Forum:November updates - Discord chat, infoboxes and the holidays

Amelia Admin

Hello everyone! It's been awhile since I wrote one of these which is how I always start these and I'm going to try to be more consistent in the future which is what I always say. November was one of the bigger months we've had in awhile. With the most amount of new editors we've gotten in ages, Miraheze issues, a new Discord server and fancy new infoboxes being dropped. I just wanted to take time to talk about these new things, shiny they may be. Firstly, Miraheze's issues. You may've noticed images refusing to work for the last few days. The problem was not on our end, but on the whole of Miraheze, our hosting provider. I failed to report the issue on the actual site itself due to chronic headaches and tiredness due to my personal life, so I apologize for that I'll try to be more on the ball moving forward. Secondly, the Discord server. As far as I know, all you need to do is click the "Discord chat!" button in the sidebar and you'll be invited. It's small, but that just means it has room to grow, right? Some older users may remember we previously had a Discord server that simply went away one day. It was not one of my prouder moments, but a spam bot joined that server and sent horrid disgusting images and I in a moment of panic deleted the original server. I don't think that incident will repeat itself. So far the server is home to discussing changes to the wikis contents, reporting old and bad articles and for hosting projects to improve the site. Thirdly, the infoboxes. They've been a long time coming. We've went through a few infobox designs these last few years; not because of vanity reasons mind you but because their code simply kept breaking with MediaWiki updates. Ultimately, I felt the need to stick with something so simple that it would likely never break, but with that came a limited and poorly coded box. These new infoboxes have a very robust codebase and are likely to NOT break on me in the middle of the night. They've been slowly deploying lately, and you can see them currently on articles like Trixie Lulamoon, Twist and The End of Flutter Valley. They're not 100% complete, but all that's left is tweaks and enhancements. Beyond all that; I'm going to try to dedicate the following weeks to cleaning up the wiki substantially. Fixing the main page, adding a news section and making sure our key articles aren't so messy and hopefully, attract more editors.

--Amelia (talk) 03:45, 23 November 2023 (UTC)