User blog:ChocoMingo/This Week In Polandball: Fall 2019 (Sept. & Oct.)

Good day to all of you on this wiki, and welcome back to "This Week In Polandball", telling you the news of the Polandball Wiki as it's told. There are a lot of things going on, so let's get right to it.

Major Modifications to the PB Wiki Server Rules
First today, thanks to a proposal from WestKoreaBestKorea, the Polandball Wiki is announcing they will be streamlining their Discord server rules to make things simpler to understand and easier for the community to know what is to be expected from them. The simplified rules also give mods flexibility of what someone’s punishment should be. Here are how the old rules were compressed into the new set of rules on the server.



The wiki has also added in a new rule to the wiki server, which ensures the connection the server has with this wiki, as well as adding in the sister wiki coalition.


 * This server is a direct extension of the Polandball Wiki and its community. A ban here, regardless of duration, will warrant the same punishment on the other  - You also get banned on the Companyball Wiki, PWSC Wiki, and Chinese PB Wiki under this rule.

Upcoming Pages for Comics & Artwork
There will finally be a place where you can have your countryball drawings displayed for the entire community to see, two pages for comics and artwork will be coming soon. In addition, there will also be an approval process and as always, follow the Polandball drawing rules in order for your comic or artwork to be allowed in. There will be a page with rules listed on it and how to get approved. A bite-sized version will be posted on both comic and art pages.

Please note that the only planetballs to be drawn and still have the comic/artwork allowable for display are the 8 planets of the solar system, Pluto, the sun, and the moon if a comic or artwork absolutely requires it and of course, must also have a countryball included. Meta comics/art (a.k.a. drawings featuring wiki users) won’t be allowed to be displayed on the pages.

Approval Process:
 * Make a comment on the comic/art page with the comic/art you want to submit. A title is necessary and it should be of the artwork or comic and not yourself.
 * For comics, a mod will look at the comic to see if it has a plot and/or is satirical. For art, a mod will look at the artwork to see if it only uses 1 panel and is high effort or at the very least, looks decent enough to be high effort.
 * If approved, your drawing will be added to the page with credit given to you, as well as you receiving an approved submitter role on the server. If not, a mod will comment that your comic/artwork isn’t approved and an explanation.
 * One-panel comics, collaborations aren’t eligible for first-time approval requests.
 * 3-2-1 Rule: Like Reddit, the wiki does not approve comics or artwork that are shitposts or are rule breaks. If a user has 3 comics rejected for being shitposts or drawing rule breaks in a 2 month period, they will be blocked from the wiki for 1 week. The punishment will double if a user is a repeat offender.
 * Your Fandom account must be 30 days old for mods to review any comic or art piece.

Event Calendar for the Polandball Wiki
It’s been a while since there have been events on the wiki, but owner NESTLEH has made a calendar of events that the wiki is planned to have this year and into next year. Here is an image of what’s to hopefully come. Keep in mind that TBD indicates that there isn’t an event planned at this moment, but the mods are open to suggestions from the community of events they can do for those months. If you have any, let them know!



Owner Takes On a New Change
After half a decade or so of being known as NESTLEH, the PB Wiki owner is ready to act on a change he has been waiting to do for 2 months. He has been considering renaming himself to something different as he claims two factors came into play.

One of them was self-discovery and wanting to reach out more; the other was to distance himself from Swiss-based Nestle’s bad controversies. For the latter, it is clear he is not associated with that company, and he didn’t budge to change his name when Nestle allegedly made a claim that “water isn’t a human right”. However, when Nestle made an idiotic response about an anti-slavery bill in Australia, NESTLEH decided he had enough.

As of this moment, NESTLEH has decided to change his name to a simpler one. He will be renaming himself from NESTLEH to ChocoMingo. He came up with this username from two areas, the Choco part is from the PB Wiki community, who sometimes calls him “chocolate man” (especially Avery) and the Mingo part is from his birdsona, which is a flamingo. You could say that yes, he has fully embraced the nickname given to him by the community.

Polandball Wiki’s Response to the UCP (Unified Community Platform)
Seems like there hasn’t been any significant news from Fandom as of late. Wonder what’s going on over there?

(*glass breaks*)

Oh my, that is…spectacularly huge. I don’t even know what to say about this. Now, where was I…oh right, our response to their planned UCP.

Fandom has announced a new project that will migrate content from both Fandom and Gamepedia into one platform, at least, as far as we know. We are looking forward to what this project from Fandom will bring. That being said, while everything about the UCP hasn’t been announced yet, we can respond to what Fandom will be doing so far.

Around early January, Fandom will start migrating content into the UCP. Unfortunately, this will result in a few features to be retired or replaced that have been essential to everyday activity in the Polandball Wiki community. One of these features are the forums, a place where mapping games, discussions and wiki events have been held. We understand how vital this part of the wiki is to the community and we will be talking to Fandom about migrating forum content to their Discussions feature, which we hope you will enjoy as much as you enjoy using Forums on the wiki.

Other features that will be retired will be the message wall and article comments, which are also vital to daily activity on this wiki. Fandom has said they are working on replacements for both features, hopefully around January. They also ensure all message wall content will be migrated to its replacement and we hope that turns out to be the case.

As for article comments, there are probably going to be mixed reactions to this. For one, they are essential for the Comics and Art pages, but one possible workaround is that we might design those two pages to mostly be a showcase of work made by the community while Discussions is where people would post their comics and artwork. On the other hand, some see this as a positive, removing flame wars and toxic comments. Either way, it will be interesting to see what Fandom does to replace the current system. Hopefully, there is a feature like a “Report” button for someone to alert us about rule-breaking and toxic comments.

Fandom has also announced they will be changing the user profile layout as we know it by combing aspects of it from both Fandom and Gamepedia. Hopefully, the migrating process will be smooth for user profiles. In the end, it will take some time, but we hope to know more about these features so that we can get used to these changes and learn more about them, and hopefully, so do you.

Op-ed: Mods are human and they have lives too
by NESTLEH/ChocoMingo

A few weeks ago, I made a tweet rant about what went in my head when one incident on the wiki happened. I was stressed out to the point I got some academic advising help from my college. I didn’t need to be in this position, but many factors, including the incident led me to a breaking point and I felt like I had enough and need to let my true emotions out. That being said, here’s some important advice to all of you.

Mods are human and most of us have stuff to do in our lives other than socialize on the internet or make some edits on pages. As much as we may enjoy doing those things or help out the community, it is also important to take care of yourself first. That is something I want to take away from all of this. Basically, just understand that there is more to life than drama on the interwebs, like you or other’s well-being.

"And that's the way it is" on the wiki this time. Thank you and I hope you enjoy your day and that you help someone enjoy their day as well.

ChocoMingo (talk) 02:08, October 30, 2019 (UTC)