Voting: better, easier, faster
I have noticed that on the four major items we vote for, which are pictures, songs, quotes and Did You Know?, many more people vote for the song than the other three. For June 2011, there were over 200 votes for the songs, while the other three only had a couple dozen votes combined.
The difference between the songs and the others is song voting is done with a poll. It's possible to use a poll for the songs because we have been accepting ideas ahead of time, whereas for the other three, the choices are added as the month progresses.
The drawbacks to doing it as we go are sometimes we don't get a good range of choices until well into the month and occasionally people come in and change either the choices or the votes. Before the winners can b…
Blog cleanup is complete
Due to the lack of participation about how to handle old blogs, I decided to work on this myself. A few blogs got deleted but most were marked as inactive.
The deleted blogs were typically short "hello" blogs, they asked a question that had been answered, or the blog was a single-sentence opinion such as "I like Ferb". A lot of these were by people who were here for a few days, then left and haven't been back since.
Blogs that didn't have any comments in the past four months were moved to the Inactive blogs category and commenting was disabled. That category was also added to the blogs we had to shut down because of problems they were creating ("SpongeBob is evil", name calling, etc.).
By doing this, it has a few benefits:
- The blogs that are i…
Newsletter delivery problems
I just found out that it looks like no one got the February 16th issue of our newsletter. Right now, the program that lets me automate the newsletter delivery isn't working, which may or may not be related to everyone missing the last issue. So, I am trying to manually deliver the newsletters.
The problem is that everyone's Talk pages are getting so full from the newsletters that it takes a long time to make each edit. I've given up for the night. I will have to come back to this tomorrow.
In order to fix these problems, we're going to change how the newsletters are delivered. Instead of delivering the full newsletter, we're going to send you a link to the newsletter. This is going to have a few advantages:
- Your talk page will take up less sp…
Video cleanup
Over the past two days, I have been going through the videos on this wiki. About two-thirds were either no longer available or were unused because we were linking directly to YouTube on the pages. Those are now gone and it's time to clean up the rest.
The names of the videos are pretty disorganized. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to move a video to a new name, so the only way rename them is to upload them again. I'll make sure any pages that use the old video's name are updated. If any of you are particulary attached to seeing your name as the uploader of the video, that's pretty much going to get erased when I re-upload it unless you happen to get to it before me. If you do, please use this format for the name:
- name of song/video (song ty…
Tabbed pages comments
Right now we're testing a change to some of our pages: tabs. The idea is that it splits up the long pages into separate sections that you can quickly switch between by clicking on the tab. Same kind of thing you can do with a spreadsheet or with any of the new web browsers.
We've already used this method on a few pages like the Merchandise Portal. We just put a portal design on it instead of putting things in tabbed pages. The memorable quotes for "Summer Belongs to You!" had to be split off to a separate page because it was one-third the size of the entire page. And we have long since moved the episode galleries onto their own pages.
While it may seem simplier to keep everything on one page, that does cause the pages to get really long. Tha…