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Bad news about the highlights function

Antvasima

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Hello.

My sincere apologies about not informing our community about this earlier. I thought that we had considerably more time, and that I might be able to convince the Fandom staff to change their minds.

Anyway, I have been told that the highlights function for our discussion threads will be retired, and have tried over and over and over to plead with and convince Fandom that this is an extremely bad idea that will cause lots of unnecessary problems across many popular wikis, our own in particular, given how dependent we are on our forums, but all to no avail.

This conversation has also been made much more difficult due to that I have had to wait for so long between responses from Bert Hall. The last delay was the worst of all, as his last previous response was on October 24, and then I suddenly received a new one a few hours ago while I was asleep, which stated that the highlights would be retired in early December, meaning just in a few days.

Very regrettably, the only way that the staff will have left to highlight threads is the announcements function, and that can only highlight one discussion thread, blog, or page at a time, which means that we will have to use it to link to lists of the currently most important threads that need community input, that we regularly update it with new threads, along with descriptions of their topics, and that our members, particularly the staff, regularly visit the list in question in order to find new important threads that need their attention.

Bert has created instructions for how to create a template in the link below:

https://announcements-Demon.fandom.com/wiki/Announcements_Demo_Wiki

Unfortunately, I am not familiar with templates, so I would appreciate help from other staff members in this regard.

If this is not possible, we will have to use blog posts or regular threads for the discussion list function instead.

It is also important to note that we will have to create a new highlighted list every 30 days, as that is for how long the announcements last.

Again, I am very sorry about this, but I am afraid that we have to try to make the best out of a bad situation.

https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/Special:AdminDashboard

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Their reasons for removing the highlight function?
 
AKM sama said:
Their reasons for removing the highlight function?
Here is what Bert Hall told me:

"We need to retire the forum highlight function in order to do some work on the Notifications systems.

We don't have any plans to add an option for multiple announcements to the new tool."

I asked him if they could return the highlights function after their technical team finishes with improving on the notifications programming, but have not received a response to this.
 
Therefir said:
Why is Fandom so determined to change things that work completely well? I honestly can't understand it.
Neither can I. Their intended changes just seem to make things worse.
 
Therefir said:
Why is Fandom so determined to change things that work completely well? I honestly can't understand it.
Might be because they have a bunch of sources of user error complaining to be honest

I honestly don't see the problems myself, but, we've got to remember we're one of many Wiki's, so, maybe we just haven't been hit with it.
 
While we are but one of many wikis Fandom in general is being abandoned by more and more wikis because of their changes just being bad and never in the best interest of the users of their wikis, but in the best interest of, well, Fandom's wallets and brand.
 
Cooperate forkery is like a Black hole

They try to get too much money so they collapse inonthemselves, desperate for money from whatever they have left
 
Promestein said:
While we are but one of many wikis Fandom in general is being abandoned by more and more wikis because of their changes just being bad and never in the best interest of the users of their wikis, but in the best interest of, well, Fandom's wallets and brand.
That is unfortunately likely true. They just didn't seem to listen to me regarding either this or the upcoming forced move to the Discussions module, no matter how much I tried to present polite and rational arguments.

Anyway, you and Darkanine are more familiar with programming than I am. Would you be willing to check through Bert Hall's instruction page regarding how to set up a template?
 
Seems like a ploy to push forward this discussions tab absolutely no one cares about.

Thanks, BANDOM.
 
Promestein said:
Template looks simple enough to implement.
Thank you very much for the help.
 
Anyway, I am extremely disappointed in that Fandom does not show more consideration for all of the people who have spent so much free work time building all of these great databases with organised information.
 
It's such nonsense too. The forum system, if anything, would help Fandom since it generates far more pages per wiki that in turn, boosts SEO dramatically. With the name change (wikia > fandom) and the removal of forums, it's like they're digging their own grave at this point. No wonder other communities are jumping ship left and right. Just earlier this week, the Bakugan wiki left Wikia to become its own entity, for example.

What's the link to the template you wanted me to check, by the by?
 
Four, roundabout steps used to do something which used to be done with just the press of a button. Wonderful.

Well, it looks like regular users won't have access to the announcements page, so I can't tell how it looks (and it bugs out pseudomonobook, weird) but it seems easy enough to use. I'd imagine someone on dev wiki will make a toolbar add-on to make the process simpler eventually.
 
@Darkanine

Are you able to help us set up a template for a list function, in which we gradually add links and descriptions to important threads?

We very unfortunately do not seem to have much of a choice here.
 
Azathoth the Abyssal Idiot said:
You guys are nuts.

I'll gladly give up our widely-used highlight feature so that I can read more articles such as "some gamers hate women" and "why this Harry Potter spinoff that's only two films in is better than all of Harry Potter".

Sure, it'll be harder to stay in the loop about important issues that impact enormous parts of our community, but how else will I know if it's cool to be gay for Dumbledore?
God, alot of their articles are just horrible and cancerous.
 
Caling Crimes of Grindlewald better than the Harry Potter series is actually depressing. It was really, really bad.

@Ant. It doesn't seem like our wiki supports the feature yet. Once it's enabled, I'll be glad to help.
 
I'd strongly reccomend making routine backups of the wiki, by the way.

I don't really see FANDOM stopping with nonsense like this, and eventually we'll probably be having some serious discussions about making moves away from it. I co-own another wiki, Deadliest Fiction, and there is some backup plans I've developed to maintain it in case FANDOM goes off its rocker and shunts out its various wikia communities.

I'm not saying the sky is falling, but you have to admit we're starting to see some of the cracks.
 
@Darkanine

Thank you. Could you talk with Fandom about enabling the feature? You are a council member, so perhaps they are more likely to listen to you.

Also, what should we use in the meantime for our single highlight via the announcements function? A regular discussions thread for which the first post is regularly updated with new links to the list by administrators and discussion moderators seems most convenient to me.

@Dargoo

Yes, I am currently investigating another option, but it is too early to say if it is realistic yet.
 
Having a regular discussions thread with important links in the first post seems like the best option.

I'm not sure how feasible this is, but it would be good to make it so that normal users cannot post in that thread, and staff send a new reply and add the link to the original post, rather than just editing it. This way anyone that follows the thread can still get notified of every new "highlight" without having to constantly check it.
 
Well, the only way we can do that is by constantly locking, unlocking, and then locking the thread again.
 
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