User blog:LostInRiverview/Community news - February 2018

Alright kids, gather 'round. It's story time!

''Once upon a time, The Sims Wiki hosted regular news blogs. Then, one day, an evil witch (just kidding) locked the news blogs away in an archive, and buried the archive below a Community Discussions forum thread about policy revisions, to make sure that no one would ever see them again. But, our dashing and handsome hero has rescued news blogs from their pit of obscurity! And everyone lived happily ever after!''

Wasn't that great, kids?

* Sounds of children snoring *

– Welcome to this Community News blog post. It's the first one we've put out in (*glances at watch*) quite a while. My hope is that this sort of news update becomes a more regular occurrence, though perhaps not to the same "once a week" schedule as we operated on before.

Without any further ado, let's move on to the wiki news I'd like to talk about.

After long periods of thoughtful and silent meditation - otherwise known as a The Sims Wiki community discussion - the user role of "Content Moderator" debuted on the wiki, along with a process for selecting these users.
 * Content Moderator role is here!

Content Moderators can be thought of as a step up from rollbackers, but a step below full-fledged administrators. Content mods can rollback, can delete and undelete pages, protect and unprotect pages, and can edit fully-protected pages. Content mods can't block users or edit certain interface pages, however.

Applications are currently being accepted for Content Mod rights at The Sims Wiki:Requests for moderatorship. If you feel you would be qualified for these rights, and think having those additional powers would be useful for editing and for improving the wiki, feel free to fill out an application. Additionally, if you can think of any wiki users who would be a good fit for that role, feel free to nominate them.

Recently, we've been working on a new infobox design for The Sims Wiki. The goals of this project are to design new infobox templates that look good with the current wiki theme, but preserve the same functionality as the current infoboxes. We think we're getting close to achieving that goal, but there's still time to be active in the discussion and development.
 * Changes potentially coming to infoboxes

After we're sure we've gotten the major infoboxes converted to the new design (we've already made some good progress on that front), we will begin the process of converting our canon articles to use those new templates. This is being done so that the old templates can be kept and preserved, especially for authors of fanon who may not want their infoboxes to change. The downside of this decision, however, is that the change from old to new infoboxes won't be automatic. In other words, we will probably need several editors' help to make the change complete.

But, we're not quite there yet, so it's not too late for you to have your input and to see the new designs before they go fully live - head over to Forum:New infobox design and lend your voice!

You may have already noticed, but The Sims Wiki has recently launched a public Discord server. (if you're unfamiliar with Discord, this page can offer a bit of explanation, as well as the basic rules and procedures we've adopted for the server) In the couple months that the server has been public so far, we've seen a large influx of members and the server is often host to active discussions, including plenty of off-topic banter and even voice chatting by yours truly and several other wiki members and Discord members. It's honestly a lot of fun, and we'd love for you to join us as well!
 * The Sims Wiki is on Discord

If you'd like to join in, follow this link: https://discord.gg/UHKDcAn. This will open Discord in a new tab in your web browser, or will launch the standalone Discord app if you have it installed. If you have any trouble, you can reach out to a server operator or moderator for assistance.

– So... wiki news blogs, huh? Yeah Meh Nah – That's all the stuff I've got to report on today. Be sure to "cast your vote" above regarding the "return" of wiki news blogs, and leave any relevant (or irrelevant) comments down below!
 * User Poll

(Possibly) Until next time!

-  LostInRiverview talk · blog  ·  contribs 19:16, February 11, 2018 (UTC)