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Discussion about the wiki's UCP update, and other important information

Antvasima

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The UCP update:

As most of you already know, our old forum will likely be shut down later today, and the wiki updated to the UCP format.

Some features are inconvenient or not user-friendly yet, but I have talked extensively with the Fandom staff about all the problems that I have found, and they have told me that they will try to fix them gradually.

Among other things, it is not yet possible for me to follow new calculation blog post comments in a practically realistic manner via the recent changes page, as the bad organisation structure for this section would require me to sift through at least several hundred of extremely disorganised Discussions forum post every day to find the blog comments.

However, I will still try to help out with initial standard instructions for newly created blogs, as they can be viewed via another page. The organisation afterwards will require more common sense from the blog creators though, as they will have to notify calc group members via their message walls on their own, without me reminding them, if they have modified their blogs according to calc group member instructions or answered questions from them, as otherwise a large part of them will never be properly evaluated.

It is also best if you all change your user settings to use the source code editor, as it seems to have less editing problems than the alternatives, and also doesn't risk to mess up the code structure of our wiki pages.

Here is an UCP information page that is useful to read:
The Unified Community Platform


Other important issues:

In addition, all members who use a different username in the forum than in the wiki are required to tell me or AKM sama, preferably here in this discussion thread, so we can change them accordingly.

Also, we still only allow one content revision thread per verse at a time in order to avoid extreme overwork.
 
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I mean I would just stick to source editing 100% of the time anyways. Visual Editor has just always been cripplingly limited, and should be discouraged at every turn. Even if you need to, for whatever reason, edit on a mobile platform.

That said working with the UCP has been quite annoying so far with all the formatting changes. I get trying to appeal to mobile users but some of the features broken by this update, at least on the FC/OC side of things, really seems out there.
 
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I'd like to note that on FCOC a lot of things have changed since the updates were applied:
  • I don't think you recieve message wall notifications anymore, so it's best to use the messaging system on the new forum
  • The "Special:Wiki Activity" has been replaced by "Special:RecentChanges" which is vastly inferior. Here's a link to get it back from the dev wiki.
  • Images on verse pages may distort. To fix this issue, make sure that image are cropped properly, as non-cropped images will automatically adjust to appear differently.
 
Well, the Fandom staff has at least taken all my past complaints about the UCP seriously, and are working to solve most of them, so I think that it will gradually improve over time.
 
I have also received message wall notifications in the Tenchi Muyo wiki (which has been converted to the UCP for quite a long time).
 
I will ask NoGround for information about this script:

 
I see. I'm glad to hear that they're taking your criticisms to mind.
 
Yes, but it is easier said than done to handle the programming to find actual solutions to the problems.
 
Somehow, every single aspect of the site was made worse by this update.
  • Numerous APIs were nuked
  • Rolls outside of thread managers and sysops were nuked. You can no longer identify calc team and human resource members from their user profiles.
  • Message wall history was nuked
  • Message walls don't support source code editing or rich text editing
  • The new margins and paragraph spacing makes every single profile look shitty
  • Profile pages look shittier
  • Source editor is shittier
  • Editing in general is more of a hassle and is shittier/less streamlined
  • Images take a metric fuckload of time to upload now for some reason.
  • Recent activity is an incoherent mess when it was previously very intuitive
Thank you, Ant and co. for the Forum Move. I would have seriously just left the site if the new forum wasn't made.
 
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I hate literally everything about these changes, 50% of the images can't even be seen now for some god forsaken reason

**** Fandom with all my heart
 
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Yeah, I had that issue although, I think it fixed itself for me shortly after.

Your image is also...missing. Irony
 
Yeah this blows, was finishing up some final edits from a Zelda CRT and I didn't like it. Images don't seem to load properly or at least take forever to do so, and god is recent changes such a downgrade from recent wiki activity.
 
And now to watch VSB peeps deal with whats been happening on FCOC. Grand times indeed.

385455.png
 
So, the old recent wiki activity page is gone. I sorta preferred that for my own edits, while I used the more complex recent changes page for more general searching.

Old message wall posts are gone, that's a real ******* downer, I think there were some of those I would have liked to at least screencap. (EDIT: Apparently these are still being ported over and will arrive eventually).

I can't see the list of all pages I follow/watch. That's a HUGE pain in the ass. I used that very frequently to briefly see what pages I've made or worked on.

Blog comments now only display the number of comment threads, rather than the total number of comments. That's gonna be extremely annoying. I'll no longer be able to tell if someone has replied for further evaluation/comment unless I check the comments themselves, or they make a new comment thread instead of replying. Ugh.

Not being able to identify calc group/image helpers is a shame.

It looks like we have to type in the categories [[Category:Like This]] at the bottom of the page instead of having a little box for them, which kinda sucks.

They've also removed the category intersection, another useful feature I and many others used from time to time...

I haven't had the same image problems everyone else has, everything else I've seen so far mostly strikes me as different rather than a direct downgrade.

Hope y'all enjoyed my dope UCP review.
 
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I can't really criticize the Fandom staff for whatever they wanted to do, since I don't know much about their motivations and I don't know what is needed to effectively manage such a big website. But from my perspective as an user, this whole update just looks awful.
 
Fandom doesn't care about users, so far I haven't seen a single person who liked this absurd change. **** fandom.
 
Yeah, it seems the trick to several hundred edits via sandbox edits won't be as effective anymore.
 
All the galleries got ****** up on my profiles, now I have to edit them all, Not to mention everything is slower and has more errors and glitches... I hate Fandom so much right now
 
Source editing also just stopped working for some other server reason or something like that
 
I can only hope these things are just initial change errors and everything will load faster and won't give me errors everywhere, cause this shit is a travesty
 
I also have problems with some galleries I made, the new image boxes and the spacing are terrible and I don't think there's a way to get around it.
The preview mode also is awful, since it doesn't show the tabbers
 
Yeah, you need to crop images so that they fit image boxes correctly. Tabbers don't work in preview mode but should work fine when published
 
Yeah, you need to crop images so that they fit image boxes correctly. Tabbers don't work in preview mode but should work fine when published
The problem isn't even that they don't fit (but I'll keep it in mind) but text is too close to the galleries and feels weird, I don't know how to properly explain it
 
Quick information for everyone.
If you see some profiles whose images, gifs etc.. got weird, like giants, out of the borders, out of slideshows etc... you just need to click edit and then save without actually changing anything, then refresh the page and everything will return to normal in the majority of the cases.
It doesn't make any sense, but I hope it will help someone to save time if their profiles got destroyed by this new format
 
Some hopefully helpful information:

You should all use and bookmark this page for edit-patrolling purposes:


The message wall contents will eventually completely return, but it goes slowly to convert.

If a verse page lacks images, you can click the edit button, and then click save without actually doing any changes. That should fix it.

You can all change your personal settings to use the source editor, and I would strongly suggest that you do so. You can either use the 2010 or 2017 version in this regard, but I think that the 2010 version will eventually be removed.

If you are a highly experienced member, such as Agnaa, you can contact Fandom directly with polite and constructive information and suggestions regarding bugs that you have found.


If you scream at or insult them, you will likely get blocked though, so be very careful.

Fandom has in fact already fixed or improved on various issues that I have sent them for the past 2 months or so. Just not nearly all of them, and I sent them a new bug report today containing several crucial issues.

The reason why they did this system update is that their old mediawiki software was outdated by over a decade, so they could not push this change to the future any more.
 
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Can they only be contacted for bugs, or could I contact them for feature requests? If I can contact them for feature requests, what categories should I use within that form?
 
What kind of feature requests do you want to make?

For the time being, it seems best to focus on crucial user interface and usefulness problems though. We mainly need to be able to edit easily to properly do our work.
 
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