Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-27345308-20160830194319

Hey, users! It was a long time since the last highlighted thread, wasn't it? So, we (the administration) wanted to give insight to the community in some new stuff going 'round the wiki etc.

I'll try to be as short as possible, but this will be a long announcemnt.

Discord chat
The wiki now has an official Discord server. Discord is a chat service, mostly designed for gamers. We made the server because it allows a lot of stuff like multichanneled conversation (yes, now memes and Undertale-related questions won't be in the same channel!), better support for bots, multiple roles for users, better organization of the user interface, integrated pings and a ton more stuff.

You want to join? Read the "How to join" section on the server documentation page. If you aren't new to Discord, read that page anyways because it contains information about bots, channels, roles, rules etc.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please state your Wikia username in the span of 10 minutes after joining the server. After that amount of time, you would most probably get kicked by a mod. Don't panic afterwards! If you were kicked only because you didn't state your username you can simply reenter and state your username. After stating your username, a staff member will give you a "Members" role, granting you access to several more channels.

Also, we would like to hear your opinion on if you would like the Discord server to completely replace the Wikia chat we currently have. If a majority of the community agrees on this, the staff will prepare everything for the change!

AbuseFilter
Ooh, sounds scary! Yes, this is a new extension Wikia Staff enabled on the wiki due to some excessive vandalism earlier. I, myself, have configured several abuse filters, and some of them are supposed to autoblock people commiting certain changes, so if one of the filters misbehave and autoblock you, you can go on a Community Central Message Wall of an admin (preferrably mine ;) ) and complain. Here are some basic guidelines on how not to get falsely caught in an abuse filter:
 * Do not blank pages. If you feel a page needs deleting, add the delete template to it instead. This does not apply for user pages, threads, blogs and similar pages that only serve their purpose in the community.
 * Do not flood edits.
 * Do not insert curse words into pages nor create pages with curse words in the title. (This filter is very likely to misbehave.)
 * Do not add/remove a lot of content to/from a page. Diffs up to +2000 and -1000 are okay for AF.

I'm also working on the documentation of the abuse filters we have on the wiki, so expect Project:AbuseFilter  to be created at some point.

Translations
We documented any general info a translator should know before translating the wiki on Project:Translations! Also, as of recently, our Project namespace pages (policy, manual of style, chat rules etc.) are available for translation to other languages. The reasoning behind this is that Project namespace pages contain rules and guidelines specific to this wiki that should be understandable to any person no matter what language do they speak. So now users that want to translate Project pages to a language they know well can look in Category:English translation for a list of Project namespace pages in English, and then translate them to their language. Further information about this can be found on the aforementioned documentation page, and for more questions feel free to ask in this thread or on my Message Wall.

Standardization
Once started by our dear adoptive bureaucrat that now, sadly, retired, the process of standardization of the wiki is still lasting. Standardization is the process of making all the pages of the wiki follow the same standard. Why? Because we do not want users in future making edit wars over a single space or comma in text, don't we? When all pages follow a written standard, there is no place for speculation what is right and what is wrong and edit wars over it. The wiki may undergo changes in it's staff, in it's community, but the content shall remain.

So, on that note, our Manual of Style got renewed! Now we have a written spacing standard, a compact tutorial on how to use easy formatting, and a section just for how links should be formatted and where should they be located.

Also, the page organization section got moved from the Manual of Style to Project:Page organization, and a lot of new information has been added, so for people editing pages, please read this page before editing!

Currently, the wiki is under several standardization processes:
 * In Battle pages are undergoing standardization by Man Son You. More information can be found on his In Battle page standard draft.
 * Location pages are undergoing major changes, mostly lead by our content moderator Cheeseskates. Anybody that wants to participate can simply check out several of his draft subpages, and once the quality of the drafts gets good enough he'll push the changes to the main namespace (we need to maintain the quality of our articles, no?)
 * Minor standardization of the wiki templates is done by me. If anybody is interested (which I doubt, templates are boring, haha) they can ask me on my Message Wall, but note that a lot of the wiki templates are currently under protection against vandalism (jeez, I have to get less paranoid about vandals vandalizing our templates, nobody cares about them)

Other notable things

 * We've got some shortcut redirects! Now you can use the shortcut MoS when you want to point somebody to the Manual of Style, "Discord" when you want to point somebody to the Discord server documentation page, translations when you want to point somebody to the translations page and policy when you want to point somebody to a page full of doge memes. Jk, it points to the policy.
 * Our chat bot has a new antispam plugin which makes him a savage at times, so please report to mods if it bans you for seemingly no reason.
 * Our wiki is getting a better in Monobook support! (if you have no idea what Monobook is disregard this)
 * We recently got a Voting template that shows people how to properly vote on voting threads.
 * No, our policy has no doge memes, get over that joke.

Cheers!

 