User blog:Zathsu/Merging Attrition

The merge has really been a battle of endurance, a war of attrition with the obstacles at hand and those we've overcome in the past. We've had breakthroughs and fallbacks in our struggles, but at long last bittersweet progress is being made. Great news and bad news, head shoulders knees and toes, with each coming week, the merge woes grow. :/

So its like... a war of attrition and whatnot. I'm clever with my titles, I swear! It just needed to not sound like the end of the world like the last few, and heaven forbid it be another title related to the false promise of the merge ending soon, because it seems a monkey wrench gets thrown and perfectly lodged in the gears every time our train starts going. But maybe we finally have killed that monkey throwing his monkey wrenches. Its complicated. Life is chaos.


 * -|Merge News=

Bittersweet
As mentioned here, the Fandom Technical Team are now finally getting around to our request for a File Transfer. This comes with both good and bad news. The good is that Fandom can also import the articles, including the entire edit histories of each article, when they do the File Transfer. Now there will be no ambiguity about who authored a given page. The bad news is that, completely randomly, Special:Import broke across the Fandom network, & so the Image Transfer had to be delayed yet again while it is fixed. However, the fix is expected to go live today, so the Transfer shouldn’t be delayed much longer.

Lockdown Pending
After talking with, it was decided that once the Technical Team begin the File Transfer, all editing will be locked down for non-Admins. This means that no normal users may edit pages, add comments, edit their blogs, leave messages, or affect in any way the Diep.io Conception Wikia until the Merge is complete. If anyone has any Blogs or Profiles which they want imported before the Merge begins, let Ursuul know so that it can be imported.


 * -|Wiki Policy News=

Sandbox Rescheduling
While the next Sandbox is still Saturday, August 12th, 3 PM - 5 PM EST, because Sandboxes have been skipped so many times, we will now be hosting Sandboxes on a monthly basis instead of a weekly basis. This is both to allow us to post the Sandbox times well in advance, as well as to allow Administrators to clear their schedules and so ensure that they are able to participate.

Weekly Updates Renamed
While we will still aim for one update per week, because of events such as last week where one was skipped, & also in case the release schedule was changed down the road, “Weekly Updates” has been renamed to “Wiki Updates”. At least the acronym still works ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

Demotions

 * — Demoted to Junior Moderator due to inactivity.
 * — Demoted to regular user after his Internship ended.


 * -|Tech News=

New Game Mode Infobox
Authored by and, and implemented by , the Mode Infobox is now in use on all Game Mode pages. This is part of a secondary effort to ensure that most, if not all, Main Namespace pages have a Portable Infobox on them, in order to provide general information in a standardized format.

New User Page Functionalities!
Thanks to a script authored by, we can now transclude the “Bio” used in Community Apps onto empty user pages. As can be seen here, many sole-Discussions users use their Bio as the entirety of their profile, & so this transclusion will allow editors interacting with such users to easily view the information about said users. Additionally, a simplistic Template is now the Default user profile. Because the change was made primarily for technical reasons, the content of the template itself can change if necessary, so any suggestions as to what would be ideal in a default user profile would be welcome.

CSS Centralization Complete
As mentioned in last week’s update, local CSS has now been centralized in MediaWiki:Wikia.css. Additionally, the CSS has been reorganized with a table of contents for code neatness. No practical changes should be noticed, this is simply a bit of “future proofing”.

CSS Minimization (Pending)
Speaking of future proofing, several of the widespread IDs and styles will be made into commonly used CSS Classes, which, again, while it shouldn’t change the practical function of the CSS, should make it easier to maintain in the future.

Miscellaneous Changes

 * ShowUserGroups was installed sitewide.
 * MediaWiki:Global.css was rewritten for use as a general import, so that it may be imported sitewide or personally on any other Wikis with no undue effects.


 * -|Fandom News=

New Page Header on Discussions
As most Discussions-users have noticed by now, the desktop version of the Discussions-area has been redesigned to include the Headers. For those who do not use Discussions, it is certainly worth a look, because the aesthetic change now makes Discussions actually feel connected to the Wiki. It may even be worth giving Discussions a shot.


 * -|Opinion Polls=