Board Thread:Warrior's Pub/@comment-27334870-20180120235446

Dear Admins, Beurocrats, and former administrators,

First, let me kick this off by saying I'm not an expert in running a wiki, and that I'm actually relatively new to being very active on the site, as I wouldn't call my escapades in 2015 and the massive gaps I've had between activity since then as something that would make me some sort of alumni here. So take everything I put here with not just a grain of salt, but an entire can if necessary.

Our attitude as a wiki

This isn't advise on structure and visuals, per se, but this is my take on how we should approach new users and handle the wiki in general. To kick things off, I strongly suggest we don't take ourselves too seriously. 'This should come off as a fun wiki, where people can easily discuss and bring forward matchups that more dedicated users can put on their agenda. ' Otherwikis and websites take the math magic and statistics gig much more seriously, and will do it better than anything we can ever put out, so it's better to focus on what makes the Deadliest Fiction Wiki unique:


 * Historical and Modern Battles. MilenHD, Laquerius, and various other users still continue the original spirit of Deadliest Warrior and focus on more realistic fights, something a lot of other VS Wikis don't do. We should promote these users more, and encourage the development of their battle quality. Our origins were from a bunch of Junkies wanting to continue the spirit of the Deadliest Warrior show, so it'll help to make that a large part of our gig once again.


 * Character Focus. The focus on X Factors in Deadliest Warrior means that we look a lot at how the characters themselves react to and function in battle, rather than looking at statistics brought forward after millennia of power scaling and from some a-hole moving moon for comedic effect with his left pinkey. We already tend to do this well, but I think we should focus more on it.


 * The Writing. I'm really glad to see that Appel brought back the yearly awards, as that encourages people to actually finish writing their battle scenarios. Many users like El Almien came here and loved the fact that they were able to use it as a fun little haven to improve their writing, so I think we should make more endevours to encourage good writing, maybe as a tweak to the Featured User block on the main page.


 * A warm welcome. Rather than laughing at some battles that looked like they were structured sub-par (cough Hercules vs. Sun Wukong cough), try to reach out to these new users and help them rework these battles even after they have been marked as unfair. Not so much as to offer a collab, but give them some pointers and write out some parts of the information blocks on their battle to make them more appealing and easy to read. With very few exceptions, new users will write crap battles, but whether or not they stay to improve their stuff is mainly based on our reaction to them. I love all of the people on the wiki as-is, and I want to see this community grow with even more lovely characters. Assembled, an active new user of the wiki, is a bleeding example of this. They wrote a lot of battles and showed a dedication to the wiki, and I'll be the first one to say that I'm guilty for not helping them get on their feet for battles, and I plan on personally messaging them about doing a Collab Battle/helping them write a battle.

The Main Page

I've already heard that there's going to be some major visual changes to the wiki coming, so I wanted to draw out a list of things I think need to be changed to the main page. Updating recent battles was a nice update since it used to take half a year for that stuff to change, but there still needs to be many revision.

Put a large focus on new battles, updated every week, having a dominant section of the front page after the welcome and spoiler warnings. Battles don't nearly get as many votes as they used to, and  recently the battles with the most activity has been us shitting on new members trying to get into the loop of this place. The slideshow needs to go, replaced with some kind of big banner that provides a link to a page that gives advice about voting, and links to the most recent battles of every week. Trends show that we get at least three new battles each week on a good month, although this has slowed recently.

'''Create and link guides to making a page, a battle, and voting. '''Make links to these guides large in prominent after advertising the latest battles. Provide good example battles for new users to model after, so that people feel more comfortable jumping in and getting their hands wet. I'd love to help write out some guides if it helps make these developments go more smoothly. I'm talking guides by the way, not policy.

Declutter the main page, remove redundant stuff and clear out cobwebs. Featured User and the "Deadliest Warrior Network" haven't been touched in years. We either need to update these or remove them entirely. We should add a link to "Recent Battles" as opposed to the category "Blog Posts" as the later is just stupidly confusing to navigate as this wiki used to have battles nearly every day. Again, I stress the necessity to promote new battles outside of the slideshow format we have right now.

'''The color scheme. 'Look at any other wikis that are updated more frequently than us and you'll notice that the colors and presentation look less old''. The neon reds need to go, and a rework of our entire color scheme should be in order to freshen things up. I can't really pin down what's wrong other than it looks really outdated.

Cleaning Up the Wiki

Suffice to say this is a wiki with a very active history and I'd say it would take five presses of the Random Page link before you see something that is poorly constructed, needs rewriting. Appel is one of the best users here in focusing on fixing a things like the tags, but there needs to be a drive to make a more unified structure for warrior pages.

The Hubs. The Battle Advertisement Hub is a joke, the Reservation Hub isn't used by anyone anymore, and my latest Tourney is the first one since El Almein was on the wiki. These need to be reworked completely, as they are redundant and are just taking up space. We need a more convenient and visually friendly way to reserve and advertise battles. Maybe for advertisements, create a queue where users can apply to have their battles on the main page? The Tourney system is fine as-is, but the page needs to be more accessible.

A Standard Layout for Pages. Especially when it comes to the 'Service' tab of the Infobox, things are very. very inconstant on these pages. Beyond Biography Rewrites, which the current administration is doing pretty nicely at, I think we should rework the infobox to support a broader range of characters and fighters, since it seems more geared towards the real life warriors you'd see on Deadliest Warrior. Yes, considering how many pages are on this wiki this would take nearly a year to implement, but I think it's a reasonable change that I'd love to help implement.

'''The News Tab under "Community" is still from 2013. 'Nuff said.'''

'''Proofreading. '''General spelling errors are pretty darn common on the wiki. They are harmless individually, but in the quantity they're currently in they just make us look lazy. Heck, they're even on on the Policy Pages, especially in the form of syntax errors. Going out to all users including myself, a couple of small edits can go a long way if we all pitch in.

Endless Skies and Organized Crime Wikis should not be linked on the main page. I know Leo has mentioned this, both those wikis are only related to this one in structure and userbase, and they see less activity than a turtle in a desert. I might be mistaken, but there isn't even a link to the Deadliest Warrior Wiki, which is also run by many of the people here. It might also see very little activity as well, but it's more of a tie-in than the others.

A stronger drive for voting. I was devastated to see that Leo and Wass were feeling apathetic towards writing on our collab because of how little the community reacted to it in terms of voting. I had to actually reach out to specific people and beg for votes for it to get close to what I was initially expecting to see. Maybe a page for battles that need more activity might be in order? This is also a point on attitude, too. Right now users like Wass and Appel are doing great work in reaching out to and voting on battles, which I commend them for greatly. But regular users like myself and many others need to support each other's works if we want to maintain the dwindling userbase we have left.

'''Redundant Categories. '''I strongly suggest an admin read over the Categories page. There is a number of categories with only one page, and I think the limit for that stuff is 12 or 15 pages for a new category. Some are just weird, others are blatant misspells, these all need to be removed. I mean, ffs, thisis a category.

To Make thing Sound Less Bitter

Here's some things I'm glad to see as of late.

New Admins. This move alone shows that we're willing to move forward as a community and embrace users who are more active to take the reigns in bringing this wiki back to rank 32 (32!) among all other wikis (we're like, in the thousands now ;_;). Appel was a perfect choice, and Laq, while new, is one of the largest bringers of change this year.

Battle of the Year. Recognizing the great stuff in the community as-is is the first step to getting a larger drive for more battles. I remember writing my ass off for SCP-096 vs. the Hulk to try and nab that battle of the month award, and I'm hoping this step forward gives other new users a similar reaction.

The Forums. That said, I don't think we need many changes in the forums other than removing some redundant discussions. It's easy to post, approach, et cetera. I wish there was more activity, so maybe a larger link in the front page is necessary? We should have room for some fun discussions on casual stuff, y'know, make it less serious (Fairness Challenges and Rematch Requests is all I see these days). That's an attitude change, however, and as-is I don't see any structure changes needed.

Awesome writing. This year has had two of my favorite battles on this wiki. Wassboss and Leolab have really outdone themselves this year, and I wanted to say they raised the bar for quality standards here. It's actually the reason why I'm really passionate to draw in new users. Their hard work deserves more attention, and can serve as an inspiration for new users to work off of.

'''Thank you for your time. I love this wiki, the people on this wiki, and I want to see it grow rather than gradually shrink into a hangout group for four or five people. I'm aware Admins are already on top of these issues, but I wanted to throw in my two cents. This place though, has been a fun place for me to get away and improve my writing and make some freinds. I want that to be a place for more people to come.'''

Thanks, and may the Deadliest Warrior win,

Dargoo 