The Future of FC/OC (Major Changes to Policy and Content Standards)

[Rayfire]

Even among battleboarders this isn't a very large contingent; I know of many users (including myself) that have actually written stuff and have never had an interest in chucking it on FC/OC, which won't be changed by deleting a bunch of profiles & tightening up standards.

This is mainly concerning people who will want to index their stuff on FC/OC though, people who don't want to are irrelevant if they aren't gonna be on here either way, most of this community are casuals or minors, and not a lot of them want to write a 30k byte essay on their character when a lot of summaries on vsb are quite brief for the sake of convenience and the lack of extreme need to describe the character in detail when that's mostly already done in source material.

I have some suggestions that I think would do a lot more to help it be a site for writing characters and stories, if y'all're interested. I think this current approach will just shrink the userbase, leading to less quality, leading to a bit of a death spiral over the next few years unless something comes to change it. But if you decide to go for it anyway, then I just hope I'm wrong.

Everybody agrees that this is what's going to happen, so some input could do some good

 

[Agnaa]

Sure. I'd love to hear your ideas, Agnaa. Feel free to comment here or on the server.

Two motivators that I've noticed be a lot of help in smaller communities like this are collaborative projects, and rewards.

Broad strokes, collaborative projects can be things like:

• Having a community contest to write a bunch of short stories under a collective theme, to be compiled into a PDF for everyone to read afterwards.
• Organising a relay novel; each person writes a chapter at a time (with certain word limits), before passing it off to the next person, ending up with a full linear book at the end of it. Although this can run into issues if people end up writing slowly, having life issues, dropping out with no warning, etc.
• Have one user write the start of a story, and then invite members of the community to write the rest of it. As with above, these can be compiled into a larger tome afterwards.

Broad strokes, rewards could be granted for taking actions like:

• Winning a writing competition hosted in the community.
• Hitting a certain milestone of writing in their own worlds on their own time (say, after the first 50k words they've written in one world).
• Helping with the quality of the site.

And these rewards could be things like:

• Receiving fanart, either commissioned or drawn by a member of the community.
• Having a page of theirs highlighted, either in the Discord or on the front page itself (maybe in the gallery?).
• Have a profile for one of their OCs researched and made by a member of the community.

Finally, a rule suggestion I'm leaving to the end since I'm not sure if it's already a thing. There's a lot more to the profiles than the vsbw-like main sections, so don't make those mandatory if the rest of the page is high-quality. Currently, the front page presents the wiki as one for versus debating with original characters or characters from fanfiction; this could be reframed to being about discussion and analysis of original characters, often with a versus debating sort of angle. The Getting Started on FC/OC page focuses on making pages in line with the standard format, including every relevant statistic and the like. If you want to more lean into the amateur writing angle, you could make almost all of this optional, if it in general meets certain standards of quality.

This is mainly concerning people who will want to index their stuff on FC/OC though, people who don't want to are irrelevant if they aren't gonna be on here either way, most of this community are casuals or minors, and not a lot of them want to write a 30k byte essay on their character when a lot of summaries on vsb are quite brief for the sake of convenience and the lack of extreme need to describe the character in detail when that's mostly already done in source material.

I may not want to make a profile for my own characters, but I'd be down to write some short stories for an FC/OC community event. I think that could be a valid part of the community.

 

[HonestlyBored24]

 

[Rayfire]

Most of the community is in the same boat...

 

[Phoenks]

Two motivators that I've noticed be a lot of help in smaller communities like this are collaborative projects, and rewards.

Broad strokes, collaborative projects can be things like:

• Having a community contest to write a bunch of short stories under a collective theme, to be compiled into a PDF for everyone to read afterwards.
• Organising a relay novel; each person writes a chapter at a time (with certain word limits), before passing it off to the next person, ending up with a full linear book at the end of it. Although this can run into issues if people end up writing slowly, having life issues, dropping out with no warning, etc.
• Have one user write the start of a story, and then invite members of the community to write the rest of it. As with above, these can be compiled into a larger tome afterwards.

Broad strokes, rewards could be granted for taking actions like:

• Winning a writing competition hosted in the community.
• Hitting a certain milestone of writing in their own worlds on their own time (say, after the first 50k words they've written in one world).
• Helping with the quality of the site.

And these rewards could be things like:

• Receiving fanart, either commissioned or drawn by a member of the community.
• Having a page of theirs highlighted, either in the Discord or on the front page itself (maybe in the gallery?).
• Have a profile for one of their OCs researched and made by a member of the community.

Finally, a rule suggestion I'm leaving to the end since I'm not sure if it's already a thing. There's a lot more to the profiles than the vsbw-like main sections, so don't make those mandatory if the rest of the page is high-quality. Currently, the front page presents the wiki as one for versus debating with original characters or characters from fanfiction; this could be reframed to being about discussion and analysis of original characters, often with a versus debating sort of angle. The Getting Started on FC/OC page focuses on making pages in line with the standard format, including every relevant statistic and the like. If you want to more lean into the amateur writing angle, you could make almost all of this optional, if it in general meets certain standards of quality.

I may not want to make a profile for my own characters, but I'd be down to write some short stories for an FC/OC community event. I think that could be a valid part of the community.

I'll take all of this into mind. Thanks.

I may also need to clarify our quality standards and format more.

It seems many people at the moment think they are way higher than they actually are supposed to be.

But, the fact does stand that we do need to clean up a large portion of the wiki and enforce some standards overall. We've basically had zero standards going on years now for anything that wasn't Tier 1/0.

 

[Rayfire]

Is it possible to get a non-staff vote for this here though? A good chunk of users of FC/OC are significantly affected by this, since nobody likes their hard work losing half it's purpose if it gets deleted (FC/OC VSBATTLES Is literally the title lol) And the DEATH BATTLE! supports are facing the brunt of it. All of them made dozens upon dozens of profiles. They don't deserve this at all.

Nobody thinks getting rid of 4/5 of the wiki is a good idea, and everyone so far feels it's going to destroy a lot of the community if the standards for FC's become far more strict than they are already. Especially on this forum, where a lack of profiles means the vsbattles section will become way less active, and we'll essentially be Joke Battles 2.0

So, yeah, i feel like we deserve a chance to voice our opinion on this and get a say in whether this goes through or not, considering this affects most of the wiki's userbase. We should get a say in what happens to us and what doesn't

 

[Nierre]

not involved in FC/OC at all however, I do understand where Phoenks and the other staff are coming from, but still quite an upsetting change nonetheless

 

[Rayfire]

I do understand where Phoenks and the other staff are coming from, but still quite an upsetting change nonetheless

I do agree that the premise of the changes makes sense, but the way it's being executed is just... not fit for this type of community and how much hard work's already gone into profiles, calcs, etc for the things that are gonna get removed. The profile standards were clarified in discord and they seem mostly the same of what we already want for profiles, but there's still a lot of insanely controversial changes

 

[TheShape03]

A SIGNIFICANT portion of the site is likely to be affected by these changes. Below is a review of some of the most popular examples:

• Skibidi Toilet: This has been a long time coming. Skibidi Toilet has become an official product, with a movie in production and collaborations with Fortnite. As such, it is no longer considered fan content in any capacity. Additionally, due to its wildly unserious and memetic nature, it is not suited for inclusion on this wiki in the first place.
• SMG4: SMG4 is far too unserious and heavily memetic in its origins to remain on this wiki.
• Most Minecraft Mods: Most Minecraft mods lack sufficient narrative context to be notable enough for inclusion. Minecraft is primarily a mechanics-driven game with little to no inherent lore or story, and most mods reflect this reality.
• Most Roblox Games: Roblox is a game engine that facilitates the creation of original content, much like Unreal Engine or Unity. Consequently, any original Roblox game not created by FC/OC users will no longer be allowed. Additionally, many Roblox games lack substantial storytelling or are excessively unserious and memetic in nature.
• DEATH BATTLE!: Due to the reliance on brief fight animations where the characters portrayed are nearly identical to their canon counterparts, DEATH BATTLE! will no longer meet our standards for fan content. As fan fiction, it represents much of what we aim to move away from—characters that are indistinguishable from their canonical versions, with only superficial changes such as being weaker or stronger than their original depictions.
• All YouTube-Based Original Content: As this content does not meet the requirement for original creations to be user-generated, all YouTube-based original profiles will be removed.
• Many Sonic Fan Characters (FCs): Most Sonic FCs are uncreative spinoffs that often fail to meet the originality and depth required by our policy standards. EXE characters, in particular, tend to appeal to a younger audience that does not critically engage with aspects like character personality, plot, or originality.

So, can these things be moved to Alt Battles Wiki or are they not allowed there either?

Damn, I have a lot of things to move...

 

[Phoenks]

So, can these things be moved to Alt Battles Wiki or are they not allowed there either?

Original content that isn't user-made is likely to be allowed on there. Depends what it is.

As for fan fiction and stuff like that... probably not.

 

[TheLunyFan]

Original Content which is not created by FC/OC users is not allowed.

what the **** are you on
genuinely, this one rule alone f*cks up the wiki so much, you're just asking for people to leave.
Remove this rule at least, everything else is fine but this one rule will severely downgrade FC/OC.

 

[TheShape03]

Original content that isn't user-made is likely to be allowed on there. Depends what it is.

As for fan fiction and stuff like that... probably not.

I see.

Are things like Creepypastas (Ignoring the .exes), Slenderverse, and Power Star allowed under the new standards or will they be removed as well?

 

[HonestlyBored24]

Original content that isn't user-made is likely to be allowed on there. Depends what it is.

As for fan fiction and stuff like that... probably not.

Where am I supposed to put my goobers then??

 

[Volt12121]

Where am I supposed to put my goobers then??

The anwsers so far have been Alt wiki or make up your own wiki

 

[ShockingPsychic]

I will always encourage an effort to get higher-quality profiles, but these content guidelines are ridiculous. From what I can tell, this throws away most of the wiki's most popular and highest quality pages/verses.

Sonic.EXE (Canon), Pillar Chase 2, Death Battle, Fallout Equestria, Glitchtale, Dream SMP, Hypno's Lullaby, Jeff the Killer, Fundamental Paper Education...

I also think some of the blacklisted stuff is being hit with a ton of bias... Things can't be too silly in nature to be on the wiki, yet we feature multiple comedy-centric verses on the main wiki. We have Annoying Orange on the main wiki. We have Scary Movie on the main wiki. I also think the reason for EXEs being blacklisted is a bit mean-spirited. You're essentially saying we shouldn't host EXEs because some of the fanbase is braindead, lol.

I want to ask the mods to please listen to the community on this one. These are not good changes. You're getting such intense backlash for a reason.

 

[Phoenks]

Sonic.EXE (Canon), Pillar Chase 2, Death Battle, Fallout Equestria, Glitchtale, Dream SMP, Hypno's Lullaby, Jeff the Killer, Fundamental Paper Education...

Most of these are staying, though?

The only one out of these that would be removed is Death Battle, from what I can tell at a glance.

 

[TheShape03]

Okay, I'm going to be honest, too honest. This is nonsense, and I say nonsense so as not to say something worse.

This is going to make this wiki (which is currently barely staying alive) die. Most of the users here are here to analyze fan characters and since the wiki is called "FC/OC" I don't understand the reason for setting a super high standard for having fan characters but allowing any OC, I can't think of a reason. why this is a good idea, it's like telling everyone to "get out of here."

We have determined this to be at great detriment to the overall quality and character of the site.

That keeps the site alive.

Furthermore, it has come to the point that we are simply indexing far more than our small team can possibly moderate effectively.

And wouldn't the answer be... getting more people and making the team bigger?

• Quality Standards in general have been raised to combat the ever-growing pile of low quality pages on this site.

The best way to deal with that is, you know, delete them and say "it was deleted because of low quality, we put it in a sandbox, try to improve it/not allowed here."

Most Roblox Games: Roblox is a game engine that facilitates the creation of original content, much like Unreal Engine or Unity. Consequently, any original Roblox game not created by FC/OC users will no longer be allowed. Additionally, many Roblox games lack substantial storytelling or are excessively unserious and memetic in nature.

And what...? Since when does a character have to be completely serious to have a profile on the wiki?

 

[That_moron2]

lmao

 

[HonestlyBored24]

make your own wiki

 

[El_rapero_de_tf2]

i don't understand the "deleting stuff that attracts a younger audience" part
like, if we were to go for that logic, vsbw should delete the FNaF and Poppy Playtime verses entirely since their fanbases are flooded with children

 

[TheShape03]

Where am I supposed to put my goobers then??

Character Stats and Profiles might be a good option.

 

[ShockingPsychic]

Most of these are staying, though?

Sonic.EXE isn't, according to the OP

Pillar Chase 2 is a Roblox game, and since "any original Roblox game not created by FC/OC users will no longer be allowed", it's out.

Jeff and Paper Education are original content not made by any of the FCOC users who work on them. Paper Ed is also hosted on YT, which isn't allowed anymore

Fallout Equestria, Glitchtale, and Dream SMP are the only ones that might be safe. I originally read that all content made by non-wiki users was being blacklisted, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

 

[Mr. Bambu]

i don't understand the "deleting stuff that attracts a younger audience" part
like, if we were to go for that logic, vsbw should delete the FNaF and Poppy Playtime verses entirely since their fanbases are flooded with children

Maybe he's right. Maybe we should. Good ideas are being had.

 

[Phoenks]

Sonic.EXE isn't, according to the OP

EXE Ocs, such as derivatives of the original.

The canon one might stay, though. I'll see what John thinks.

Pillar Chase 2 is a Roblox game, and since "any original Roblox game not created by FC/OC users will no longer be allowed", it's out.

Not "any," but most.

I'll have to look into Pillar Chase specifically before I give a real answer about it, though.

Jeff and Paper Education are original content not made by any of the FCOC users who work on them. Paper Ed is also hosted on YT, which isn't allowed anymore

Hosting on YT is still allowed. It's just case-by-case.

Original content not made by users you are correct on, though.

Doesn't this have millions of views? Couldn't that just go onto VSBW if it is original???

 

[ShockingPsychic]

Couldn't that just go onto VSBW if it is original?

The issue, as I understand it, is that the verse exists as animations set to songs that the creator did not create. Therefore, it is heavily reliant on content that it didn't make

 

[TheShape03]

I have a great idea, we leave the wiki as is so it doesn't die.

I'll have to look into Pillar Chase specifically before I give a real answer about it, though.

It's a round-based game where an assassin hunts down humans trying to survive. The assassins are fan characters such as MX (Mario Fanfic), PCX (Sonic.exe Variant), EXE (Sonic.exe Variant), Inkfell (Basically Bendy with a different name), etc.

So, is anyone planning on making their own vs wiki for Fan Characters? I mean, I would do it myself but I'm useless.

 

[El_rapero_de_tf2]

Maybe he's right. Maybe we should. Good ideas are being had.

no complaints if that happened, but still why would that double standard be done here?

 

[Phoenks]

The issue, as I understand it, is that the verse exists as animations set to songs that the creator did not create. Therefore, it is heavily reliant on content that it didn't make

I see. In that case, it falls into the same boat as Skibidi Toilet, I believe.

Alt Battles would probably take it?

 

[LeoEpicGamer8910]

I feel like a lot of this controversy and anger among the FC/OC community could've been avoided if the changes were better explained. I'm not trying to be rude, I'm just saying that it seems most of the anger among users is coming from a misunderstanding. Still not a fan of Death Battle and such being deleted though.

 

[Bobsican]

Will Sonichu stay?

 

[Phoenks]

I feel like a lot of this controversy and anger among the FC/OC community could've been avoided if the changes were better explained. I'm not trying to be rude, I'm just saying that it seems most of the anger among users is coming from a misunderstanding. Still not a fan of Death Battle and such being deleted though.

Fair enough. I've tried clarifying things off-site to what seems much better reception.

I'll probably make a follow-up post to this and edit the OP and Site Rules again to make things more clear.

I'll also see what other staff have to say about this. Anyway, there are definitely a lot of misconceptions. I'll explain some very briefly, here:

Fan fiction and all that is still allowed, from any source, whether you are the one who made it or not. The only standards regarding it is that the content has to be different enough from its source material (And not only in powers/stats)—which has to be shown to some extent on the pages.

What I was trying to say was that original content, like other people's stories on webnovel or youtube-original series, wouldn't be allowed unless FCOC users were involved in their creation. This specifically only refers to original content: characters and worlds that are entirely of the author’s creation, are not based on existing works, and that do not use the intellectual property (IP) of others

Quality standards are not going to be that high (Not nearly what people seem to think). We just want pages that explain characters more than a couple sentences at the top. We also want them to be well-formatted. All of this stuff is case-by-case and will be reviewed by all staff before reaching a conclusion on whether or not a page should go or not.

We should try gathering some examples for you all on what would be the "bare minimum."

 

[JohnConquest1]

Calling the Death Battle characters the same is a bit shallow. They share some abilities but stuff like origin, strength levels like you mentioned, and personality can shift drastically from the canon counterparts. And of course it’s the biggest love letter to so many characters, some people wouldn’t even know about like Bucky O’Hare or Lucy. Plus Death Battle’s a huge show, likely a big reason for outsiders to even care about this wiki. What’s the point of a wiki nobody will be on?

I'm gonna disect this comment one point at a time.

They share some abilities but stuff like origin, strength levels like you mentioned, and personality can shift drastically from the canon counterparts.

Saying that they're from Death Battle isn't enough on its own. The same goes with strength. It's just their perceived version if we look at it from that angle. Personality is something that is barely if at all can be thoroughly conveyed through a 3 to 4 minute fight animation, let alone personality traits that'd make them seperate from the original.

Lets take Deadpool for example as he by far should be the most different from his comics canon counterpart by virtue of screen time and interactions. Let me ask you this, how differently would comics canon Deadpool act if they were in the place of deathbattle Deadpool? the latter being predicated and designed to emulate the former. Yes it's not a 1 to 1 but in DeathBattle's specific situation they have to stay within the realm of Parody, in order to avoid Disney's lawyers. They have to stay within being a parody and are thus limited in how they can develop the character in a meaningful way. This goes well beyond even content such as SMG4 in the sheer number of potential legal entities involved. For every Popeye that'd promote their characters being featured on the show, theres cases like Shueisha and Toei who will strike their's and specifically other's content to the point that they're deplatformed on a whim. And yes they do have to do this because being financially sound is far more important than developing their version of Deadpool. Likewise, one outcome where they would act differently isn't a deciding nor one that should be praised either. I would not put it past Marvel's writers to make fun of and devalue DeathBattle Deadpool should the payoff be funny from their perspective.

What quality? We’re talking about removing tens to possibly hundreds of pages made with passion and attention to detail because of the standards of some faceless mods. What about the users who care about these characters and want to share them and debate with them? Why aren’t we prioritizing the people actually using the website? Making new standards makes sense. Removing a bunch of pages because they don’t align with standards just made on a whim without any discussion users like us can see doesn’t.

I've personally taken great issue with how people see the site and how little we can do from our position to remedy that. That is why we have the announcement about mobile view on the wiki in the first place. Popularity alone isn't worth anything if the quality of said work is substandard or nondescript. It isn't as if these standards are entirely new either, and the revisions to them that we're presenting here was something we were discussing for a while, going back for a year and several months. Similarly this isn't the wiki's first rodeo with removing swathes of content either.

 

[Ebihara]

I only visted the site for the death battle profiles sad to see them go.

 

[DarkKingD10]

(First time I'll be talking here in a while huh?)
Anyway, as I said on the Discord, this is generally just more a push towards the, original(?), intent of the site. So while I believe some tweaks should be made here and there, overall this is a decent change of pace.

 

[Rayfire]

There's been talk about making a 5th wiki for mainly FC rejects here (Which Kanogami says i could make on the discord, apparently) And i feel like this would be a solution that would make everyone here happy. Hard work isn't lost, the deleted profiles don't lose half their purpose, (Being usable in vs threads) and the main wiki looks better. We can prevent the debating side of this community being less active (Which i feel isn't being considered, there's a lot of matchups involving FC's that are apparently going to be removed according to the OP) so if the changes aren't withdrawn i think this is the best option to keep our already relatively small wiki alive.

 

[Da3ggman]

These changes are not it man

 

[Rayfire]

There's been talk about making a 5th wiki for mainly FC rejects here (Which Kanogami says i could make on the discord, apparently) And i feel like this would be a solution that would make everyone here happy. Hard work isn't lost, the deleted profiles don't lose half their purpose, (Being usable in vs threads) and the main wiki looks better. We can prevent the debating side of this community being less active (Which i feel isn't being considered, there's a lot of matchups involving FC's that are apparently going to be removed according to the OP) so if the changes aren't withdrawn i think this is the best option to keep our already relatively small wiki alive.

Thanks to a lot of discussion in discord, 3 FC/OC mods have given me the go-ahead, and i'm well underway on making the wiki, so the FC's being deleted here will be moved to that wiki and still be usable in versus threads on fcoc's side of the forum, kinda like alt battles. We're saving the community with this one

Keep your profiles that are likely to get deleted in blogs, they'll be helpful later

 

[Phoenks]

Yeah, I have no problem with people making another wiki for this stuff. I do want you guys to at least have somewhere else to put your work. And I'm personally fine with leaving the forum open.

(First time I'll be talking here in a while huh?)
Anyway, as I said on the Discord, this is generally just more a push towards the, original(?), intent of the site. So while I believe some tweaks should be made here and there, overall this is a decent change of pace.

I'm glad you understand the intention.

I will work on more tweaks with staff members later. People still seem to be confused on some things, reasonably so.

 

[H3110l12345I20]

Mind if I have a say on the joke part of the rules?