Hello Fairy Tail Fanon community and welcome to my largest blog, I been planning to write this blog to inform you on certain major updates to not only FTF but to the entire FANDOM as the whole. As ya lot may recently knon, FANDOM is taking an radical update knon as Unified Community Platform (CUP). What is it? How would it affect FTF? I'll explain that right here, and wish to hear what you think on it.
What is UCP[]
Unified Community Platform (UCP) is an platform that runs MediaWiki 1.33, the same platform Wikipedia uses. It's stated this will be implemented in the coming months or so. For more in-depth details, please check this out, I may underline key factors I feel would change how we edit FTF.
Differences between Legacy & UCP and what it means[]
According to the help of UCP, Legacy is operating a older MediaWiki platform (which is what FTF still uses, so ya know what it is). Le4gacy offers Message Walls, threaded Forums, Chat, Achievements, the Admin Dashboard, Special:WikiActivity. However according to FANDOM, these features made it nearly impossible to uupdate to newer versions. As such with UCP, we will lose many thins such as recent activities, classic editor, achivements.
In 2019, Fandom and Gamepedia joined forces and decided to updates FANDOM cutomized complex design to the newer platform, which as stated, means removal of many things we came to enjoy. Accoreding to the post, and I quote "This will give Fandom users access to newer and better MediaWiki features and Gamepedia users access to features that were previously only available on Fandom. Our development teams will no longer have to maintain two separate platforms, one of which is heavily outdated, and are instead able to focus on building new features for our users.".
This is the dicussion board on the abandoned wiki project.
UCP is apparently an working-progress and so updates will be regular. Not much details but I know certain forums will be removed and placed with something called dicussions. Wandering what it looks like? Check out my picture to the right, it's an abandon wiki project I had but as I said, abandoned it due to UCP.
Editing[]
Classic Editor is removed, and along with "visual editor" (kinda) and now replaced with the new MediaWiki Visual Editor] and its wikitext source mode. This new style is the primarye editing format for UCP, and in my honest opion are pretty bad. With the abandoned wiki project, the two are essentially the same thing, nothing from Classic Editor survived and just been abandoned altgether.
There is also an loading screen, that's right, ya know that loading screen ya see in games? We have that now and can be pretty instant to lasting over 10 seconds. I'll make an gif on what it looks like soon enough if ya want to see it, but if you want to check out what UCP has to offer, please check out my abandoned wiki prjoject and mess around with it (make articles and get the feel on UCP).
Which wikis live on the UCP and which ones live on the old platform?[]
All Fandom wikis created after March 11th 2020 live on the UCP. Fandom wikis created before that date will be gradually migrated to the new platform in the coming months. Gamepedia wikis currently still remain on their own platform and will eventually be migrated to the UCP as well.
A wiki that has been created on the UCP cannot be moved to Fandom's legacy platform.
The highlighted text is key in UCP as it means you can not revert back to legacy after updating to UCP.
Mobile[]
Honestly, I do not know how this will be affect mobile devices such as Ipad, but recent comments suggest many features are no longer avaliable such as CSS. However it does seem lie UCP will offer more ease of access for mobile users at thistime and even show what's been edited on mobile or not.
Special:Videos and Special:Images[]
Both of these pages have been replaced by MediaWiki's standard page Special:NewFiles that allows both for the upload of new images to the wiki and the addition of videos from supported video sources. Special:NewFiles also introduces convenient filters for searches, such as search by file name or type.
CSS and JavaScript customization[]
CSS is largely no different then Legacy and I never dealt with JavaScript, so this is largely unafffected in terms of primary purposes.
RSS feeds[]
On the legacy platform, an extension to display RSS feeds is available. This is a third party extension with some changes made by Fandom. This custom extension will not be available on the UCP. I honeslty have no idea what this is lmao.
Link suggestions[]
Ok this grinded my gears as it causes so much issues on my abandoned wiki project. Basically that stupid autocorrect but for links! When you are editing a page and are adding a link via wikitext, Fandom's legacy platform offers suggestions to complete your link for you. This feature will be added to the UCP at a later point. I can see this feature being an pain the same way autocorrect on phones, and it's unclear if ya can disable this feature.
User Profiles[]
Profiles have received a re-design on the UCP, but contain the same basic elements as on the legacy platform: a global header with your avatar and some information about yourself, and local tabs for your profile text, your messages and your list of wiki contributions (labelled “Activity” on the UCP). The main difference to legacy platform wikis is that UCP profiles use new message walls that are not based on MediaWiki.
I think User Profiles is largely unchanged and shouldn't cause much distress.
Threaded Forums[]
OK, sadly this is going to be removed in UCP and no longer be avaliable. Apparently it's old cold and hard to maintain and update. All existing thread shall be ported to Dicussions. They're working fore "several enchancements" to make it more familiarly closer to forums. More information can be located here.
Comments[]
Comments is largely no different then Legacy, besides using the same feature similar to Discussions, and comments wont be lost. However , admins can switch this new feature off on the Dashboard to suit the community interests, so we can revert to what Legacy had in terms of comments.
Message Walls[]
This doesn't conern us as the new update can be toggled off to user talk pages, but for sake of explaining, Message Walls are being removed with a new user-to-user communication feature. The new message wall is essentially the same thing as the new-featured comments, an dicussion-similar board, and I also dislike this feature (I never enjoyed message boards to begin with lmao). So all-in-all, this update wouldn't affect our messages.
Blogs[]
Basically unchanged.
Final Notes & Personal Opinion[]
So these are in my opinion key updates we need to be aware about on FTF as it changes a lot on how we operate here. Further questions or more in-depth can be read here, but if you wish to ask me about it, you can on my talk page.
My opinion, it's not need, simple as that. Many features FTF has, will or might be removed. Any inquires, your opinions expressed please down below to see if you agree, disagree OR you spot any incorrect information I wrote here.