User blog:K6ka/Community News - January 2019

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first community news blog post of 2019! Without further ado...

Although I am of the opinion that New Years Resolutions are about as useful as throwing a brick at your face to cure insomnia, I think we can agree that one of the things we can always improve on at the wiki is 1) attracting new editors; and 2) keeping those new editors around. When new editors join the wiki, they will undoubtedly have lots of questions to ask, so it's important that the venues where they can ask these questions be easy to use. It would be a bit ironic (and sad) if an editor with questions about editing needed to go through a lot of editing trouble in order to be able to ask this question.

Currently the "official" place to ask for help is the Help desk forum. The forums we use on The Sims Wiki are the older wiki-style forums that have been in place for many, many years now. Although these forums are effective, even I, as an experienced editor, find them a bit clunky to use, with a lot of strange quirks here and there, and are a bit confusing for new editors to use.

Wikipedia has a Help Desk that is frequented by many new editors, as well as a special, newbie-friendly forum called the Teahouse. Wikipedia doesn't use the wiki-style forums that we use, and instead those pages are treated like any other standard talk page, where all discussion occurs on one page, separated by section headings, and where old threads are removed and archived over time. This is also how our administrators' noticeboard page is set up, and we seem to be getting less confusion with posting threads there than in the wiki-style forums, where threads are often missed or seem distinctly out of place.

We currently have a forum thread open to move the Help Desk forum over to a talk page style format. The forum thread can be found here.

The The Sims 2: Open for Business article has been selected to be the featured article for the month of January 2019! A featured article is an example of the finest articles we have on the wiki, and they're chosen based on their readability and the amount of information they contain. They are selected by members of the wiki community—people like you! To nominate or vote for an article, read the instructions here, and then either make a nomination or vote for an existing one.

Discord is a multi-platform online text and voice chat service that The Sims Wiki uses to help engage and coordinate the wiki and the Simming community. Discord is completely free to use and is quite popular amongst gamers. The Sims Wiki has a Discord server which you can check out here, and you can also join it by clicking on that big "Click here" button below.

Click here to join the server.

By joining, you agree to abide by the server rules.

One of the many complaints we got about the server from the very beginning was that we had way too many channels. One of the solutions to rectify this problem is to expand the scopes of existing channels. Recently we renamed one of our wiki-related channels from #template_development to #technical rather than creating a new channel. The #technical channel is for the technical aspects of the wiki, including templates, system messages editing, Javascript and CSS, and more!
 * Updates to the server

If you have any other suggestions as to how we can improve the server, please let us know in the #server_feedback channel on the server!

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It's 2019! YAY! WOOHOO!!!! TWENTY-NINETEEN HERE I COME!!! It'd be nicer if I hadn't already broken my New Years Resolutions... So what? Every year feels the same now. Thanks for reading! Be sure to leave any comments or feedback in the Comments section below, and see you next month! — k6ka  🍁 ( Talk ·  Contributions ) 19:53, January 3, 2019 (UTC)
 * Poll for users to click on