All posts by MiningCreeperI

Aloha, and welcome back! It would be an understatement to say that lots of things have changed ever since our last update on the Wiki. The world is going through a pandemic, and on top of that, we are facing a political and financial crisis. It’s not looking great for this year so far, so first and foremost, we hope that you’re all safe and well! 

On the bright side, summer is finally upon us! This is the time to take a break, enjoy the weather and go back to normal, even if it is just for a moment (mind you, social distancing is still in place, of course!). If you’ve had the chance to check out Mineplex recently, you might have noticed that as a minigame server, it has been a big winner of the coronavirus outbreak, with their player count more than doubling! 

Keeping that in mind, we obviously want to keep the Wiki tidy and clean for the increased amounts of visitors. There have been plenty of cool changes we want to share with you today, plus there’s so many more to come later this year. So why not grab yourself a nice drink, a comfy spot and dive right in, hm?

Remarkable contributions

Over the past few months, many dedicated editors of the wiki have spent lots of time ensuring that the wiki stays a reputable source of knowledge for the server. In this section of the newsletter, we would like to focus on some of the users that have made a tremendous impact on both the reputability and overall appearance of the wiki. 

Our first spotlight this time is on Sncwie. With 30 edits since joining the wiki in March 2020, Sncwie is very dedicated to keeping the wiki a valid source of knowledge for all and puts a lot of time and effort into editing different articles, whether it be ranks, games, or even more!

Next, we’d also like to thank BlueandGreen! He is an ex-wiki staff member who has put a tremendous amount of effort into the wiki in all aspects. More recently, he’s made somewhat of a return and now spends lots of time ensuring that the wiki is up to date, clean, and reputable. 

One final shoutout goes to someone who has been working very hard over the past few months to keep the Wiki updated and accurate: TheBlueComet481! A current builder for the Mineplex network, he is constantly editing many different articles whether about the build team or just Mineplex in general. Showing his interest in- and outside of the Wiki, he is definitely deserving of the Featured User award. Congrats!

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Feedback from polls

In the last newsletter, we asked a few different questions about various topics and aspects of the wiki to see how we could improve them. We are going to have a look through each one of them and the feedback it received here!

Mobile Readability

Judging from the poll results, it appears that most of you do not often use your mobile to browse through the wiki. 75% of you said that mobile readability could be worth a fix in some articles around the place, but it shouldn’t be a major concern. This is also backed up by the wiki statistics administrators have access to, which suggest that about ⅔ of our user base uses a desktop. Thus, while we are definitely going to take it into account while creating new articles in the future, it is very unlikely that we are going to go through all the older articles to improve them for mobile users, unless they are extremely messy. 

Newsletters

Overall, 2 people would be happy to see the newsletters carry on, 5 think that the time spent on them could be spent on something more useful and announcements for major changes would be enough, and 1 person does not read them or care about them. From our perspective, except for polls, newsletters don’t get that much engagement. They are also quite a bit of a challenge for us to release in time or release at all as we are all rather busy, and do not have that much time to dedicate anymore. Hence, while we are not quite sure what is gonna happen to them yet, this might be the last one for a while since we are considering to put newsletters on hold temporarily. However, we expect things to change around the wiki in the future and its relation with the server, which signifies that there is a possibility they will return if there is a demand and more people around!

Rules

This one is straightforward. 100% of the votes said that the current community policy and rules were fine. Unless something major is brought up, we will most likely not change or add any rules in the near future.

Bedrock Content

2 people were focusing more on Bedrock articles, whereas 5 did not think it should be our main focus at the moment. Currently, we do have some articles about Bedrock games and features, but the issue is that most of the active editors actively play Java. Thus, we cannot really document stuff we are not entirely familiar with. In the future, if we get the Mineplex community to engage more with our platform then perhaps we could encourage more Bedrock articles to be written, but it is not our biggest priority as it currently stands. We have yet to finish all the server subteams and Java Nano Games pages, which we think is more important before starting a wider expansion.

Visualizations

This was about the layout of the pages and whether they had too much images / we should focus more on text. While this did not get a lot of votes, it appears that most people do not care or think it is currently fine as it is. Therefore, in the future we will most likely keep on writing articles the same way as we do nowadays, but we will keep in mind that too much images can cause loading issues, especially on low-end devices.

Usage of the wiki

We were quite surprised to see that most of you use the wiki to look up information about older, or previous games, features and updates! The content which is the most interesting to you guys is both general information on broader topics (hackers, GWEN, reports) and factual information, statistics and analytics (kit stats and game balance). We will thus try to make sure that the relevant articles are always up to date and available. 

Design Choices

For the theme, 1 reader wants light, 2 readers want dark and 1 reader does not mind. We did experiment with a black theme in the past during seasonal events (Halloween), and people seemed to have enjoyed it. While it is not a priority at the moment, we will consider reintroducing a black theme for a longer period of time to see whether it is an improvement or not. 

As for the general article layout and design, everyone voted for having professional-looking, Wikipedia-like articles without flashy colours or fancy fonts. This is great news as we believe this is already the case for most of our articles at the moment, so not too much change is required. However we invite you to debate on any change you think would be necessary in the #wiki-discussion channel of our discord.

Thank you very much for giving your input and feedback, this is really helpful in order to stay on the right track and focus on stuff which actually matters to the wiki users and reflects what they want!

New staff member !

Even though we had SophOG resign from her administrator position at the beginning of the year, we are delighted to announce that Saltyfishhy will be joining the wiki staff team as a content moderator! Here is a few words from him:

Heyo! I’m Saltyfishhy, and I’ve been a member of the Mineplex community for about 6 years now. I’ve always been interested in contributing to the community and the network itself, and more recently I’ve discovered the Mineplex Wiki! As a little bit about myself, my favorite game on Mineplex is probably Speed Builders, and as a close second I’d have to say Super Smash Mobs. These days you’ll likely see me chilling in lobby one, however.

This is great news for us as we are always willing to see the wiki team and active users grow, as not only does it positively impact the quality of the content available, but it also allows us to realise more of our plans and projects for 2020! Speaking of...

Going Forward

Aside from several internal updates and additions, there haven’t been many content updates visible to regular readers. This is about to change though: Our schedule for 2020 is packed with exciting projects! Today, we’ll just name some of them which will be our main focus during the next months.

The mysterious CoM project?

If you’ve taken a look at our public project overview before, you might have noticed that one card has remained untouched for over a year now. But has it really? Today I’m happy to confirm that what might be our biggest collaboration to date is still in the making, and we’re now working on it at full steam. We will keep you updated on its progress over the course of the next few months. Stay tuned!

Discord server overhaul

Our Wiki Discord server is far from optimized, and we heavily rely on the use of third-party bots to make features like the Wiki integration and moderation possible. Even though it will only be a side project, we are planning to develop and implement our own bot to make more features possible, which also comes with an improved experience for all of our server members. We are considering to add features like:

• Wiki ↔ Discord account linking
• An upgraded report system for Vandalism/malicious edits on the Wiki
• An enhanced verification system for Mineplex Staff & GI members

We’re still in the planning phases, so if you have any other suggestions, let us know!

Unified Community Platform

The UCP is a major upcoming change, affecting all FANDOM & Gamepedia Wikis in the near future. It will come with a massively updated editor, improved mobile device support, and much more! To prepare for this, we will be undergoing some changes sooner or later. We’re not quite ready for the move towards the new platform just yet, simply because some features (like the forums this newsletter is being posted in) are not fully functional on the new platform, but we will make way for it soon. Read more about it here!

Upcoming content

Welp, that’s a lot to look forward to! If you want to give feedback on our current projects, feel free to check out our public trello board.

Content-wise, we wanted to do something special based on the poll results this time. Seeing that you guys are primarily interested in removed games, and UHC has been frequently requested to make a return in the Mineplex community, we decided to focus on our Ultra Hardcore page throughout the next weeks! UHC has actually been a featured article before, but we felt that it could still use some improvement in terms of content and layout. Be sure to help out and start editing the page if you have anything to share about UHC, be it factual information, screenshots, clips or anything of the like. 

If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. 

Thanks, and stay safe!

Hello there 2020! It might be with a delay, but we still wanted to wish you a happy new year. We hope you all had a great start into the new decade!

As for the Wiki, we’ve tried our best to get this newsletter out as soon as possible. It’s slowly becoming a tradition for us to gather community feedback at the beginning of each year, since it’s very important to us what you guys think. Of course, this is not the only topic which awaits you in this issue. There’s a lot in store for you today, so why don’t we dive right in?!

Remarkable contributions

Thanks to MachoPiggies for making countless edits as well as creating some new pages in November!

Welcome back Prism55Writes! It’s been some time since he was last active, but he’s made some smaller changes recently.

Vanessa1375 deserves a big shoutout for keeping many subteam pages up to date, as well as her valued contributions throughout the last year! Thank you :)

Saltyfishhy only recently joined us, but he contributed to a number of articles already. Sounds like we’ve found our Featured Contributor for the Winter season, congrats!

Once again, thanks to all of you for your work here! We really appreciate it.

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Okay, let’s talk about polls first. Last year we’ve had a batch of questions for you to answer already, and by bringing some of them up again, we’d like to see if your opinion changed. Next to that, there’s a lot of new questions on recent topics too, so be sure to answer them to the best of your ability! Of course, feedback is always appreciated outside of polls too, so if you have any other thoughts to share, let us know in the comments.

Mobile readability

This is one of the questions we already asked you last year. We’ve done some small improvements here and there to clean up and improve the experience for our mobile readers (smartphones, tablets etc.). Unfortunately, FANDOM doesn’t provide many useful tools to allow for design changes, and it is difficult to get around their restrictions. Still, we’d like to see if you feel strongly about improving the current situation.

Newsletters

As you can see, we’ve had lots of trouble releasing these newsletters every month. We’ve now switched to a quartely release schedule, which means we’re aiming for one new issue every 3 months. Last year, you’ve clearly shown how much you’d like to see our newsletters continue, but with each new release, we question if you actually enjoy them, since they require a lot of preparation each time. So, here’s the poll:

Rules

Aside from a fancy redesign by BlueandGreen, our community policy hasn’t undergone many changes last year. Being a topic which affects all of us more or less, we’d still like to see your opinion on it though.

Bedrock content

Despite seeing a lot of Bedrock player contributions on our page, it’s undeniable our main focus is still on the Java edition. How important is Bedrock as a platform to you?

Visualizations

With the main focus of our Wiki being on a Minecraft server, it’s no surprise that our readers prefer short, concise articles over walls of text. Images and videos can help in breaking up long paragraphs. What do you think about them?

Usage of the Wiki

The Wiki offers a wide range of content, and our readers’ interests aren’t always clear to us. To find out what areas we should prioritize, here’s two questions for you!

Design choices

Unlike in previous years, we’ve been experimental with our layout and tried many new designs, such as a dark mode (with white text), new backgrounds and more. Let us know more about your reader experience below.

Those are all the polls we have for you today. Thanks a lot for answering them! We’ll evaluate your responses internally and announce the results later. Now for the interesting part: our 2019 Year review!

Year Review

The beginning of each year marks an exciting event for all of us: in January, the Wiki celebrates its anniversary following its creation in 2013. If you haven’t seen my blog post on it yet, check it out here! Since the 5th anniversary was a large milestone for all of us who’ve worked on the Wiki over the years, we’ve released a temporary design to celebrate it. It’s hard to believe that we’ve already passed our 6th anniversary this year, but we’re still going strong!

Only a few weeks later, we launched our Wiki Discord server. This was something I had been considering for a while, but I definitely didn’t expect the massive turnout! Thanks to over 100 of you for joining us. And – in case you’re not a member yet – don’t fret! We’re always open for newbies, so come join us now :)

In March, BaconAnEggs surprised all of us with the sudden creation of dozens of pages and over 800 edits in only one week. He started working on an article for each staff member, which would unfortunately later prove to be too inconvenient to handle. Regardless, we still appreciate your hard work, which started and led what was probably the most passionate project for our Wiki in 2019!

Following the staff pages creation, we began working on another one of our plans during Summer: the Translations project. Although it hasn’t been completed yet due to inconsistencies of the official rules document and conflicts with the workload of the Translations Team, we’re hoping to fully launch the project soon.

Aside from that, the Wiki has seen many overhauls to basic functionality in the last year. We’ve revamped the staff application system, the punishment system, the rules and policies, the History pages, the verification system, but most importantly, the project management structure. With the release of our public Trello board, we created an easy way to offer an overview of our current plans for the Wiki. Not only that, everyone (yes, you too!) is able to comment on them at any time. Feel free to check out the board from time to time here!

In terms of new staff members, last year has surely been a surprise too! With Nicodami stepping up to become a Bureaucrat and SophOG as our newest Administrator in July, we’ve seen two very experienced Mineplex community members join the Wiki staff team. Their help with various projects is definitely appreciated. As always, we’re looking for new staff members, so be sure to check out the application hub. We would be excited to read your application if you’re interested!

Back in November, we finally completed the staff page archival. All that remains are Admin+ pages, as they do not require as many updates, and are of higher interest to our readers than volunteer staff pages. If you want to take a quick look at the 200+ archived pages, check out the Wiki archive here.

As for December, we’ve decided once again to introduce a new layout and background for the holiday season. This was our second attempt at introducing a dark theme, which was unfortunately removed shortly afterwards after noticing some conflicts with older article designs. Still, we’ve kept this freezing cold blue color palette until today. By the way, we’ve also enabled an animated background with snowflakes. If you’re interested in enabling it, continue reading below!

var className = "CustomSnowElement";
var flakeWidth = 32;
var flakeHeight = 32;
 
importArticles({
    type: 'script',
    articles: [
        'u:dev:MediaWiki:SnowStorm.js',
    ]
});

The final major change for 2019 were the updated Minigame infoboxes. This might not sound like much, but it enables us to do so much more with the Wiki design. The template is also more customizable than before. We haven’t noticed any issues with it yet, but if you do happen to come across some glitches, please let us know \o/

And here we are, back in the present! We hope you liked our short recap of last year’s events. Since we’re already some weeks into 2020, we’ve got some changes to document from this year too.

First of all, we replaced the news panel on the homepage with a dynamic rss feed. What does that mean? Well, it will update automatically without requiring manual edits now. Every time an announcement on Mineplex is made, it’ll show up in the small box on the right side of the homepage now.

This is more of a small change, but if you play Mineplex on the Java edition of Minecraft, you might’ve heard of Communities already. Well, there’s one for the Wiki now! Come join us by typing /com join MineplexWiki in-game! ^-^

And we have one last, rather unfortunate announcement. SophOG has decided to step down from her position as administrator for personal reasons. Still, her work won’t be forgotten. Thanks for all you’ve done on the team :)

Upcoming content

What’s next for us? Well, we’ll aim to focus on the Translations project for now. The concept is good to go, so we should be able to get started soon(TM). The CoM talks also haven’t been forgotten, but due to a lack of time on our ends, we haven’t been able to make any progress lately. The winter design will disappear soon, so enjoy it while you can! We will return to the classic look after February. Finally, Rose Rush will be our next featured game. It was re-introduced on Java only today, so our readers will surely be interested in a well-crafted article. That’s why we need you to get it up to date again. Feel free to help out wherever you can, be it with additional tips or even videos.

If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. Thanks for sticking with us, and here’s to a great 2020!

Hey everyone,

you might've noticed that we skipped this month's newsletter again. This is for a very simple reason: Things have been busy for all of us from the Wiki Team, and we focused on exams and college work recently, which left barely any time for Wiki work. Because of this, we've decided to rework the schedule so that we'll be posting one newsletter every two months from now on, with special editions in between. As you could tell from the sometimes heavily delayed posts, the previous monthly releases have been very difficult to keep up, and with this change, we'll be given the opportunity to publish the newsletters on time. Next to that, this will allow us to provide more content in each newsletter, while also giving us more time to prepare each newsletter issue with more detail. 

With our newest addition to our Project Management efforts, the Trello board, it soon became clear that we have a huge list of tasks to work on to improve this Wiki in various areas. Due to the above-mentioned time constraints, we unfortunately had to put most of these projects on hold in the last weeks. Regardless, we're still keeping track of all of our goals, and will continue to work on the page to the best of our ability. As always, all major updates will be announced in the newsletters, so check them out from time to time if you'd like to stay up to date. Staff applications are also open, so if you're interested in joining us, I highly encourage you to apply. Remember, we have cookies ?

Now for the exciting news: In case you're not on our discord server already, we've recently hit 100 members! That's a huge number I honestly never expected when opening it to the public. Anyway, to celebrate the occasion, I'm hosting a giveaway to give back to our amazing community for your contributions over the last months. I know I've said this before, but without your dedication and passion for the Wiki, the site wouldn't exist. So, what can you win? I'm giving away 3 rank upgrades, and all you have to do in order to win is join the Discord server and react to the giveaway message in the Announcements channel. You'll have a week to enter, so don't miss out. Good luck to everyone :)

The next newsletter should be released next week, if everything goes according to plan. Thanks for reading, and Happy Halloween! ?

School’s finally over! So how did everyone’s exams go? 

We’re in a bright mood for the July Newsletter today! With Mineplex’s player-count increasing a lot in the recent times, we have seen a great amount of activity around the wiki lately! Let’s jump straight into it, shall we?

Remarkable contributions

First off, we’d like to give a big shoutout to Musmak, who made over 100+ edits in barely 2 weeks! With Musmak’s many improvements on various articles, be it grammar fixes and formatting changes, they’ve easily earned themselves the User of the Month tag for sure. Thanks a lot!

BaconAnEggs continued working on his recently started project – the staff pages. We’d also like to thank you for your continued efforts!

As our newest member of the Wiki staff team, SophOG was very active in June and has improved a number of pages. Be sure to give her a warm welcome, if you haven’t already! :)

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

We have lots of great news today, so we’d like to begin with the most important announcement: we have a new Administrator candidate, SophOG! As always, we allow our community to vote before making a final decision on the application. If you want to have your opinion count, leave your thoughts here!

In the last month we realised how hard it was to juggle between all the different projects we have for the wiki. With the aim to organise all these tasks in a better way, we decided to create a public Trello board! At last, we are now able to overlook everything at a glance while knowing some idea or project will not get lost on the way. It also provides a greater transparency and community interaction between us and the wiki community, as it is now possible for anyone to check out what we are up to.
But wait – there’s more! You’re also able to comment on all cards to share your ideas with us. This means we can always collect your feedback on all projects. We hope you’re just as excited for our Trello board launch as we are!

We also have a small update regarding Discord moderation. Recently, we have witnessed a few trolls around our discord at times where we weren’t able to moderate. Coincidentally, we’ve had a staff role which remained largely unused for years: the Chat Moderator position. From now on, this role is not only responsible for moderating the wiki chat module, but also our Discord server. The main tasks are enforcing the chat rules and making sure to maintain a suitable and welcoming environment for all users on both platforms.

Along with that, we’ve decided to overhaul the Wiki staff application requirements, to reflect more accurately what we’re expecting from our applicants. Be sure to take a look here, and if you have any remaining questions, feel free to let us know! 

In addition to that, we also made the application form itself more clear and added a few more questions. One thing to be sure, with a mature attitude and a clean punishment history, you’re more than ready to give the application a try. So what are you waiting for? We’d be excited to welcome you on board! :) 

Upcoming content

As a result from last month’s poll, it became clear that we’d have to remove all articles of former staff members. This project is definitely one of our current priorities, so the archival process should begin soon(TM).

Now, a little word about the translations project! It’s still fresh in our minds, we have worked on it a lot lately! Recently, the Rules Committee of Mineplex decided to remake the main rules document. This meant that we had to rework a lot of what we had previously started, thus resulting in further delays. Once again we would like to apologise to everyone, especially our fellow TT people! We are coming close to publicly launch it though, so stay tuned for that! 

Aside from that, we know we haven’t had the time to work on our featured games recently. We hope to make up for that with a new project coming soon! Although we’re not going to ruin the surprise yet, we might be welcoming a lot of new editors in the near future. We’re thrilled for this long-awaited change, and hope to share more with you in the next months.

And that’s all for today, folks. If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. 

Thanks!

Good day ladies and gentlemen, we have a new request for adminship!

As always, it is up to you to decide the outcome of the application, but before that, let me introduce our candidate.

This time, our applicant is SophOG! You might have already seen her on the Mineplex forums and on the MP Discord, or perhaps you know her from the Game Insights team. As a former Moderator, she has an extensive knowledge of Mineplex, and continues to actively help the server as community member to this date.

Joining the Wiki back in April, she has been editing a great variety of articles, and she is often seen participating in discussions on our Discord server. With such outstanding activity, she was interested in joining the staff team as a Chat Moderator about a month ago. And now, Sophie is hoping to continue her staff journey at the Mineplex Wiki by becoming an Administrator.

Please consider to read her application before voting here.

As per usual, the community plays an important role in the whole application process: All of you are welcome to comment the request and ask questions directly to the candidate. Feel free to share your opinion and take part in the poll below. Please keep in mind to be respectful, and stay on topic. 

A promotion requires a clear consensus. The poll will also be taken into account, although the comments will be prioritized when making a final decision.

All other recent changes are covered in our Newsletter, which will be published later today – promise!

UPDATE: Just released the NL – be sure to give it a read over here!

Until next time, and enjoy the rest of your holidays! :)