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!

2 months later, and we are back! Although it may seem like we skipped a newsletter, it is intentional. We have decided that it would be better if we released a newsletter every other month, thus covering 2 months in one newsletter. Anyway, let’s jump straight into it! 

Remarkable contributions

The past months have been quite busy in terms of edits! We’ve seen a few new member joining us, as well as older ones who suddenly went on a streak of edits. It’s nice to see that your trick-or-treating hasn’t impacted the involvement on the platform!

• MachoPiggies went through a great amount of pages, improving, fixing and updating them! The amount of work done was so impressive, it would not have made sense to not award him one of the 2 User of the Month titles! Congrats! 

• Vanessa1375 went around editing a few pages, which include Classics Cow, Streams Team or even Content Creator Council!

• BlueandGreen also contributed in a more technical way by targeting cosmetics pages as well as improving some templates.

• DCPlaysMC edited the Power Play Club page.

• Heckingss mainly focused on working on various teams and subteams pages, such as Rules Committee and Quality Assurance Testing to only name a few. We thought his numerous contributions were quite pertinent, hence he will be able to enjoy the 2nd ‘User of the Month’ tag given along with this newsletter. Congrats!

• Xukuri, THELichCA and Surved edited a bunch of miscellaneous pages.

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

During Halloween, you probably noticed that your eyes have been treated with a dark and spooky theme! As this period is heavily celebrated on Mineplex - especially through the 2019 Halloween Event which included the return of Halloween Havoc - we had no reason to pretend nothing was going on around here. Although we received a lot of positive feedback on the general aspect of the wiki, the colour being pretty much inverted led to some displaying issues around some templates… Sorry about that! Anyway, did you enjoy that theme? What do you think should have been improved? What would you like to see if something similar was done to celebrate Christmas? Please make sure to vote on the poll below and let us aware of any ideas you may have through the comments!

Over the last weeks, BlueandGreen overhauled some of the cosmetics pages, which sparked a discussion about their layout on our discord server. Not only is there some information we’d like to add to the main tables (the rarity of cosmetics, for instance), but the large galleries of some pages have proven to be highly inconvenient for our mobile readers, too. To combat this, we’re considering to move all animated images to a dedicated subpage. This would allow us to improve the general design of the galleries (such as by sorting and categorizing the GIFs), as well as speeding up the load times of the main pages and lowering data usage. What do you think about this?

Another small change is the recent addition of the Wikia Bot to our discord server! Our little helper is connected to the Wiki, and provides some interesting statistics on the page, and many more useful commands. Use !wikia help for a quick overview of all features.

Finally, here’s the results of our Halloween giveaway! Our 3 winners are:

• AceSJus

• Jaekub

• killer10

Congrats to you all! Be sure to message Mining on Discord to claim your prize. If you haven’t won anything this time, don’t worry! We might do another giveaway in the future.

Upcoming content

For our next featured minigame, we wanted to do something special: We’ve chosen a Bedrock game. The article for Dragons wasn’t even created yet, but that is about to change. If you’re a bedrock player, feel free to contribute to the page, because there’s obviously a lot missing.

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

Thanks!

Welcome back! It’s been a while since the last newsletter was released, and while we tried our hardest to work on an issue for you last month, our holiday vacations took up most of our time. No worries though, we’re back with even more this time: double the content, double the fun.

Remarkable contributions

We are very happy to see so many dedicated editors on the Wiki, and we don’t want to miss the opportunity to show you our appreciation! Here’s some of the users with the most outstanding work in the last months – July and August:

• Vanessa1375 removed tons of small mistakes she came across. Thanks!

• Welcome DanielW231! As one of the newest editors, he already made lots of changes.

• Even after earning themselves the User of the Month tag last time, Musmak continued to improve various articles. Thank you!
• With tons of new images added, we’d like to give a special thanks to YeeterFamGang.Great job, and congrats on becoming our User of the Month for your efforts in July!
• After his long absence, BlueandGreen has racked up hundreds of edits in almost no time, with one of his main projects being the Mineplex Discord article, which has now more than doubled in size. Great to see you back, and with no surprise – the User of the Month tag for August goes to you!

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Over the last months, we’ve made plans to rework the staff verification system. Until now, we had a large range of tags which users could choose to receive, including Quality Assurance, Event Assistance and others. With this update, we’ve narrowed it down to Mineplex Staff and Game Insights tags, to accurately highlight the users who have extensive knowledge of the server. Along with that, we’ve also renamed the “Verified Mineplex Staff” tag to just “Mineplex Staff” – it was a bit redundant, wasn’t it? Last but not least, we now have a Discord verification in place as well, so if you’re either Mineplex staff or GI, don’t hesitate to contact us to have your tags applied to your account!

Staff pages have repeatedly shown to be a huge issue, and we’ve finally decided to remove all staff pages (excluding Admin+). We have already prepared an archive for the retired staff member articles, which means none of the information in the articles is lost. We thank each and everyone of you for your efforts on these pages, but please understand that we have grossly underestimated the work connected to keeping them updated. Feel free to take a look at Mineplex Wiki:Archive to see the removed pages. Needless to say, there are no plans to remove any other pages at the moment.

If you’ve paid close attention to the edit logs, you might have noticed that we deleted a seemingly harmless article about Staff Commands. Don’t worry, none of us went rogue! :) We have actually been asked by a Mineplex administrator to take down the page because it contained confidential information. To elaborate a bit more, they requested that we should not specify the commands which are in use by staff only. In the future, we will try to rework the article so that it does not violate Mineplex’s staff policy, as we would like to maintain a good relationship with the server. Thanks for understanding!

Upcoming content

Our next featured game will be Super Smash Mobs Domination! Being one of the longest standing games on the network, the article could certainly use a cosmetic makeover. Feel free to help us update the page.

That’s it for today! If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. 

Thanks!

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!

Ahh… Sun’s shining in the sky, there ain’t a cloud in sight...

Summer is going strong with over 30° celsius (that’s 86° fahrenheit for my American fellows) already! The school year is drawing to a close, and everyone’s in a holiday mood. Do you guys have anything special planned for this summer? :)

Guess what, we do! In fact, we have a lot of projects waiting for release. Here’s our monthly overview about all changes in May and our upcoming plans.

Remarkable contributions

• NeoEnderman2016 worked on the Speed Builders and Shocking Strikes (Ability) pages in May! Thanks :)

• Another shoutout to Timmi6790 and Wattywatty14, who were reverting vandalism and contributing to the Clans page respectively.

• Big thank you to DCPlaysMC for improving the Gadgets page! He has been very actively editing the page for several weeks already, so the User of the Month tag is definitely well deserved!

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

In regards to last month’s vote which was held in order to decide whether Nicodami would be promoted to bureaucrat, I am pleased to announce that he will be joining me on that position! The vote was very favorable, with only one opposition and one neutral to one supporting and seven strongly supporting editors! If you are interested in checking it out, the poll is available here. This is great news as since we’re both very busy, we can share our duties and make sure the wiki keeps running smoothly for you all to enjoy!

Regarding the staff pages, a small majority (around 60%) voted to keep the pages of the current staff members. Only 40% of you were interested in removing every staff page, while moving the content to other pages. In accordance to the poll results, we’ll be archiving the articles of former staff members soon, and monitor the remaining staff pages. We’re still considering to remove them all, should we not be able to keep the rest of the staff pages updated.

We also have a small update regarding the TT project! Unfortunately, due to both of us being rather busy, it has stalled a bit recently. We had several possibilities on how to handle it, and we were unsure which one to chose, so we opened up a discussion on fandom’s community help wiki. In the end, we decided we will go with the solution we originally planned on doing, because it will be the most convenient, even though it’s not the most efficient. Fortunately, this means we already have most of it set up, we just need to test it and it should be all good to go! Nonetheless we still wanted to apologise for the delay, it was really unexpected on our end, and was also worsened by all the exams we had to go through lately! 

For our fellow translators reading this: as soon as we’re ready, we’ll notify you on the TT discord! 

Upcoming Content

This month’s featured game is the crazy Weekend Brawl! Dozens of game variations are still missing, so we’ll be trying to add them. If you’ve been playing Weekend Brawls yourself, feel free to help out. :)

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

Thanks!

Phew, there’s so much to talk about this month that we didn’t even have time to come up with a good pun for our title. They’ll be back next time. Sorry guys.

Remarkable Contributions

• DCPlaysMC edited various cosmetics pages, and added his own images to improve the galleries! Thanks!

• Just like the other, User:Wattywatty14 joined us only a few weeks ago, but made lots of changes already. Nice job!

• A big thank you to SophOG, who did not only work on several articles, but was also very actively engaged in discussion regarding the staff pages. Looks like we found our User of the Month for May! :) 

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

The recently introduced Staff pages (example) caused a lot of controversy. We’ve received quite a few valid complaints, questioning their adequacy and their value of contribution to the Wiki. To centralize the discussion in one thread, we prepared an announcement which includes a poll with all the options which are currently available for us. We’d love to hear your feedback on the matter so we can make sure our final decision is the best choice for everyone!

After a long wait from our end, we’ve finally decided to launch a brand new project! Maybe some of you noticed already that Mineplex doesn’t offer any sort of translations of the rules anywhere, even if the entire bedrock platform is translated. Thus, we decided to host translations for them on our platform! These will made by volunteers within the Translations Teams members, including both of us. We’re really proud to start such a project as it is a big step towards helping the international community around Mineplex. In the future, if it all works out well we might also start translating Mineplex's FAQs and other useful information! However, you might not want to expect a translation of the entire Wiki as, sadly, that would require a lot more active contributors from all around the globe. 

Feel free to suggest anything you think would be useful to improve this project! 

We have a small update about the progression of discussions with Mineplex leadership team. The Community Management team is interested in working together with us to improve the Wiki. The details are yet to be discussed though, and the project is put on hold while major changes are being made to the Game Insights team. We’ll hopefully have more updates for you soon.

Finally, we have a rather special announcement for today. On a personal note, I’m very excited for this, because of my struggle to meet the activity requirements of my leadership position recently.

Nicodami requested the rank of bureaucrat. As you know, he has been an administrator for a few months now, and he still plays an active role around the wiki with several edits on a weekly basis. Here’s a short introduction by Nicolas himself:

Hey! For those of you who don’t know me, I have been around the Mineplex community for a while now, as I joined in 2014. To this day, I am a part of Mineplex’s ideas and translations team, and mainly play Block Hunt on the network. I have been on the wiki since over a year ago, and have over a thousand of edits here, making me one of the biggest contributors to this wiki. Recently, I’ve been working on making the new translations project possible!

His entire application can be seen here. Remember that your vote matters, so be sure to leave your thoughts in the announcement thread here. 

Upcoming content

We’ll be back with the June newsletter in exactly two weeks from now, where we will announce the results of the staff pages polls, the progress of the Translations project, and the outcome of Nicodami’s application. Stay tuned!

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

Thanks!

Bonjour!

Despite our April fools plan not to release a newsletter this month, we’ve decided it would still be a good idea to keep you up to date with what has been going on recently, especially because we had HUGE changes last month.

Maybe you were simply overwhelmed by all the new pages and edits? So were we. Let’s quickly recap what has changed.

Remarkable contributions

What do I even begin… BaconAnEggs registered some days ago, but made over 800 edits in under a week already, immediately climbing the leaderboard to secure the 5th place. All staff pages, which were planned to be done over the course of this year have been now finished in a few days. With such a truly outstanding start, I look forward to more of Bacon’s contributions in other projects, too. Great job!

Nicodami continued working on the History pages, making substantial changes to the 2018 and 2019 changelogs. Thank you!

One more shoutout to Timmi6790, who has also recently joined us, as well as MarzieK, for making several QoL changes to various articles. Appreciated! :)

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

With the recent addition of hundreds of new pages, we have also hit an all-time record of over 2000 (!) edits in March. Our WAM, a score from 0-100 which reflects our activity level, skyrocketed from 18 to 50 last month, bringing us back to the top 1000 most active gaming wikis for a few days. Personally, I’ve had rather pessimistic expectations for the wiki this year, but I was clearly proven wrong. Thank you all <3

With all the new staff pages, updating articles like the list of all trainees, mods, recruiters etc. is easier than ever before! Simply assign the respective categories to a staff member’s page, and the lists will update automatically. As an example, adding the “Event Squad members” category to the Block2Block page will eventually add him to the Event Squad page. Simple as that! Feel free to expand the staff articles if you can, as most of them are stubs right now.

The staff articles also attracted – believe it or not – 3 new staff members to the wiki! A warm welcome to all of you, we’re glad you’ve decided to join us.

Finally, in case you missed it, here’s another plug for the Discord server we just launched! Be sure to join on the right side of the page, or alternatively by clicking here. See you there!

Upcoming content

We’ve got all staff pages covered now, but guess what, there’s much more on the list! As long as we can update the staff pages every so often, we can start focusing on other projects such as:

• Games

• Cosmetics

• Kits

• Abilities

• Maps

• Wiki Design/Layout

• History pages

Let us know in the replies which one you think deserves the most attention.

Besides that, our next featured game of the month is Super Spleef. Being only an arcade game, updating it should be a short and crisp task.

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

Thanks!

Hola!

Spring has finally arrived, which means: It’s a beautiful day outside! Birds are singing, flowers are blooming… on days like these, kids like you… should be editing on the Mineplex Wiki!

(I totally didn’t butcher the quote nor the transition this time)

Well then, what does we have in offer this time? We worked on a special project, and we can make a major announcement for all of you today! But before we get into that, let’s recap what happened in February.

Remarkable contributions

KfeatT created a page for the newest holiday game, Rose Rush. Thanks!

Nicodami worked on Rose Rush too next to adding a 2019 Valentines Event page.

I made a PewDiePie page following his visit on the server.

CryptoFoxGaming made an extensive guide for the Factions gamemode on Bedrock. We’ve decided to award you with the User of the Month tag for including a lot of detail!

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

If you've looked at the right side of the Wiki today, you might have already noticed the exciting news: We’ve launched our official Wiki Discord server! This server will allow you to talk with fellow editors about anything you’d like. With the built-in edit log, we can now catch vandals and other rule breakers in an instant! It will also help us centralizing community interaction and enable us to respond to questions and issues extremely quickly. Well what are you waiting for?

Join us now: Server Invite

Along with the new PewDiePie page, I added a YouTuber infobox ({{YT Infobox}}) and a rough outline of a YT navbox ({{YouTuber Navbox}}). The infobox includes a live subscriber counter, which was made possible by a new extension I enabled on the Wiki. Other than that, you’re good to go if you want to create a new page for any Mineplex YouTuber. Here’s a great tip if you’re lazy like me: feel free to copy the PewDiePie article and simply change all values in the templates which don’t fit.

In the last month, Nicolas and other anonymous contributors made huge changes to the History pages. This includes collapsible update logs, as well as updates sorted by month, which should make the page less cluttered. Be sure to leave your feedback in the replies.

The 5 year anniversary was a great opportunity for me to relive all the great memories the Wiki had offered me in the last years, but it’s time to return to the original design. We’ve removed all festivities for now. Personally, I really enjoyed the event and consider releasing more in the future!

Upcoming content

Yep, we’re still working out a solution on the staff situation. I can assure you I’ve had promising talks with Emily (EmmaLie), the lead of Community Management, and I’ll try my best to give you some sort of update on the matter in the next newsletter.

Our next featured minigame is Nano Games! It’s a pretty recent release, so the only difficulty should be updating every single one of the huge number of gamemodes in time. We’d appreciate your help with this project!

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

Hello everyone! We’re back with February’s newsletter issue, and interesting topics like the wiki anniversary, a discussion about a new page theme, and more!

So what are you waiting for? Let’s JUMP RIGHT INTO IT!

Remarkable contributions

• User:AvrooVulcan made sure the Reports Patrol was up to date!
• User:Nicodami kept up to date a lot of pages by adding or removing new maps, staff members, subteams members, and more! He also worked on getting a brand-new fresh looking Ranks page alongside with myself! Make sure to check it out if you haven’t seen it already!
• User:Vanessa1375 made a lot of edits this month! These were made to the Ideas Team, Game Insights, Senior Moderator, Subteams pages and more. To show our appreciation, this month’s User of the Month tag goes to you, Nessa! ^-^

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

This month has been very special for the wiki, as we celebrated its 5th anniversary! 5 years ago, Henry decided to create this wiki. To this day, we have accumulated over 37 thousands edits, as well as a total of about 750 registered users, including 10 wiki staff members. At this time, we get about 5 thousands views weekly, which is insane! We would like to thank anyone that has been a part of this project, without you the wiki wouldn’t have been what it is today!

Along with the new logo and background, we’re considering an entire redesign of the Wiki, which would include a new colour scheme and major layout changes. One of the most highly requested features is a dark theme. We’ve already discussed this topic internally, but we’re also interested in your suggestions, so be sure to let us know in the replies if you want to see any changes. Another update we’re definitely considering are global CSS definitions for elements like tables or boxes so that they use the identical colours and sizes throughout the page.

Upcoming content

For this month, we’ve chosen Cake Wars as featured minigame! After the extensive testing of all the new templates we created last year, we think they’re ready to be added to the more popular games. This is definitely an exciting project to get done, so be sure to contribute to any of the Cake Wars pages if you notice anything missing.

Oh, I almost forgot: If everything goes as planned, I’ll have some exciting news to share with you regarding the staff merge in the next newsletter!

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

Happy New Year! 

Christmas time is over (by the way, did y’all get what you wanted?), school’s started for me again and the exams are back as well. Woo! I seriously hope 2019 has more to offer.

In this issue, I’ll present the poll results from last month, and take a look at our goals for this year.

Remarkable Contributions

• Nicodami finished a 2018 Christmas Chaos Event article in a matter of hours after the holiday cheer was released!

• I’ve been working hard to finish the Fissure page with as much detail as possible.

• AvrooVulcan focused on numerous articles such as staff pages, and more. Looks like he’s had an editing spree! What could that be worth it, you ask? A shiny User of the Month tag sounds nice, right? ;)

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Last month, we included a few polls in our newsletter to find out what you guys would like to see changed. We’ve taken all of your feedback into consideration!

To evaluate the results in detail, I’ll go through each question one by one. 

Should we create an article for every single map?

With 3 neutral votes and someone opposing, I don’t believe this project should be our main focus this year. The Map Database which is currently in the process of being created should serve as a great way to look up details for all maps. Personally, I could definitely see map articles being added later if we have enough editors to keep them updated constantly.

Is mobile readability a relevant concern for you?

With 4 positive responses, it is clear that this is an aspect of the wiki we need to pay more attention to. It is true that some pages still contain huge tables or other features which make browsing through them uncomfortable. We will thus try to focus more on creating templates and updating old and unaesthetic content, which should hopefully improve the overall readability. 

Would you like to see the newsletters continue?

100% of the votes supporting our monthly issues was a quite overwhelming response! I’m glad you guys are enjoying these, as they definitely take up a lot of of our time.

As you might have seen, I couldn’t deal with the previous weekly release of newsletters due to my time constraints; and even now, we have trouble with finalizing the articles on time. We could totally look into returning to our bi-weekly release plan if you would prefer that, but it doesn’t seem to be necessary at the moment.

Would you want the Mineplex Staff-Wiki Staff merge to happen?

I know that some of you are quite skeptical about this change, and worry about staff bias. I’ll make absolutely sure this won’t happen – as a bureaucrat, it is my duty to make sure our neutrality is unaffected by this change. I’ve been talking to LT regarding various ideas for almost a year now, and we’re definitely making progress! I’ll keep you all updated if everything goes well.

What of our current page expansion projects should we stick to?

Again, it is great to see that our efforts last year sparked your interest: laying the foundation for an even bigger and better Wiki has been my main goal in 2018. We’ve been able to start various projects which were never attempted before – creating pages for all kits, abilities, maps, staff members, and many more!

I’ll definitely stick to this project next year as we might be able to document every single detail of one minigame for the first time.

Are you happy with our current rules?

Everyone seems quite positive about keeping the same rules here. Unless it’s required, we probably won’t touch much the rules in the following weeks. If we were to change anything, we would probably start off by clarifying some aspects rather than adding new stuff. 

Should we keep working on “random” games of the month or focus only on the available games?

Once again, a lot of you seem to appreciate the random games of the month! Considering it’s a good opportunity for us to bring back some light on old pages in order to get people to update them, we’ll surely continue with these!

Should we add more content for Bedrock Mineplex (formerly known as PE)?

It’s no big secret that ever since Bedrock was released, we’ve added close to no content for it whatsoever. This page is mainly focused on Java right now, and the majority of you – including me – doesn’t see this changing anytime soon. 

I’m personally rarely playing Bedrock, so I’m constantly looking for other editors who could add some more detail to content for other platforms.

What I’m worrying about is that none of the Bedrock server’s history is documented. If we were to add Bedrock articles now, we would only be able to cite the present state of Bedrock, which makes it feel somewhat vague and inaccurate, unlike for Java where we have 6 years of balancing to look at.

Would you be interested in an expanded editing guide?

Well it looks like Nicodami and I have will have some work to do then! 100% of the votes would like to see us create a more detailed guide. We totally understand though, it is true than some of the aspects of the wiki (especially templates and wikicode) are a bit complicated at first sight. For now, you can always refer to our Manual of Style which serves as a basic introduction to our page. We’ve also released an FAQ on the Mineplex forums here.

I’ll definitely note this down as another important change we could work on this year.

Thanks for your participation in the polls! We might do them more often from now on, as there’s usually no direct feedback in the newsletter replies.

What else have we done in December?

I’ve added a base page name module, which serves as a function to make our life easier when creating templates. It can be used as a variable on any page to return the entire page name, excluding anything in parentheses.

The {{Map Infobox}} template is here! This was the last missing template for the minigame-related set of pages: Kits, Abilities and Maps. We’re technically good to create map pages now, the question if it is worth it still stands, though.

Another behind the scenes change I’ve worked on is a modification of our punishment system. Basically, it makes the staff life easier but also gives users more details on their block.

Upcoming Content

The same procedure as every year: I’ve created an outline of the History/2019 page. Maybe I can keep up with all updates this year. Remember, whenever you notice something missing, feel free to add it, or leave a notice so all readers are aware of it.

The Map Database is still in the works! We haven’t agreed on a final layout yet, so be sure to let us know what you think fits best by looking at some examples here. My personal favourite is probably the tables, as they are pretty handy, sortable by various parameters and easily modifyable in terms of design.

This month’s featured minigame is Type Wars. Being one of the classics, this article needs some love to stay consistent with all of our new templates. Perhaps you can take a few minutes to proofread it?

And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading, and as always; if you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you just want to share your thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. 

Thanks!

Are we late?! Don’t spread those Fake News!1

Hello ladies and gentlemen, take a look outside of your window: what a truly wonderful time of the year it is! Welcome back to the last newsletter issue of 2018. Let's jump right into it! (;

Remarkable contributions

• Worpp made a plethora of changes on various pages, and I think the User of the Month tag is well deserved! Hope to see more of your valued contributions as a GI member in the future c:

• BananasREVIL improved multiple articles. Thanks a lot!

• The anonymous users are back, contributing mainly to the Nano Games pages. Be sure to register, so that your edits don’t go unnoticed.

• The wiki team also did a lot of work! We massively worked on the Search and Destroy related pages, improved old pages such as Game Menu and Quick Compass, and much more!

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

I know what you might be thinking: why did these noobs miss the November Newsletter? We didn’t! We actually decided to change the newsletter’s month to be the one you will be able to read it on, and considering nobody loves november, we left it out.  

Remember our ambitious project for 2018 of creating pages for all games, kits, maps AND abilities? We’re coming very close! In November, I finally got around to add the Kit Infobox template ({{Kit Infobox}}), and we also have the map templates covered now. (Granted, Search and Destroy served more as a “test area” for us than actually focusing on adding the content; but this way we could make sure everything is working as intended!)

If you’ve checked the edit history in the last days, you may have noticed me working on a Map Database page. I’ve tried to prepare some examples of how this page could look like. It would be quite important to agree on a final design before we actually add all maps, because that’s gonna be a heck ton of work. 

Please visit the prototype version here before answering the poll:

Last but not least, we’re also interested in what you would like us to work on, so here’s a voting for some projects we could tackle next year:

Thank you very much for answering the polls! I’ll be sure to take them into consideration next year. :)

Upcoming content

After 2 years of promises, I’ll try to take over BlueandGreen’s project, attempting to replace the minigame infobox with the new design. Wish me luck! (and time, heh…)

Our next featured minigame will be Ultra Hardcore! As this doesn’t require maps nor dozens of kits, we might be able to completely finish the page.

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

Merry Christmas to everyone, and a happy New Year from all of us here!

Hiya! I’m really excited to write this newsletter today as Spooktober finally came around! We’ve seen a bunch of new updates on Mineplex, which means new articles have been created on the wiki! Let’s jump straight a way in what has been done by the community this month, shall we? 

Remarkable contributions

• GeneralEJV and Enunciated revised the entire Game Insights page!

• GwenTheGuardian added some information to the Waiting Lobby page!

• Vanessa1375 updated and improved the Senior Moderator, Moderator, Appeals, Reports and Halloween Havoc pages.

• Nicodami added quite a few Nano Games pages, worked a lot on the Halloween Havoc page, and added a page for the Mineplex Discord (if anyone is interested, we will need to add a page about the old Mineplex Teamspeak!). He also added a new poll on the main page (make sure to vote if it’s not done already), and worked on some templates with me.

• NeoEnderman2016 created a new page for this year’s new exclusive Halloween game: Halloween Havoc! As your additions were really extensive, we’ve decided to reward you with the super fancy User of the Month tag! Congrats.

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

I have a big announcement to make today! Two months ago, both of our staff members (BlueandGreen (formerly Administrator) and RobbinK (formerly Moderator) resigned from their position. However, I’m very happy to announce that Nicodami will now step up from his moderator position to become an admin! This means I will not be alone doing the behind-the-scenes stuff anymore, which is pretty exciting. We can ensure now that the Wiki will be updated regularly! By the way, there’s still quite a few staff positions available, and we’d love to recruit more members. Be sure to visit the application page and give it a try.

For technical changes, I have a new addition to present which might come in really handy sometimes! The {{RankTag}} template allows you to easily find the Xenforo, Enjin or Teamspeak tag as well as the in-game prefix of a rank and add it on any page. Some of the missing tags, especially for the TS section, are still on our to-do list.

This change might turn out to be huge in the future: after reading various guides and help pages, I’ve set up a semi-automatic bot for this Wiki! Its most frequent fields of application will include making repetitive edits to many pages, such as 

• moving a group of pages to a new category

• fixing links to disambiguation pages 

• searching for misspelled words and replace them with correct ones.

Impressive, eh? If you have any boring, monotonous tasks to do, let me know and I’ll see if the bot can take over.

Upcoming content

We’ve decided to feature a timeless classic during the next month, which sadly has been removed from Java: Search and Destroy! Originating from the Red Warfare merge, this game will serve as a great test field for possible new kit and map navboxes. As always, editing isn’t limited to staff, so if you loved the game just like we did, be sure to contribute to the page! ^-^

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

Thanks!

Newsletter written by Nicodami and MiningCreeper.

Hiya! This newsletter is very exciting as it is the first to be released after a very important Mineplex change: the switch from Enjin to Xenforo! While the web developers were very active collecting feedback from the community, we had a lot to do as a lot of the content, especially links and forum tags, had to be updated. That’s why we’re very glad you guys also fixed some of the articles:

Remarkable contributions

• Nicodami added a lot of the new forum tags to most rank and sub team related pages on the wiki. He also started worked on creating some individual nano game pages. Wait what? Why is his name red?! We’ll have an announcement later on… =)
• Thanks to GeneralEJV yet again – he’s worked hard on fixing the staff pages.
• ClassN added a lot of information to the Villager (Super Smash Mobs) page and created an article for our beloved Bawk Bawk. Check out your userpage for a really cool User of the Month tag!

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Besides all the turmoil caused by the content updating, we have also created pages for most of the Nano Games which were just released. To improve the readability, we’ve worked on templates for the main page and added a new infobox design for each nano game article. If you feel like there’s anything missing, let us know!

Upcoming content

We have lots of plans to expand the wiki! At this time we are planning on finishing all the nano games pages, as well as adding a page for each sub team. We also plan on modifying some older pages to make them look better and more organised. Finally, we started relaunching an old project: creating pages for Mineplex staff members. We are hoping to work more on that soon, so keep your eyes open!

During the next few weeks, we'll focus on fixing the Gladiators page as it is our new Article of the Month. Yay!

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

Thanks!

Hiya! I’m super excited for this newsletter: I’ll finally announce what our staff team has been working on for the last year! First off though, I’ll summarize what you guys have changed in the last weeks.

Remarkable contributions

• GeneralEJV worked on some staff pages. Thank ya c:
• Nicodami is back and created the Nano Games, Ideas Team and Translations Team pages. Thanks for your dedication!
• Editor_fixer updated a bunch of Bedrock articles, adding loads of information. Great job! You’ll be our User of the Month for September 2018 ^-^
• I’m glad that I finally got around to actually work on a featured page. The main Wither Assault page should be up to date now. Shoutout to the EventSquad community (in-game) for assisting me with testing.

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Now for the really interesting part: We’ve finally received a response by LT after waiting for almost a year now, and it seems to be quite positive! 

	“	Yeah I've been impressed with the work on there after looking at it. However, if we were to put an official stamp on it and partner up, we would require our staff to help oversee it with your team.	”
	—BlueBeetleHD, Mineplex Head of Staff and Social Media Manager

Right now, I do believe that in its current state, our Wiki cannot progress. We barely have extensive edits, and the readership attention continued to shrink over the past months.

With the "officialization", we'd be guaranteed a daily involvement by staff members and a quality standard on all pages. We’ll (hopefully) hear back from them soon, and the Wiki will become the huge project it used to be again! 

This change would obviously not have been necessary if we already had active staff members on our side, which is sadly not the case anymore. It is with a heavy heart that I am announcing that all of our current staff members are leaving the team, that being BlueandGreen (formerly Administrator) and RobbinK (formerly Moderator).

Both Robbin and Blue and responsible for different platforms and tasks now, and I am really sad to see them leave. This page, this project, this community wouldn’t exist without them.

Should you be wondering about my position, you have probably noticed that I am not as active as I used to be. I don’t have the time to keep the page up on my own anymore, which is why I looked for any and all possibilities to expand the staff team. I’ve decided to stay here until the merge commences or a different editor is willing to take over the page. This, however, also implies that I will be even less active from now on. Fact is, if the merge should fail and there is nobody interested in adopting the page, I will have to shut down the project. 

Upcoming content

Pretty much everything has been said above. You’ll see huge changes on the staff side soon™.

The next featured article will be Nano Games! One mini-game page per day and we’ll be finished. 

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

Thanks!

Hiya! I’m back from my vacation (it was awesome, by the way – did any of you travel this summer?), and I finally got around to work on this article, so let’s start with what y'all changed lately, shall we?

 Remarkable contributions

• An unregistered user elaborated some more on the Tactics page for Block Hunt! Be sure to create an account if you want to.

• MrBeefSteak added a missing command to the Game Commands page. Thanks!

• Magitroopa kept the wiki clean while I was away, and reverted countless vandalism edits. Thanks a lot! I’ve decided to choose you as the next User of the Month, not only for your recent actions, but also for your previous work on the Super Spleef page and many others. ^-^

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

You know, sometimes I have weird ideas. We have a lot of huge projects to finish on here, that’s already repeated very often: Mobile Readability, Games, Kits, Abilities, Staff Members and so on… but, there’s one key aspect of games which is still missing in that list. Got it? 

'Maps'. Sure, sometimes they don’t really affect gameplay, but especially for games like Dragon Escape, adding some more tips on possible leaps and shortcuts might be helpful. And, most importantly, we could finally fix some of the map galleries! Most of the current maps are so huge that every detail is lost if you take a screenshot. We could embed one image on the parent page and have multiple screenshots and a detailed map description on an external article. Now though, read that first sentence again: We’re talking about an idea. Something which definitely couldn’t be fully released in an instant, considering the state of the Wiki. I’m not the kind of person to reject every concept just because it 'seems' to be unreasonable — I’d love to give it a try. How do you feel about this?

Upcoming content

Fine, I get that this may sound like a worthless promise by now, but I still am asking LT to consider a Wiki promotion on Twitter or somewhere else. I hope I’ll have some result to present next month.

Wiki-related news would be our next article of the week (month?), which is Wither Assault! I hope to find some time to work on that. ;)

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

Thanks!

Yo!

It's been some time – one month, to be exact. Today, we're gonna look at what happened in the last month! Sorry for the break, the recaps should now be posted regularly again.

Remarkable contributions

• NeoEnderman2016 modified the champions kit pages to make sure all numbers were up to date shortly after the update. Thanks!

• Nicodami created a huge new article for Christmas Chaos 2.0. Well done!

• Klusimo worked on extensive changes to the Treasure Chests page. Considering that you’ve been dedicated for a long time now, you’ll be rewarded with the User of the Month tag shortly. Thank you very much! :)  

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

I’ve created a Staff Infobox template to display general facts about staff right at the top of a page. General readership might be interested in profiles of higher-ups (Leadership Team, Admins etc.), I do not discourage anyone from creating pages for Trainees and previous staff though. Keep in mind that monitoring 400+ new articles might be a little too much.

Upcoming content

The next featured game is Squid Shooter. Quite impressive page already, I'll make some minor changes soon-ish.

I’ve also decided to release these recaps once per month. It’s impossible for me to write meaningful and substantial posts every two weeks without anyone else assisting me, and it’s more of a bother by now. I hope that you understand this change, and who knows – we might be able to return to the original weekly cycle at some point.

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

Thanks!

Hiya! Our 4th newsletter comes with a slight delay, I’d like to apologize for that. Of course I cannot reserve all of my time for the Wiki, unfortunately BlueandGreen has been just as busy over the last weeks. To solve these issues, we’re thinking of expanding the recap project for every editor; if you’re interested in writing the posts, send me a message (preferably on Enjin: here)! ^-^

Please note that this newsletter will only cover the changes made between 21st May to 3rd June.

Remarkable contributions

• Nicodami decided to continue working on minigame pages and made two huge changes to the Leap and Help pages. Thanks again!

• GeneralEJV updated the staff pages and made sure the information was correct. I know that can be very tedious, so thank ya for your work! c:

• He came, he saw, he edited: Another badrock page was added by CloudGamer360. Great job \o/

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

The rule updates which were announced in the latest recap are now live. We will let you know should they be modified again. Aside from that and general maintenance, I can’t present any huge technical changes today. I wonder if something is coming though…

Upcoming content

The next featured game is Snow Fight. This one might be a little more difficult, being a removed game from 2015. I still hope to find some information on it. 

The User of the Month tag will be awarded next time. After that, it will actually be given out every month, starting from July 1st. The previous 4-week-schedule was a bit wonky.

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

Thanks!

Heyo, this is the third newsletter of our bi-weekly series! Let’s see what has changed in the last days here at the Mineplex Wiki.

Remarkable contributions

The last two weeks, Nicodami has been busy adding content to many minigame pages, including Dragon Escape, Block Hunt, Cake Wars, and Castle Siege (2014 minigame). He has updated several more pages and images. For your dedication, we decided to reward you with the User of the Month tag. Thank you for your hard work!

NeoEnderman2016, Magitroopa and many more have been actively watching the pages for a long time, restoring vandalized articles to keep the Wiki clean. Thanks!

Unregistered users have been continuously updating the staff pages recently. Feel free to create an account so you can get started to engage more. Should you actually be MP staff (like I suspect), you can also be given the respective staff tag on here.

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

I’ve been thinking of bumping the punishment lengths for vandalism offences, since warnings usually don’t have an impact and it still is a prevalent issue here. These changes include:

• Light Vandalism: 3 warning points → 5 warning points
• Heavy Vandalism: 5 warning points → immediate block (ranging from one day up to two weeks depending on severity)

Do not hesitate to leave your thoughts in the replies. If no further changes should be made, the rules will be updated accordingly in 2 weeks.

Our newest template addition is Template:Platforms, which will show a notice if the requested page is found on both Bedrock and Java Mineplex. You can enter the type of page, the other article and the platform to get this example output:

Platform Notice: This minigame is available on multiple Minecraft editions. Please refer to Survival Games (Bedrock minigame) for the Bedrock version.

Keep in mind that bedrock is bad though.

Upcoming content

Our next featured game is Bacon Brawl. I expect this one to be quite easy to finish, since most information is already added, and it doesn’t have a large number of kits. While we’re working on that, I might get around to finish the Bedrock SG page which was the last article of the week, now that my exams are done. 

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

Thanks!