Forum:Possible Additions to the Wiki

Hi everyone, as I hope you've noticed there have been a couple of changes to the Wiki recently. Namely, these are the addition of a Logo, Background and a revamp of the Main Page (thanks to the Wikia Content Team). There are also some changes, however, which I wish to get the view of this Wiki's community before I chose whether or not to put them into effect, as I don't wish to be viewed as some sort of "Baron Admin" who just adds things when the general consensus of the community is that they don't want them on here.

Getting back on topic, the changes I would like you to comment on are the addition of the "Achievements", "Category Exhibition" and possibly the "Chat" functions. For those who are unaware of what these functions do here is a basic description of the functions (all courtesy of Wikia Labs):

Function 1: Chat: Instantaneously communicate with other people who love your wiki and your wiki's topic as much as you do! Anyone with a Wikia account can join chat via the "Join the Chat" button in the right navigational area of your site.

Function 2: Achievements: Achievements will help your wiki to grow by incentivizing editors to contribute a variety of content. You can create your own challenges that are unique to your wiki, and even upload your own images for the badges.*

Function 3: Category Exhibition: The most popular eight pages in your categories are already displayed as images, but this feature will list all of your pages as image links sortable by name, recency, or popularity!

If you wish for a visual representation of what these functions actually look like on a Wiki, please feel free to ask and I'll add links to other Wikis with a least one of these functions already active.

So to wrap up, I hope you like the new changes to the Wiki and please remember to comment whether or not you wish to have the functions mentioned/described above added to this Wiki. You may also mention your opinion on the new aesthetics of the Wiki, but please don't make that the main part of your post. --Trivi-AM (talk) 19:42, July 30, 2011 (UTC)

* Please note that the addition of images and new badges will be available to admins only.

Do you we think should add a comment system to articles. The Blue Blunder 02:17, August 1, 2011 (UTC)


 * Personally I don't think we should add the comment system, mostly because it disables the Talk Pages of articles so it would become difficult to discuss the improvement of articles if it was added, also it would be rather underused given the Wikis current small community. Of course I am willing to overlook my personal objection if enough people say otherwise. --Trivi-AM (talk) 11:55, August 1, 2011 (UTC)


 * The comment system is currently in place though. One of the downsides is IPs leaving comments that do not really moving the articles forward.  On the 16th a whole slew of these comments were deleted by a member of the VSTF for housekeeping and anti-spam purposes.  The talk page system does not tend to encourage such near pointless commenting or spamming - go back to it?   BrokenSphere  (Talk) 04:32, December 17, 2011 (UTC)


 * I added the comments system on a trial basis originally as well as to try and gauge the popularity of certain areas of the Wiki. Granted at the time I was unaware of all the spam comments this would cause. Considering the spam comments (especially those on our articles which were made with no content added to them) I'll deactivate the comments system and return to talk pages. --Trivi-AM (talk) 11:49, December 17, 2011 (UTC)

Several months after the fact, but here are my thoughts:

1) Chat - Would probably function well with a more active editor base, but there are not enough active editors on this Wiki at present (4 within the last week, not counting the bot) to warrant enabling it.

2) Achievements - I have not yet seen this in action on a wiki, but am opening to seeing it on a trial basis perhaps first.

3) Category Exhibition - I have activated this on 2 other wikis that I administer, but have not really noticed any changes.

This was not mentioned, but is a new feature under Labs: Expanded Wiki Navigation. This gives the wiki an expanded capability to put more links to key topics from the topmost drop down menu that goes beyond the default. I really like this and have implemented it on the abovementioned wikis. There is enough content on the wiki to implement this. BrokenSphere (Talk) 00:05, December 16, 2011 (UTC)


 * Yeah I do agree that now that Chat isn't going to fit well into this Wiki with the low editor base. I have seen Achievements added to a couple of Wikis and generally they seem to be received positively, with the only main problem being editors spamming articles etc just to get certain achievements (but this can easily be stopped by blocking the spammer). After writing my previous post I did add Category Exhibition to this Wiki, but it began to malfunction (this was a problem across all Wiki's which used it) so I removed it and have yet to reactive it. I'm a bit on-the-fence about adding the Expanded Navigation, but I will probably enable it when the size of the Wiki has expanded slightly more. --Trivi-AM (talk) 16:34, December 16, 2011 (UTC)