Thread:Apprentice125/@comment-2092722-20160219035603/@comment-2092722-20160219043619

Since Im assuming you cant see the thread, bear with me for this LONG quote:

Hey there, Community Council!

I’m Cristina - a product manager here at Wikia. I’ve been on the team for just shy of two years and had the pleasure of meeting some of you at Community Connect. Prior to Wikia, I spent seven years at Huddler in a range of roles, from community manager to customer support to product manager, and we built a community platform focused on facilitating thriving discussions and product reviews. Two years ago, Huddler joined the Wikia family and I began focusing on ways to engage users and help them connect with each other and share their fandoms.

Contents[hide] Let’s Discuss Time Saving Moderation Features Modern design, easier to fit in your pocket Near term, long term Wikia is built by you! Feedback Early Adoption Participate Let’s Discuss On Wikia, you don’t just build great wikis—you build awesome communities with fellow fans who share the same passion on your favorite topics. Some things should be collaboratively chronicled in wikis and others lend themselves to lively discussions. Often times, deep conversations lead to the most brilliantly written articles, and vice versa!

Until now, discussions have taken a backseat to the wiki, and as you may know, the Forum feature (where you are reading this message) has had a myriad of issues over the years. To be the true home of fandom, we are stepping up our game so that every kind of fan can find their place here.

We’re still early in our development of discussions but we envision a world where a wikia is made up of content-rich wikis and engaging conversations of all kinds. We want fans from around the globe to talk to each other and share their opinions, reactions, questions, and speculations. Everyone should have a place in the home of fandom, whether you are writing encyclopedic caliber articles or imagining what might happen in the next episode of your favorite show.

Those of you who attended Community Connect were able to see Discussions in action in the Connect mobile app and some even participated in user testing. We talked quite a bit about the overall vision for Discussions at Connect, and you can see much of that in this video from the Conference. Since then, we’ve been busy building additional features and infrastructure to create a solid foundation that we can keep improving. For details about the features currently available in discussions, please check out our earliest adopters (linked at the end of this post) and take a look at the Help page here on Community Council.

With all of this big vision in mind, we know that to make discussions on Wikia successful, we need community leaders like yourselves to start great conversations, keep the communities on track, and of course give us feedback so we can continue to build exciting features that will engage ever more fans and allow you have the conversations you want to have.

Time Saving Moderation Features We know the most important thing for any community is quality on-topic conversations, and we also know that with all communities come trolls and spammers. To combat this, our early focus has been around streamlining moderation so communities can thrive without dedicating every waking hour to Discussions.

First step -- let’s create ways we can keep our communities healthy without moderators lifting a finger:

Keep trending clean by allowing any user to upvote so the best content rises to the top Make it so any user can report a post to let you and other moderators know a review is needed Add device-level blocking with help VSTF, helpers and staff keep offenders from coming back with new accounts But, we know spamming and trolling happens -- so we want to make it easy for moderators to clean up the mess. Here’s a few ways how:

Delete all posts by a user - quickly remove all Discussions content by a single person in one click Reported posts queue will help you focus your time on the issues users have reported Lock posts and prevent new replies from being added You can’t do it alone, so we’re also building tools to help the VSTF and helpers track down any bad users and stop them in their tracks. There is also a “Moderators” user group so you can recruit a core of trusted people who are onboard to help make your wikia’s Discussions successful. Fallout just held an election for moderators and they have both long-time desktop web users and app users who are joining the team.

Modern design, easier to fit in your pocket The new Wikia Discussions platform is built on modern technology and designed to be mobile friendly - whether you’re in an app or on the web. On the web, each page is responsive so you can post or reply from anywhere on any device, as well as moderate on the go.

For those who prefer native apps, we have that too! You can seamlessly move from your computer to your smartphone to your tablet, and we are actively developing each platform to keep improving the experience.

Thus far, apps have been our testbed for getting Discussions off the ground and the results have been dramatic. In apps, users who log in are 2.8 times more likely to return to the app in the next month and those who actually create a discussion post are 4.2 times more likely to return in the next month. We expect no less as we extend this to the web, so it’s a great opportunity for you to engage more people and keep them coming back.

Near term, long term Discussions is an evolving feature and a primary development focus for Wikia. We have a lot of work in progress and much, much more planned.

What we’re currently working on:

Moderation tools, of course! Some tools are already live on web. We’re actively developing additional tools for both web and apps. View all posts by a user - whether it’s your content or someone else’s, you can now view all discussion contributions by a specific user in web and it’s coming to an app near you by the end of the month. Discussion categories and related navigation tools to give users ways to dig into the specific discussions they’re most interested in Email notifications for upvotes and replies to your posts (we currently have push notifications for these in apps and will continue to expand this functionality with Discussions following functionality) Enhancing the display of links posted in discussions with relevant metadata, like the webpage title and image A few more core features like adding the ability to edit your post after publishing it and getting push notifications supported on international communities Looking a bit further ahead, here are some other areas we’ll be working on:

SEO - we’ve been flying under the radar with Discussions on web but very soon we’ll want to get all of these pages fully search engine optimized so fans of all kinds can find them. Following posts and additional notifications Image upload support Tagging and relationship-building between Discussions content and wiki content Search On-site notifications And lots more! We are continuing to build out Discussions with the goal of migrating content from the current Forum feature and retiring it. We’re planning similar replacement of Message Wall and Comments, though the schedule for that work is still to be determined. For now, I’d like to keep this conversation focused on the new Discussions feature and we’ll open up the conversation to the other features at a later date.

Wikia is built by you! We come to work everyday to think about ways to help you build and run the internet’s largest pop culture communities, so we need your help!

Feedback Every community is different -- tell us how your community would like to use Discussions and maybe we can help you!

Early Adoption It’s still early days for Discussions, but we already have some amazing communities using it. We need more admins to jump on board and help us build something special. If you’d like to add Discussions to your community please sign up here by responding to this thread!

We understand that you’ll need to talk this over with your fellow admins and community members. No problem there with regard to your non-disclosure agreements. The Discussions video from Community Connect is public and we’re already live on some high-profile communities, so not much of this is especially secret. Wider communication to the entire Wikia community is coming soon. Just remember, this is an evolving feature and we certainly aren’t done yet. :-)

Participate Check out and participate in discussions! Here is a list of communities that have discussions up and running:

Fallout Wiki Wookieepedia Brave Frontier Wiki Marvel Database

Thanks in advance for all your feedback! Our entire team is excited and we can't wait to keep iterating.