Hey, wikians, happy Summer Solstice! We hope you’re not melting over there—it’s probably only going to get warmer from here on out.
This newsletter is surprisingly long! We expected it to be a good bit shorter when we sat down to start writing it. We’re covering a whole bunch of stuff this time:
Updates to the Wiki Theme;
Updates to our Rules;
Moderator Team Status;
Changes to our Templates;
Some Discussions Stuff;
A Whole Bunch of Miscellaneous Stuff; and
Upcoming Changes.
Without further ado, let's get into things.
Updates to the Wiki Theme
Pride month
We had the usual things this year (pride themed favicon, logo) but we also tried something new out: Pride buttons!
After pride month is over a slightly more muted version of the themed buttons will stick around year-round in gadget form for those who like it. Like all gadgets it will be togglable in your preferences.
New Wiki Skin
As you’ve almost certainly noticed, we have a new wiki skin! It’s opt-in for now, but will eventually replace the current default skin (known as Oasis). We (read: Forge) are pretty happy with the way it’s looking, and hope you are too <3
The appearance of our Oasis theme has had a few updates to match the upcoming FandomDesktop theme in hopes of smoothing the transition. This mainly applies to our home page and our infoboxes.
New Discord Widget
To match the new theme a little better we’ve replaced our old hand-written discord widget with a spiffy new customized version of the Dev Wiki’s Discord widget:
(Old on the left, new on the right)
The new widget automatically changes colors based on your current FandomDesktop theme. For those still using Oasis the widget will always be light themed.
Header Navigation Redesign
Our header navigation has finally received the redesign mentioned at the bottom of the category overhaul voting thread:
(Old on the top, new on the bottom)
Our hope is it makes the wiki massively more discoverable for new users who don’t know the category names yet. If you feel like further improvements can be made, or if you liked something about the old layout better, please let us know!
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Updates to our Rules
Our stance on using images in your avatar has been clarified: Provided you can credit the image’s artist or photographer, you’re good to use whatever you want in your avatar (even if the artist hasn’t specifically said it’s allowed). (Content Policy rule 3.b)
The Wings of Fire Fanon Wiki has legalized weed! Wow, we’re better at this thing than half of Europe.
Like smoking and alcohol, mentions of marijuana are now allowed provided you add a mature content warning to your page/post/reply. (Content Policy rule 4.a, Discussion policy)
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Moderator Team Status
Sunset has been promoted to content moderator! Fae is a wonderful person and we welcome faer to the moderator team with open arms.
Storm is still planning on stepping down sometime this summer, probably after we have a few more moderators promoted.
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Changes to our Templates
The “Template:Tribe Banner” page has been renamed to “Template:Tribe” to better fit in with the other templates, and has been converted into the PortableInfobox markup, which has two primary benefits:
It looks a great deal nicer for both desktop users and (especially) mobile users
The image that appears when the page is in Popular Pages and in the page’s Discussions tag will be the tribe sigil instead of whatever the first gallery image is.
Additionally the “header” field has been renamed “tribe” and two new fields, “owner” and “permission”, have been added. All official tribes have been updated, but you’ll need to update your blog posts.
We’ve added a Tribe Subspecies template for all subspecies of canon tribes. This new infobox is very similar in appearance to the updated Tribe infobox with minor additions to better accommodate subspecies.
We’re currently in the process of migrating the existing subspecies to the new infoboxes.
We’ve also added a “Tochidden” template which allows you to visually hide the Table of Contents like you do with “__NOTOC__” while keeping it accessible in FandomDesktop’s side-tools and for mobile users.
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Some Discussions Stuff
We recently added a Wiki Support Category and are seeing how it works out. “How do i do X?”, “Can you make me a page?”, code questions, and anything else you need help with all goes in the wiki support category!
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A Whole Bunch of Miscellaneous Stuff
The old Help Directory page now points people to Special:Community where the same information lives at the bottom of the page.
The old (almost four years old!) “Roles of Promoted Users” thread has been showing its age for a very long time. It’s finally been archived and replaced with a much nicer version.
The gadget fonts introduced way back in the 2020 Autumn Newsletter have all been added to the wiki css itself and the gadgets have been deleted. This means anyone who had a “This page looks best with the font gadgets enabled” notice on their pages can now remove them.
We’re also now importing a few more scripts. One lets you upload multiple files at once, one will make the Recent Changes rail module much more handy, and one will automatically create new user’s pages for them so you can search for their names.
DPLForums has been fully shut down after an incredibly inactive life. rip. Forge really wanted to put a zombie joke here but she couldn’t decide how to phrase one </3
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Upcoming Changes
Wiki Makeover Contest
Now that we have access to the new skin and its updated ThemeDesigner we can finally release a few more details about the upcoming Wiki Makeover Contest!
For the theme portion of the contest you’ll be picking two sets of colors: one for the light theme, one for the dark theme. Each set will have four colors: one for the page background, one for links, one for buttons, and one for the sticky header. The colors for the two themes should be similar but definitely do not have to be identical.
The image portion of the contest will proceed as normal based on the winning light/dark dark theme (artist’s choice). As usual, the first-place winner’s image will become the new background image. Unlike usual, the second-place winner’s image will appear where the grey Fandom logo currently is on Special:Community!
The first part of the contest should be announced a week or two after this newsletter. We’re super excited for this and hope you are too!!
Rewritten Discussion Guidelines
We’re currently in the process of rewriting our Discussion Guidelines. The one on our rules page and the one actually on Discussions will be merged and updated.
New Newsletter Schedule
We’re switching newsletters from following the astronomical seasons (newsletter gets posted on whenever the season equinox/solstice is) to following the meteorological seasons (newsletter gets posted on March 1, June 1, September 1, December 1).
This makes things a lot easier to remember (for us, anyway) since we won’t have to look things like “when is the autumn equinox 2021” up. The Newsletter Archive page has been updated to include the new schedule.
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Please remember to categorize your discussion posts correctly! Posts showing off artwork of any kind should go in Creativity, and anything related to roleplaying (including polls about roleplaying) should go in Roleplaying.
As always, off-topic posts will be deleted. Any and all replies to this newsletter that are just “first”/“second”/“third”/etc will also be deleted.
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