Hey folks! Today marks a pretty big update to the site so I thought I'd run you guys through the changes. The Big Cartoon Wiki has been up for 2 months now and I'm pleased with how smoothly things have gone. A lot of old and new faces have returned and the site has been surprisingly active. People have been doing a good job spreading word of the site which has really helped us with search engine visibility. And with all of this site traffic, I wanted to make sure the site looks as professional as possible. A lot of these changes have been months in the making so I'm excited to finally release them!
But before that, I'd like to welcome The Squish Gang as our first affiliate! This is a longrunning community for toon enthusiasts featuring their own forum, Discord server and art site. There are lots of communities out there like this but TSG is by far the most friendly and well-organized one I've ever seen. I'm very proud to be able to join the TSG Network and we recommend you check them out if this sounds like the site for you.
Complete CSS redesign
The first thing you'll notice is a complete overhaul of the site's look. This new vector-based skin pays homage to the old site with a nice orange color scheme. I've also simplified the logo a bit to be more in line with the new flat design. There might be a few things I missed so if you see any broken or odd-looking page elements, feel free to leave a comment below.
Thumbnail Reconfiguration
When the site first went up, I enabled thumbnail generation to reduce server load. This sped up page loading but it took up a huge amount of disk space. Eventually, I was forced to disable thumbnails and pages slowed to a crawl as a result. Fortunately, I've found a nice middle ground between page speed and disk usage. Page galleries should load pretty smoothly now and the server won't have to work as hard to serve them up!
New Infobox and Navbox
When we ported the infoboxes from the old wiki, a lot of them had Wikia-specific CSS so we needed a temporary hack to make them work. Now that I've redesigned the site I've also overhauled our templates. Their style matches the new site and I've changed how they work under the hood. The old infobox templates required a lot of repeated code that was difficult to keep consistent with each other. The new ones are generated via lua scripts and should be a lot easier to create and maintain.
A big thanks to Argentite for helping out with the porting process of these.
Character Instances Removal
With these changes to infoboxes, we are also phasing out some features of the old ones. These include Episodes featuring expansion, Expansion instances, Expansion types featured and Instances by character. A lot of this information is redundant and can be found on the page itself. They don't provide any useful information for readers and are a lot of work for editors to maintain. Even for our most popular pages like Pokémon, the episode and expansion count is frequently out-of-date. We hope that by simplifying these templates it will encourage people to use infoboxes more often.
At the same time, we also understand the amount of work that people have put into these pages so we will not immediately remove them. They will be hidden from the new infoboxes and can be easily restored by modifying those templates. If you would like to voice your support for keeping these pages, please respond below and we will take your case into consideration.
Site Policy Changes
Two small changes to the site's policy have been made since our last update. First and foremost, we will not be tolerating any form of heavy breathing over underaged characters. We treat this matter very seriously and it can be grounds for a warning or immediate ban based on severity.
On a less serious note, we will also be reining back the amount of fanart allowed on user pages. We want to allow users to express themselves but large userpages filled with fanart makes image maintenance more difficult and consumes disk space. There are many offsite options for hosting galleries like deviantART or Tumblr so you are welcome to link these on your profile. For now, we will be allowing one piece of art per user so they can have an avatar to show on their pages.
Age Categories Removal
With most changes, I want to get feedback from the community before I do anything too drastic. This wiki is run by the community and if the admins make too many sweeping changes it can drive people away. But with this one decision, I'm going to make a judgement call and implement it immediately.
For a number of years now we've had a fairly worrying category called By age of expandee. This allows members to browse scenes on the site ordered by age of the character. I understand that the intention was to organize scenes, but having site features like this sends out the wrong message about our community (especially since it has been seen as a fetish/ecchi wiki). It enables a very unsavory type of person and as site admin, I've always been a bit stressed that these existed to begin with.
So today, I've removed these categories and we will no longer be allowing them on new pages. I hate to throw out the years of work that have gone into these categories but they need to go. I feel that we already have plenty of categories to browse and the community has done a wonderful job keeping those maintained. From now on we will be focusing on the other categories and putting the existence of By age of expandee behind us.
What's next?
And with that, I'll be signing off on this update. The site has come a long way in the past two months but there's still a lot in store! We'll continue putting work into the site's presentation and any extensions that need to be coded. Soon, I would like to come up with a site mascot to go along with our redesign so we can have a face for the community. I would also like to overhaul the front page and add some better ways to find scenes.
On the content end of things, I'll be working through my backlog and adding lots of scenes I've been meaning to for a while. I'll also be keeping the community posted on ways they can help out or what needs to be done to make the pages more consistent. This wiki wouldn't be possible without the community and I'm really glad that people have accepted The Big Cartoon Wiki as the new home for The Fudge Yeah Wiki. See you next time!
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