Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-5952365-20181208193139


 * Notice: This post has also been highlighted and sent out on the Rise Of The Guardians Wiki, which has already been affected by some of these changes, this Wiki hasn't been affected by any as of yet.

As I'm sure we all know, Wikia has decided to rebrand itself as FANDOM/Fandom and has already begun changing all Wiki URLs to .fandom.com from .wikia.com. The ROTG Wiki has already been migrated over, which was shown in a banner at the top of the screen a little while ago. This Wiki has not been affected yet, but all Wikis will be soon.

Now Wikia(/FANDOM) has announced that the highlight option on Forums will soon be retired in favour of their new Announcements feature. This means that Forum posts will no longer be able to be highlighted and shown in everyone's notifications upon entering that Wiki. Instead, Admins and Discussions Moderators (so Val, Skye and I, to be specific) will have to use Announcements with a link to the Forum post. *Takes deep breath* *SIGHS* OKAY, SO this is a bit of a problem -_- For one, Forum Highlights are short and sweet, you simply make a post (or go to a post that needs to be highlighted) and, well, highlight it. It shows up for everyone who enters the Wiki and isn't intrusive if you aren't on that Wiki at the time. Announcements get sent to everyone who has done anything (comment, edit, make a blog post, upvote a Discussions post) 'on that Wiki within the last two months''. Yes, anyone who has done anything automatically gets a notification for that Announcement'''. So say that there's a really big role play that everyone is a part of, but WHOOPS! It hits the 500 replies limit! So, now a new forum post must be made to continue the role play! Has happened many times here, right? No biggie, just highlight the post and everyone will rejoin and continue! Except, no. Now anyone who has done literally anything on this Wiki within the last two months will also get a notification for it. "Well, Ember, what's wrong with that?" I'll tell you! '''You can not opt out of Announcements easily. There is no default disable button, and unless you know a bit about coding and Dev Wiki you seemingly can not''' disable it. I've seen this become a problem on some popular Wikis where it's actually started arguments because someone didn't want to be notified every week for two months for a Wiki they commented on one time ever. You have to go to your personal JS and add a code from Dev Wiki to disable it. As you can probably imagine by now, this is inherently bad because not everyone, and especially not new Users know how to code on Wikia/FANDOM and that will make this change very confusing to some people.

I will say here and now, however, that if anyone needs help with this or you see in the future that this becomes an issue and someone needs help disabling pesky notifications to just send me a message and I'll guide them through the process.

Secondly, another way that Highlights and Announcements are fundamentally different is how they expire and how many you can have going at once. As explained above, highlights are short and sweet, very simple. Forum posts get highlighted, only people on the Wiki at that time see it, it doesn't intrude onto other Wikis, and it expires in a week or can be unhighlighted before then. Announcements? NAAAHHHH. They expire in a month and can be expired by an Admin or Discussions Mod before then. Now here's the catch: You can only have one Announcement at a time. *...SCREAMS* *Takes a deep breath* *SIGHS* With Highlights you can have many going at the same time, with Announcements you can only have one leading to only one link at a time. That is unbelievably inconvenient -_- So whereas before we could have a joke or game thread (ban the person above you, make the longest sentence, OC trade, etc.), a holiday thread, a role play thread, and a voting or updates thread all at the same time, now we would have to make a post, link it in Announcements, wait for everyone to see it and comment, expire it manually, make another post, link it in Announcements again and do the whole process over and over and over if we want to have multiple important threads going at the same time.

...*Sighs* Just...Ugh, Wikia what are you even doing?? T,T Anyways...If anyone has any questions or anything, I'm highlighting this thread (probably for the last time ever) and will be on standby.

Thanks for the read,

~Ember

Madness is like gravity, all it takes is a little push.  19:31, December 8, 2018 (UTC) 