Ayyy! We heard Jenny talk about Traffic yesterday and on Monday Hector talked about Consumer Tools. But today I get to talk to you all about News & Ratings.

Guiding us in 2024 was an overall question “Will Fandom users care about N&R content?”. This one question prompted multiple hypotheses and from there, the experiments began.

We ran 3 main experiments during this year with multiple variants.

GameFAQs Guides & Walkthrough Widget

Our original hypothesis was that if gamers see relevant game guides and walkthrough content while on the Wiki page, then they will click through to GameFAQs to engage further with said content or the community as a whole.

GameSpot News & Galleries

We believed that showcasing related GameSpot gaming articles, galleries,…

Hey everyone! Welcome to the second in our series of blogs, focusing on updates from the different teams that create and maintain the Fandom platform. Yesterday, Hector gave insight into what the Consumer Tools has been working on in 2024, and today I will talk about Traffic.

Along with our other Product teams, the Traffic team has been busy with their focus on boosting readership and helping wikis with their search ranking. They began 2024 with this question: how could we be proactive in helping wikis with SEO? For our hypothesis, we narrowed this down to “what are people searching for in Google?” We decided to test two possible answers: small FAQ-like modules & more generalized hubs that could lead readers to wikis for more specific infor…

Hello everyone!

As we approach the final days of 2024, it's the perfect time to reflect on an incredible year filled with some new features, interesting experiments and important learnings that have impacted the Fandom experience. Stay tuned because starting today until this Friday, the Product Support team is going to release a blog series highlighting all the work done by the Product Teams, including: Consumer Tools, User Generated Content, News & Ratings, Traffic, and User Experience.

As you may know from my previous blogs, I collaborate with the Consumer Tools Team (formerly known as Engagement). This team focuses on improving features like Interactive Maps, Discussions, and Message Walls.

Earlier this year, we shared our progress in a series of …

Eyo my lovely people! How time has flown by, and as we near the end of the year, we are at the end of the Technical Updates series for as far as 2024 is concerned. If you're new and wondering what this is: every two weeks, the technical updates are posted to give you all an overview of releases, bug fixes, and other things relevant to the platform and that may have an impact on your experience. It's also a good place to give your feedback and report on bugs. With the yearly code freeze starting Monday, December 16th, no new releases are planned anymore, which is also not that surprising since we saw one of the biggest, most visual releases go live earlier this week! Let's dive in!

• 1 Notable Changes
• 2 Recent Fixes
• 3 Development Updates
  • 3.1 User Exp…

Hiya, you lovely people! It wasn't so long ago that I was here talking about the mobile drawer product release, and now I'm here again already announcing the next one. In a way you could say that this is the mobile drawer's desktop twin, as that's for sure how this all started out. Let's talk about our redesign of the navigation system: the (re?)introduction of the horizontal navigation system with content panels!

I know we always say it, but it remains true for this release as well: it didn't come out of thin air but rather was the product of experiments. What is new for this release though is that it is not the productization of one but rather two experiments. Some may remember the "top nav bar" experiment back in March. On its own, this e…

This year marked the 65th Anniversary of Barbie. Coming off of a highly successful year in 2023, thanks to the Barbie film, Barbie continues to be a leading conversation this year thanks to the milestone anniversary celebration. Since the beginning, Barbie has helped young girls and women explore their limitless potential through various narratives and roles, leading the character to play out over 250+ careers.

In 2023, we saw a 256% spike in traffic of Barbie Wiki, making it the biggest wiki jump on Fandom that year. This was thanks to the 2023 hit blockbuster film titled Barbie, which introduced us to a whole sleuth of Barbie iterations and variations on the big screen. From President Barbie, to Writer Barbie, to Dr. Barbie and even Weird Ba…

Hey hey, my lovelies!I hope everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving enjoyed their time with their family! The Technical Updates are a blog series where we publish a selection of bug fixes, potential experiments, and other changes to the platform every other Friday. For the first time since I've been publishing the Technical Updates, this will be the third Technical Updates blog in the same month! The only other time this could've happened this year was in May, but I was on holiday on the 3rd, so Tim published instead. Does that change anything to what this blog is about? Absolutely not, so let's see what happened! And remember, if you have questions or remarks about anything you read, don't hesitate to bring it up in a constructive manner in …

Hello hello!

It’s that time of the year! Not only to listen to the most famous Mariah Carey’s song everywhere but also the time to upgrade Fandom to MediaWiki 1.43.

In recent years, Fandom has strongly emphasized experimentation and exploration, driving innovation and improvement across the platform, both with minor and major changes. This commitment to pushing boundaries has given us valuable insights and advancements in various areas. It has helped us have new perspectives about our traffic, users, and platform, as well as identify which areas can be improved.

Aside from moving forward, we also want to keep the platform stable and updated. Our last MediaWiki upgrade was 2 years ago, and we think it is the perfect time to update again.

Upgrad…

Hello everybody!

We're getting closer to the end of the year, and we have exciting news to share! After a whole year of revamping Interactive Maps, as we previously announced we have something else to include that will make everyone happy: we are improving the performance of Maps, changing the internal engine to use the canvas system, and enhancing the rendering of markers.

Throughout these last years, we agreed with the feedback from our Community that the experience with maps using a significant number of markers was not the ideal one. Even if we offered some tools like clustering, we felt we should explore other options to optimize the feature. By using this new engine, we ensured all the previous issues - like showing all the markers, mov…

Hello, tickets please!

The holiday season will soon be upon us, and the hills are alive with the sound of music, Hakuna Matata and… Hygge! All sayings of a care free culture that are experienced in stage musicals, where you get comfy in a theatre, enjoy interval ice cream, and are taken away from the worries of the world for a couple of hours. Society loves this feeling - musicals about musicals, movies about musicals, shows about musicals about movies about musicals!

Miller and I share a passion for stage musicals. I’ve seen 52 musicals live in 2024 (and counting) and had a go on the stage too! Miller has also had a go in the theatre realm as well, indulging in playwriting and performing exceptionally in a solo musical theatre performance.

We…