Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-5645428-20160726133238

Yep, finally I can present to you an update on the wiki's latest action! Yes, it has been yet another long while since the last major announcement, but yes also, here's some stuff you'll indeed want to check out since then!

First, I'd like to shout out several users who have proven themselves dedicated in their contribution to the wiki. I formally announce our newest staff members, ZOptic, who was recently promoted to administrator, and IceKane, who was recently promoted to moderator! I'm sure the community is certainly familiar with you both and enjoy having you around to keep everything in check whilst also being great friends to socialise with. If you haven't yet, do congratulate them on their achievements! I also wish thank Rrobertus02, who has tirelessly uploaded a great number of images for the Map Components article, many many images at my endless request. That's something to be proud of and an effort most appreciated.

The Robert Topala Q&A is currently on hold as we wait for his response. As we have been waiting almost a year for Update 2.1, I'm sure we can wait some more for the Q&A. It ain't forgot, don't worry.

My unending quest to style the wiki to visual flawlessness has reached another milestone, the most refined editing experience on Wikia, that is, the classic editor being polished to look like something you urgently want to use to edit pages whether they need an edit or not! Perhaps I am exaggerating, but if you can truly find a better-looking editor anywhere on Wikia, do tell me and I promise I will work to top it to the best of my ability.

As mentioned in the last major announcement, article editing is now a more specialised task as most of our articles are near or already at a quality standard, at which point they no longer require much more tweaking to set them to a virtually completed state. These articles are marked by an orange-accented Quality notice template with a coin image. If you're feeling up for some old school editing, find articles which do not have the said notice and give them a bit of a workout. Remember to look to similar articles which already have the notice template and use them as a basis for making adjustments.

A reminder, threads exceeding 100 comments will be closed. This is done as the wiki wall/forum design tends to cause lag with long threads. Threads closed for this reason may be continued at the choice of the author.

I'd like to mention this time around that vandalism prevention is among the most simple and routine jobs that us staff attend to. It seems to be somewhat natural to 'fear' so-called trolls, vandals and aggravators, and it's kind of the way many have been 'raised' on the Internet. I wish to emphasise how unnecessary it is to worry about any such behaviour of those who have too much time on their hands and too little focus to do anything constructive with it. Us staff have different methods of dealing with vandalism, but we are always successful. In my case, I use certain scripts which enable me the ability to instantly delete every page created by a user, including articles, files, wall/forum comments etc.; to instantly rollback any malicious edits; to quickly block users, and to do all these things at once with the click of a button. Yes, we have access to powerful tools, so trust us in maintaining order around here and be sure that the wiki will never fall to 'attacks' or 'raids' of any sort.

POLICY UPDATE: User page extensions are now regulated. Recently, I've been encountering many pages being created in the user namespace as extensions of a user's profile (eg. 'User:Lorem/Sandbox'). Although this violates no existing policy, it has become clear that these pages are often forgot about and even created with no further edits being made to them in months, if at all afterwards. Many aren't linked to any page at all (if no one can find the page, what's the point of having it?), and could really just be included in some additional section of the associated user's profile. It is poor organisational practice to leave such pages lying around, but monitoring the activity of these pages is incredibly difficult since they are included only in the entire user namespace index, and here we're speaking of hundreds of profiles for every account that has ever registered on the wiki. For this reason, the policy has changed.

''User page extensions will only be allowed with permission. Permission will be granted where it is deemed that the content requested to be included is inappropriate to be included on the requesting user's profile under any logical layout restructuring or by nature of content. These pages are to be listed as links on the Geometry Dash Wiki:Sandbox article where they can be actively monitored by staff. Pages that are created without permission or left unedited for over a month will be deleted.''

A separate thread will coordinate the actions required in mind of the policy change, which can be found on the Wiki General Discussion board.

And that is all for today! 