Announcing Fandom's 2024 Community Connect in Phoenix, Arizona
It’s that time of year again: we are thrilled to announce that Community Connect 2024 is coming soon!
This year’s Community Connect will be from Sunday, April 28th to Thursday, May 2nd in Phoenix, Arizona. This year’s event will bring together 40 admins and editors from some of Fandom’s top communities, along with a number of Fandom staff members across teams like Community, Product, Engineering, and more. The event gives editors and staff alike the chance to talk face-to-face about what Fandom is working on this year, and provides an opportunity for attendees to provide feedback directly to staff about what they’d like to see from Fandom.
What we love most about Community Connect, and why keep hosting it, is that it’s always been about buil…
Technical Updates: January 26, 2024
Hello hello! And welcome to the first tech update from 2024. It has been a long time since our previous update and code freeze on December 15th, so we have a lot of changes to announce this time! Please keep in mind that this is just a snapshot of the work done during the last weeks, we are featuring only the most relevant updates.
But let’s talk about the most recent changes!
- 1 Notable changes
- 2 Recent Fixes
- 2.1 User Experience
- 2.2 Traffic team
- To avoid unwanted image uploads, user avatar changes will only go live on the platform after you save the changes.
- Submitting the account registration form no longer clears all fields if the username is unavailable.
- Map namespace is localized for non-English languages now.
- Template pages created by the new Info…
Your Guide to Asking Questions on Community Central
This blog post is a short guide to asking questions using Community Central's (aka CC/CC's) discussions feature. CC discussions serves as a place for users to ask questions about wikis, or about Fandom as a platform; it's a help forum. There are lots of super-smart people on CC's discussions that try their best to answer the questions people ask.
However, questions here are often carried out in ways that are confusing, difficult to understand, or unclear. To counter that, this blog was written as a "guide" to asking questions on Community Central, to help maintain productivity across the forums. This post goes over an easy format for asking questions on Community Central, as well as other notes in regards to asking questions here.
Please note th…
A Look Back at Our Work on Performance in 2023
A few months ago, we teased that we had a taskforce working on improving platform performance for all of our users. As we start to wind down the year, we wanted to take a moment to update you on those improvements and share the positive results that we’ve seen throughout 2023 to make the site work even better for all users. These are mighty but often unseen changes you may not have heard about or noticed, so we wanted to show you what our tech team has been hard at work on throughout 2023 – in addition to some of the improvements we’ve already made to wiki editing this year.
Let’s take a look at the results and see what we were able to accomplish to make the site perform better for our audiences.
- 1 Performance matters
- 2 Taskforce Assemble!
- 3 How …
2023 Year-End Reflection from Fandom's CEO
Although I can’t say I’ve watched every Star Trek show or movie over the last 57 years of the franchise, I’m close. I’m a dedicated fan of The Next Generation, and I think Strange New Worlds is a strong contender for second place (including this fall’s new season) – I’m forever grateful to the admins on Memory Alpha. I’m also a big fantasy nerd, so kudos to Baldur’s Gate III for winning Game of the Year at The Game Awards this year – and thanks to the Forgotten Realms wiki editors for covering the game.
It was a strong year for gaming releases overall, including Resident Evil 4, Legends of Zelda, Final Fantasy 16 and Starfield. This helped drive a record year for fans buying games, including on Fanatical. On the TV front, we saw The Last of…
Technical Updates: December 15, 2023
Hello hello! Check out the latest Technical Updates since December 1st. This is the last tech update of 2023, as we go into a code-freeze at the end of the year, meaning that we won’t release more bug fixes until next year.
But let’s talk about the most recent changes!
- 1 Recent Fixes
- 2 Fixes in Development
- 3 Development Updates
- 3.1 User-Generated Content (UGC) team
- 3.2 User Experience
- 3.3 Traffic team
- Avatar quality has been improved in the global nav.
- tag was unreadable on dark theme when display=”block” is used in FandomMobile.
- Disabled accounts with rights on a wiki aren’t counted in the list of rights in Special:ListUsers anymore.
- Clicking the infobox image in FandomMobile will load that image again rather than the second one.
- Pages with quotation marks…
Examining How Fandom Used Generative AI in 2023
There was no bigger topic in technology than Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI, or even GenAI for short) in 2023. Generative AI really burst onto the scene around this time last year with OpenAI's introduction of ChatGPT, a basic chat interface that allows you to ask complex questions into their large-language model and get back a really detailed, and often creative, response. Since then, we've seen it used, for better or worse in a variety of ways across the internet.
We're not going to explain Generative AI at length in today's blog. If you're just hearing about Generative AI, chances are your name is Steve Rogers and you have a lot more to catch up on than just this topic. Here's a solid explainer on the basics of GenAI: …
Technical Updates: December 1, 2023
Hello hello!
Check out the latest Technical Updates since November 17th. We’ve been publishing these tech updates on a bi-weekly basis, so the next one will be on December 15th. However, that one will be the last update of 2023, as we go into a code-freeze at the end of the year, meaning that we will not be releasing anything major. You can expect these to resume in January as usual.
- 1 Notable changes
- 2 Recent Fixes
- 3 Fixes in Development
- 4 Development Updates
- 4.1 User-Generated Content (UGC) team
- 4.2 User Experience
- 4.3 Traffic team
- Highlight menu redesign: After a successful recent experiment, we are adding an edit entry point onto the highlight to search menu for logged-in users. The experiment saw more logged-in users opening the editor as well as an …
Ad Free Logged-In Experience Expanding to Gamepedia
Hey, everyone!
Starting next week, Fandom will stop serving ads to logged-in users browsing wikis that originated on the Gamepedia platform. This ensures the logged-in experience from the historical Gamepedia wikis are consistent with the rest of the Fandom platform. This means if you are logged in on any wiki you will by default not see any ads outside of some ads on the main page.
Consistent with our desire to give registered users as many choices to how they read and edit wikis as possible, there is an option in your preferences to see ads on Fandom should you want to. That is located at the bottom of the "User profile" tab.
Let’s start with the most important reason we made this change - Fandom values our editor community. Even though we …
Thanks extension is now available to all communities
Hello everyone!
It's been a while since my last post here, and now it's an excellent chance to share some good news with all of you. After a long journey throughout this year, we are now making the Thanks extension available to all communities.
Whether this is the first time you're hearing about this extension, or if you've already been part of its early testing, you'll find out all the details about what this entails and how we've been working on this in 2023. Let's start!
- 1 What is Thanks and why did we add it to the platform?
- 2 Why did we finally choose to implement Thanks?
- 3 How have we been implementing Thanks on Fandom?
- 4 How does the extension work and how can I enable it?
- 5 Closing remarks
For details about how the extension works, please see th…