTPS to include all communities cover…

Fifteen years ago I started editing my first wiki and it’s been a fun journey ever since - contributor, administrator, code developer, and for many years now FANDOM staff. Wiki coding now comes as naturally to me as breathing (and even easier than breathing today, when I have a cold!), but there was one thing that took me a long, long time to understand - bots.

For the first few years of wiki editing, I heard people use the term “bots” a lot and it was unclear to me what that meant. Were there literally robots sitting at an office somewhere editing wikis? Were bots set up once and then run forever? Did they take breaks to dream of electric sheep? How did I get a bot for my wiki? For that matter, why did I need a bot for my wiki?

Today, I'm g…