Welcome to the February Newsletter - Part Two. We have a lot of ground to cover, with over a week left in the month, so lets get started!

Restructured Forums

We had a few ideas in mind for our forums. We wanted no more than 6 forum boards, and boards with clear purpose that are easy to navigate.

Our Changes

• 'News and Announcements' will mostly be used for highlighted threads

• Replaced 'Questions and Answers' with 'General Discussion'

• Merged 'Fun & Games' with 'Contests and Art Requests' into 'Contests, Requests, and Games'

New Index

• News and Announcements

• General Discussion

• Roleplaying

• Contests, Requests, and Games

• Promotions & Demotions

• Wiki Improvement

New Help Thread

This is a thread users can go to to find useful links and get quick responses to questions they may have. You can find the Help Thread! stickied at the top of the General Discussion board.

If you are a privileged user or a wiki veteran, I would encourage you to press the follow button at the top of the thread, and see when users have questions.

Promotions and Demotions

• • NyIaa is pending a demotion (Feb 28th)
• • Tundra the IceWing is pending a demotion (Feb 28th)
• • Wonder Rainwing is pending a demotion (Feb 28th)

Promotion and Demotion Changes

We did an overhaul of our Help:Promotion and Help:Demotion pages.

Consistency

We had some inconsistent information across our Promotion and Demotion pages

• Help:Promotion said threads were reviewed each month; Help:Demotion said they were reviewed after 2 weeks.

• Help:Promotion required a privileged user to validate a thread; Help:Demotion did not.

• Help:Promotion required a score of 7 to promote; Help:Demotion required a score of 6 to demote.

We decided to go with reviewing threads 2 weeks after their creation, requiring one privileged user of greater or equal position to validate a thread, and a score of 7 for the promotion or demotion to pass.

Comment-Based Voting

During October, when we voted to demote Aiden, we learned from staff that they won't demote a bureaucrat over the results of a poll. The only form of community consensus they will count is a Comment-Based Vote. This resulting discussion led to the development of a comment-based voting system that we intend to use for Admin and Bureaucrat Promotions and Demotions.

• On demotion threads, we will add code to our CSS to hide the usernames and avatars of replies on these demotion threads. Although there are still ways to determine who said the comments, it provides a bit more anonymity.

• On a promotion thread, users may choose to use the Support and Oppose templates. (see below)

• On a demotion thread, users may choose to use the Demote and NoDemote templates. (see below)

• Users will have 2 weeks to place their votes.

• Users who have been part of the wiki for less than a month will not be counted.

• Users may provide an additional comment or discussion, but are not obligated to.

Other

• Renamed 'Help:Promotions' to 'Help:Promotion' for consistency.

• If users try to plea with or confront users to change their vote, please screenshot the exchange and show it to an admin. It will not be tolerated.

New Voting Templates

• Template:Support - Use this template to support a nomination

• Template:Oppose - Use this template to oppose a nomination

• Template:Demote - Use this template to support a demotion

• Template:NoDemote - Use this template to oppose a demotion

Examples

{{Support}}
{{Oppose}}
{{Support|Vic consistently gives users helpful information and his attitude is always so positive. He should totally be promoted!}}
{{Oppose|Vic is not regularly active and does not welcome new users. Do not promote him!}}

Support

Oppose

Support

Vic consistently gives users helpful information and his attitude is always so positive. He should totally be promoted!

Oppose

Vic is not regularly active and does not welcome new users. Do not promote him!

{{Demote}}
{{NoDemote}}
{{Demote|Vic abuses his powers by butting in on other peoples threads.}}
{{NoDemote|Vic has proven himself time and time again. Don't demote him.}}

Demote

Do not demote

Demote

Vic abuses his powers by butting in on other peoples threads.

Do not demote

Vic has proven himself time and time again. Don't demote him.

Other

Wiki Feedback Blog

As a nod to StArchaeopteryx's old Help the Wiki blog, we have a series of polls to collect more specific wiki feedback.

You can find this Wiki Feedback blog on the Help tab of the top navigation.

It asks for specific feedback in the following areas, though you are encouraged to comment your own suggestions and ideas

• Administration

• Character Page / Infoboxes

• Contributions

• Organization

• New Users

• Rules Page

• Wiki Design

Dragon Bullets

Luster the rainwing created these beautiful dragon bullets for us a while back, but we weren't sure how we could use them. It wasn't until our Condensed Polls that we figured out a different way to approach the code.

To use the dragon bullets, surround your bullets in a tag with the class "dragon-bullets", for example:

<div class="dragon-bullets">
My Favorite Things
* Raindrops on roses
* Whiskers on kittens
* Bright copper kettles
* Warm woolen mittens
</div>

results in:

Message Wall Edit Button

We have added some code that should enable edit buttons on our message walls. These edit buttons will allow you to quickly edit your message wall greeting and view your message wall greeting history or your message wall history.

We are still waiting on the code to be reviewed, but it will look something like this:

No More Top 10 Lists

Earlier this month Wikia announced the retirement of our Top 10 Lists. For those of you who didn't know, they were dynamic lists of characters or other things that users could vote on.