User blog:Shockstorm/US Community Connect 2016

I was able to attend Community Connect at Wikia's San Francisco offices this year, was pretty neat. Flightmare attended the European one in Poland last month. Here's some things I learned that I thought I'd share:

General

 * Wikia staff actually does look at feedback from Special:Contact and may bring it up when meeting with other staff. You may want to address your feedback/concerns to individual staff - let them know in the form, helps them send it to the right people. Look here or here for staff members and what they specialize in.
 * Their office is set up in an open-office style, with no cubicles and the desks close together, including the CEO's, in accordance with the principles of Communism.
 * Wikia's search function will updated soon(ish)

Discussions
Lots of updates in near future
 * I previously thought /d was mostly to get more ad revenue, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Ads only appear like after the 5th post viewed, then every 30th after that.
 * They said /d was created to work better with forums on mobile, which are really hard to view (personally I didn't know this until now cuz I didn't actually try them on mobile, lol)
 * Categories will be added (likely this week) to help separate posts into more helpful and manageable groups
 * Someone suggested a "dank meme generator" for /d. But the Almighty is just and merciful, and spoke through Wikia staff to assure us that we (and all wikis) would be spared from this darkness.
 * Our wiki will be one of the very last to be merged. Kudos, follows, and other features will be merged into /d, so it should be pretty seamless
 * Images uploaded on /d will not appear on the main wiki, so we won't have to worry about spam images or categorizing a whole bunch of images just for /d
 * Staff told me that other communities look up to us for our developed and mature discussions community (yes, I know that may seem surprising to some of you, lol. But I guess that's pretty good)

International/other languages

 * Remember that we are the dominant wiki for stuff, and therefore our content is often translated into other languages. It's pretty neat to know that people look up to us and all that. Must be our abundance of freedom and liberty that our wiki is bursting with (no thanks to Bron and Carlo for undermining said freedom, though). Brb, getting several burgers to celebrate
 * Will look into using an interwiki bot (either our own or getting Wikia to use own) to connect pages that are partially linked via interlanguage links, but don't have links to all existing pages of the same thing
 * Don't try to translate content in Google translate or other machine translation and post it on wikis - doesn't work well and may hammer SEO (not that people here do this, but just fyi)

SEO
Basically means search engine optimization - that is, how we crush our competitors into dust and retake what was stolen from us with fire and blood.
 * Staff says that redirects cause a small negative impact on SEO. However, we need some redirects for Wikia's search, as well as helping out with linking and possibly page load times. I'll ask them directly this week
 * Didn't get a chance to talk about the whole automatic linking thing for logged-out readers, will ask
 * Interlanguage links provide a small boost to our SEO - they help Google understand that the English wiki version of a page is different from the Spanish version. Otherwise, both pages would be ranked lower without those links

Portable infoboxes
Wasn't able to attend the session about this, but I talked with an engineering manager (User:Shareif) - feel free to ask him about extra functionality that we may need for infoboxes and such

Community Central

 * Despite our different backgrounds and languages, everyone seemed to agree that CC is really bad (surprise!)
 * CC admin I talked to seems ready to crack down and start banning lots of people from chat - Christmas in August, hopefully?
 * People mostly agreed that Help pages and Wikia University weren't useful
 * Default templates and help pages were suggested to be updated - not sure if that will happen though

Fandom
New thing put out by Wikia 7-8 months ago to get fans to write editorials and such, known as the Fan Contributor program
 * Related Fandom articles can be included in a slideshow sort of thing on the main page by contacting staff
 * Related Fandom articles should be appearing in the box on the right rail, assuming there's enough articles related to
 * Program seems pretty easy to get into, could be good if some of us write stuff
 * Will be released in other languages (especially Spanish) in about a year