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Extremely good and somewhat bad news

Antvasima

Maintenance worker
He/Him
VS Battles
Bureaucrat
Administrator
164,978
71,708
First the extremely good news:


After roughly 11 months of persistent lobbying (nagging) towards my Fandom bosses, we have been allowed to place an image link to a reliable charity of our choice at the bottom of our wiki's front page.

This is an extremely important issue for me, as I want to do some good for the world through our work, and this will also create a precedent for other prominent wikis, as, if I have understood correctly, they are allowed to do the same thing if they become inspired by our example, which can create a great positive effect for our world, if a large part of Fandom's enormous monthly global audience begins to see these advertisements.

Here is the charity fund that our bureaucrats and administrators have agreed to use. It very carefully allocates funds to the charity projects that give the greatest genuinely positive practical results.

https://animalcharityevaluators.org/donate/

We have chosen an animal charity because they and environmental charities together only receive around 3% of all donations to charities in the United States, of which only 2% goes to farmed animals, and because animals are generally treated far worse than even poor humans in this world, despite that dogs and many other animals are usually much kinder than most humans.

https://faunalytics.org/giving-to-animals-new-data-who-how/#:~:text=In spite of this upward,just 3% of all donations.

https://animalcharityevaluators.org/donation-advice/why-farmed-animals

And here are the reasons why we selected Animal Charity Evaluators in particular:

  • ACE offers four alternative funds of focus for people to donate to, depending on their personal preferences.
  • They focus on donating to the charity projects that give the greatest amount of positive effects at the time, which means that they have a high degree of flexibility.
  • They have different payment methods available, even including cryptocurrencies, and such payments can be made internationally.
  • If our visitors want to donate to a more specific cause or geographic area, linking to the ACE site in the first place allows them to browse through their evaluations of different charities, and select one from there.

I initially spent a lot of time getting ChatGPT4 to design an appropriate advertisement banner image for us featuring common household pets, and another with a sufficiently good-looking donation sign, and then MonkeyOfLife was extremely kind enough to improve on the sign quality and merge them together. After this, DarkGrath further improved on the look of the sign.

However, given that artificial intelligence images are a very controversial issue, our staff later decided to use an image found by Armorchompy that features real world animals instead. DarkGrath extremely kindly further improved on this image.

Here are the images in question:

Our final image:

1000050907.png

The A.I. image:

1000050909.jpg

You can all see the finished result in the front page of our wiki if you wish:

https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/VS_Battles_Wiki

I think that these are really great news, as we are able to genuinely help the world this way.

🙂💖❤️🥰🥳🎊🎉🙏🙇‍♂️


-----------------


Also, if bureaucrats from other wikis are interested in following our example, here are my recommendations for how to find reliable charities, so you avoid accidentally promoting scams or inefficient charities where all the money goes to bureaucracy:

1. GiveWell: This organization is known for its in-depth research and strict criteria for recommending charities. They focus on transparency, cost-effectiveness, and evidence-backed interventions. The charities they recommend typically work in the fields of public health, poverty alleviation, and economic development.

https://www.givewell.org

2. The Life You Can Save: This platform recommends a list of effective charities based on evidence and efficiency. They span a range of issues from global health to economic empowerment.

https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org

3. Charity Navigator: One of the most well-known charity evaluators, Charity Navigator rates thousands of charities based on their financial health, accountability, and transparency. They are not always able to directly assess the impact of charities, but their ratings can help donors avoid organizations with administrative issues. However, as stated above, their metrics do not necessarily capture the overall effectiveness of every charity.

https://www.charitynavigator.org

4. CharityWatch: They rate charities based on their financial efficiency and governance. Their methodology focuses on the percentage of funds that go to programs versus administration and fundraising. However, similarly to Charity Navigator, its evaluations allegedly focus more on financial metrics than on overall effectiveness.

https://www.charitywatch.org

5. Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE): ACE evaluates animal charities based on their effectiveness, impact, and methods. ACE is valued within the effective altruism community for its focus on evidence and impact in the animal welfare space. They offer detailed evaluations of animal charities, emphasizing both effectiveness and neglectedness.

https://animalcharityevaluators.org


However, bureaucrats from other communities very likely need to ask Fandom's official staff for permission before they are allowed to add a front page advertisement for their respective home wikis:

https://support.fandom.com/hc/en-us/requests/new


-----------------


And now for the somewhat bad news:

As I have already told our staff members, we currently have the chance to get a much better advertisement provider, but in order to be accepted we need to reduce the number of posts per discussion thread page from 100 to 40.

This will help us greatly increase our page view and impression statistics, give us more ad impressions/more revenue, and also make the page loading lighter and as such make the load speed faster.

In addition, for pages with more limited content, we can enable an advertisement sidebar for desktop viewing, which will not be seen in tablets or mobile phones.

Since our discussion threads contain 100 posts per page, which is extremely big content-wise, it is also hurting our Search Engine Optimisation ranking, due to that Google recommends 20 posts per page, so we must do something about this problem, as our SEO is very important for us.

We will still have a practically unlimited number of posts available in every discussion thread, just fewer posts per page.

However, it is not possible for page length to differ from person to person, so staff members and Patreon donators cannot display a higher amount of messages per page. We will all simply have to begin to open two tabs at once for a thread if we want a better overview.


🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
 
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Contributing to an animal charity is indeed a commendable idea. I strongly favor the initial image selection, as the AI-generated image appears considerably less natural.

Regarding the post count per page, the number 40 seems to strike a suitable balance. To be candid, a limit of 100 posts per page was somewhat excessive, while the allocation of 20 posts per page is inadequate, given the extensive discourse typically observed in this community, particularly within General Discussion threads where it is not uncommon to surpass 1,000 posts within a single thread.
 
We already use that:

 
I think both images are fine, but as I said when I was first shown the AI image, I understand why a lot of people may be miffed about using it- which appears to be the case-, so for the sake of speed I think the normal image is the better choice

I've also already said my piece regarding the page limit. It must be done, even if it is a negative, particularly for those of us that occasionally have to go through very long threads for specific things. It is what it is.
 
Everybody, please inspect our wiki's front page, and tell me is the image size seems appropriate, or if it should be slightly adjusted. 🙏
 
Everybody, please inspect our wiki's front page, and tell me is the image size seems appropriate, or if it should be slightly adjusted. 🙏
I think it'd be nice if the elements on the right side of the page, such as "New Members", "Forum", and "Statistics" weren't interrupted by it. As with that interruption, there's a bit of a strange gap on desktop.
 
As I've expressed in the lead-up to this announcement, this is a wonderful goal that I'm very happy to see coming to fruition. I'm glad to have been of assistance, and I hope this will motivate bureaucrats of other wikis to pursue similar goals in the future.

And while the post count per page being reduced may be jarring at first, and will be objectively less practical, I highly doubt it will severely diminish the quality of the forum experience. These are the kinds of perfectly reasonable compromises that must be made to facilitate our more important functions.
 
Yes. While the banner width isn't perfect, I don't think such precise scaling is possible with the tools Fandom's currently given us. It's a good step up, about as good as we can hope for imo.
 
Thank you for helping out. 🙏

Should I increase the displayed image size from 600px to 650px?
 
Hmm. I will ask our wiki representative for help.

Thank you for the information. 🙏
 
Great and noble endeavour. Honest to God, the second image fills more natural to me, but if people don't like AI - they would probably be swayed away from it, which is counter-productive. And number of posts is fine too.
(Feels weird being the second non-staff commenting)
 
A question that did not cross my mind at the time: how will old links directing to specific thread pages work after the post limit is slashed?
 
A question that did not cross my mind at the time: how will old links directing to specific thread pages work after the post limit is slashed?
I think that only the final page numbers after the slash (/) at the end of each main discussion thread link will change, not links to the threads as a whole or links to individual posts, but I will ask our forum system administrator. 🙏
 
Non-AI image is better for use, yeah.

As for 40 posts per page, so long as there aren't any complications with current links when we change that, I'm alright with it. It's far from the end of the world.
 
A question that did not cross my mind at the time: how will old links directing to specific thread pages work after the post limit is slashed?
I thought about this myself. Links to posts thankfully do not have page numbers associated, for instance:
https://vsbattles.com/threads/extremely-good-and-somewhat-bad-news.160174/post-6132621

However page links will probably become incorrect like the following:
https://vsbattles.com/threads/information-about-our-recent-forum-server-move.159172/page-2

This will likely now bring us to a page starting on the 41st comment. Might be a bit of a hiccup in certain instances but I think most often people just link individual posts, so not a huge problem.
 
Just want to point out something mentioned in discord, wouldn't be better another image for the charity considering that the animals of the image are mostly domestic ones and the charity is specifically aimed at farm animals?
 
As I have already told our staff members, we currently have the chance to get a much better advertisement provider, but in order to be accepted we need to reduce the number of posts per discussion thread page from 100 to 40.
Ah, man. Guess the OPM thread won't be able to naturally reach 1,000, or even 2,000 pages...

This will immediately bring it up to 2075 pages, if I am understanding correctly.

Goddamn.

This is pretty fine, but man, it will be a bit harder to sift through big threads. 1 page is now 2.5 pages. 5 pages is 12.5 pages. Oh boy.

Just want to point out something mentioned in discord, wouldn't be better another image for the charity considering that the animals of the image are mostly domestic ones and the charity is specifically aimed at farm animals?
I agree with this, btw.
 
Ah, man. Guess the OPM thread won't be able to naturally reach 1,000, or even 2,000 pages...

This will immediately bring it up to 2075 pages, if I am understanding correctly.
Funny because that was the exact same thing I said in discord when explaining this.
 
Just want to point out something mentioned in discord, wouldn't be better another image for the charity considering that the animals of the image are mostly domestic ones and the charity is specifically aimed at farm animals?
The point is to raise some measure of compassion and interest from our visitors, and people in general unfortunately tend to be selective sociopaths when it comes to animal welfare. They care a lot about dogs and cats, and recurrently dolphins, but if we displayed an image featuring a pig, a cow, and a chicken, they likely wouldn't care if they are systematically tortured to death by the trillions, even though all sentient or at least sapient life is sacred in my view.

At least more people will visit the information page for our featured charity to receive further information.
 
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Ah, man. Guess the OPM thread won't be able to naturally reach 1,000, or even 2,000 pages...

This will immediately bring it up to 2075 pages, if I am understanding correctly.

Goddamn.
Well, you can always aim for 3,000 or 5,000 instead...
 
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That isn't the donation link, its a link to this thread, that happened cus Ant pinned it. The actual donation link is on the home page for the wiki not the forum. Right here.
Yes, it seemed to work better as a highlight image.
 
Will the 10 limit page per discussion be kept? So discussion end at 400 posts instead of 1000?
No. Our discussion threads will be able to continue and continue and continue, as usual.

I mentioned this in my first post here in this thread.
 
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