Feed The Beast Wiki:Administrators' noticeboard

Lang fix
Make the code and pageSuffix methods of Module:Language public. -Xbony2 (talk) 21:09, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Module:Utility_functions already has a public version of pageSuffix, although you have to trim the first character off if you're not using it as a link.  Chocohead Nag • Edits • Staff 21:15, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I mostly want code; I just threw in pageSuffix because, why not? -Xbony2 (talk) 21:19, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
 * You should be able to get code from pageSuffix and just trim off the /. --  Satanic Santa F T B Wiki Admin 16:13, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
 * That's ugly and redundant code. -Xbony2 (talk) 10:29, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
 * is not that ugly in the grand scheme of things, especially as you'd only likely have to call it once.  Chocohead Nag • Edits • Staff 16:40, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Group updates
-Xbony2 (talk) 21:20, 27 May 2016 (UTC) -Xbony2 (talk) 11:03, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
 * , taking off staff and probably banhammer.
 * , taking off staff.
 * , adding editor.
 * , adding editor.
 * Veto. That person has only been editing the wiki for a couple days. --  Satanic Santa 🎅F T B Wiki Admin 04:04, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Editor should be given out whenever you think someone's edits are good enough that they don't need to be manually patrolled. 🐇 R e t e p 9 9 8 🐇🐰 Bunny Overlord 🐰 05:22, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
 * "Promoted based on staff choosing; any staff can nominate a user for editor rights if they are trustworthy and if they create documentation past a few pages. Requires no formal vote." - My renewed and unfinished group proposal. -Xbony2 (talk) 11:48, 4 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Peter: I agree. But we also shouldn't give it out to people who only have 30 contributions. I don't think that's enough to determine that they will almost always have edits that don't need to be looked at too much by staff.
 * Xbony: I don't know why your future proposal is really relevant in our decision making right now, where your proposal hasn't even been proposed. --  Satanic Santa 🎅F T B Wiki Admin 17:17, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
 * That portion of my proposal is my interpretation of how it works currently. Apparently I'm wrong, but then again there isn't an established group system here (hence why I'm making my proposal- so we can have a system to cover all cases, and so each staff member that joins joins the same way). -Xbony2 (talk) 18:10, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

(the more active editathoners) -Xbony2 (talk) 11:32, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
 * , adding editor.
 * , adding editor.
 * , adding editor.
 * done --  Satanic Santa 🎅F T B Wiki Admin 17:11, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

New editor retention
Here's something that people (by that i mean everyone) should work towards. This was something I was working on, which involved creating new policies, pushing the translation tools, visual editor/template data, the new notification system and most importantly the wikilove and thanks extensions which i believe have been since removed. Of course while I haven't observed/monitored the wiki closely, but you'll know if anything I say here is true or relevant. -- properly signed (Former Wiki Lead); July, 2016

Rationale
As with any volunteering work, inviting and retaining new volunteers is an issue. Since reestablishing the wiki as a public wiki, there has been no significant (perceivable) increases in the editorship among the general public. There has also been no significant structural change to the content or the administration of the wiki (although there seems to be a closed off effort to reorganize the categories on going? I advise you create a project page to invite general participation). I put this here because only the current admins have the power to instigate any meaningful change in the current state of the wiki. The wiki lead has been phased out (for the better), but the admin (and possibly the staff) needs to take up the responsibilities that were previously held by the lead. Currently the wiki isn't going anywhere, it's just chugging along since I left it, maybe fixing the shit I left behind.

Resources

 * Editor Trends Study
 * March 2011 Update
 * RFA by month
 * Attrition Pipeline
 * Decline Theories

Assessment

 * Editor by tenure: Stagnant admin/staff count could represent two things: (1) failure to retain editorship (2) administrative failure (I'm leaning towards the latter). There should be a clear direction in which the admins are taking the wiki. I see none of that.
 * Accessibility: The existence of the visual editor significantly lowered the bar of starting to edit. But as crafting grids and infoboxes are central to many of the pages on the wiki, there remains a challenge for new users to understand how they work. The TemplateData extension was my intended solution to this but it has been removed. It is impractical to think that a visual editor without template data will solve the problem of the inaccessibility of wikitext on this specific wiki. The existence of excessive levels of user groups also gives the impression of a closed community. The PRO tag also works to give off the same impression (especially when 90% of the edits are made by pro users, though since it's a curse thing we really can't do anything about it).
 * New user editing experience: There is no longer any obstacle for any user to begin to contribute. However, retention still seems to be a problem. Special shoutout to Xbony2 for scaring off anon editors. In general there is a lack of compliments and a surplus of criticism (direct or indirect). templates remains an issue to new users, until a better system is in place, the burden is placed on the staff to add/include templates on new pages instead of asking a new user to understand the complicated tilesheet/oredict/crafting grid system that is in place.
 * Mobile audience: The generic mobile skin is present. However, templates and other page elements are not optimized for mobile. Crafting grids also don't seem to be working. Editing on mobile remains a miserable experience (this is however, to be expected).

Recommended Actions

 * Establish clear and simple wiki policies. Convey clearly to active and "tenured" editors the official stance (decided by consensus) towards new editors.
 * Identify possible obstacles that may cause disinterest in editing in the different stages of wiki participation up to adminship and bureaucrat requests. cf. attrition pipeline
 * "Openness begets participation". Encourage and mentor new users, express your appreciation to their contribution (the thanks ext is a good lightweight solution to this, wikilove would also be good). Assume good faith. Simplify the user hierarchy. If possible, hide the pro user tag (it looks ugly as fuck anyway).
 * Ease the use of templates. Test out the TemplateData extension (used on wikipedia, go check it out ). Write guides that are geared toward new users. Do not expect, however, the new users to read them. Make them accessible, but don't make them mandatory.
 * Encourage participation, let people know that anyone can edit the wiki. (I'm looking at whoever keeps adding IP to anon user pages) You won't get any new users if no one knows that the wiki is open to the public. Coordinate with the FTB team (forcefully, that's how i pissed them off. this is called the official ftb wiki after all) to inform players the existence of this resource.

Closing Remarks
As the current active editorship is low, this seems like a lot of work. But it is crucial for a wiki to have editors to be able to survive. There will be that one day when you decide to retire from editing, who's going to take your place then? Inviting participation and retaining users should always remain a top priority for any wiki. Of course this wiki will die if modded minecraft ceases to exist (ftb is already ded to me). –

Update July, 2016
Let me tell you my story, Xbony2, to motivate you my intentions. I want everyone to think about why they are doing what they are doing and ask yourself, "Will other people want to contribute under the same mindset?". You be your own judge to decide whether the model you envison the wiki to have is a sustainable model.

The following account may not be entirely accurate as I don't have perfect memory.

In the beginning, I joined as a mandarin translator. My motivation is that, I hope ftb will be able to expand in to the vast untapped market that is the mandarin speaking part of the globe. I chugged along, translating as they instructed. They put english articles into a shared dropbox folder, and I translate them into mandarin. However, months passed and no new english articles were added, and if I recall correctly, my translations weren't added in a timely fashion either. I finally conjured up the courage to ask for editing privileges on the wiki. (Translators did not have that back then)

I observed that there were almost no activity on the wiki, none of the staff editors were updating the website often. How exactly I started to update templates I can't remember clearly, but I volunteered to update the wiki skin. I push for more staff to be hired, and started organize the templates. A some point, I think it was shortly after I updated the skin, the ftb "core" team updated the forum skin. I was kind of frustrated that they did not bother to inform me but I assumed they did not know by then. Eventually I got "promoted" to a full wiki staff member. I think by then, the wiki is still closed, and I realized that whatever model we were operating under is not sustainable. I pushed strongly (I can't emphasize enough how strongly I pushed for this) to open the wiki up to the public. And so we did, to a horrible start. Spambots plagued the wiki and we had to stop it within minutes. We decided to make it so that only registered members may edit. At somepoint we realized that navboxes keeps crashing the server, and I developed some broken extensions to attempt to solve the problem (I should have just asked for outside talent, I admit fault on my part). But this part is irrelevant to what I was aiming for, so I will not go into detail.

In the beginning I was content, the wiki was open to the public and I expected editorship to rise dramatically. That was not the case (and still is not). After a couple months, I postulated that the staff rank may be discouraging new editors from continuing to edit (again, I should have done a survey to research but I did not, and I admit fault). I felt that the existence of a staff on the wiki established some kind of hegemony, and that the goal of the users is to contribute enough to become a staff (this is why I am now opposed to any kind of addition to user ranks). This discouraged users that do not have a lot of time to contribute and lacked long term commitment to editing. The goal of a wiki is that anyone should be able to edit the wiki easily and without hassle (reason I oppose the IP template). I started to move towards more radical changes. I added a bunch of new accessiblity extensions, even when they were in early alpha, VisualEditor, Translation, etc... (It was I that introduced the very position that you occupy right now, xbony2. and the only reason your position exists, is because I believed that more people should be able to edit/translate the wiki without any technical knowledge. I created this position because I felt the process of marking a page for translation is difficult and I felt the need for a person to specialize in this so that other staff may focus on editing/improving the wiki). I also introduced WikiLove and Thanks to become more welcoming (I also admit fault at creating hostile warning templates, and failure to use the wikilove properly. However, I still maintain that the thanks extension is useful, as it only adds a link next to contributions that notifies users that another contributor thanked them for their edit. this is one reason I added the notifications extension). This was also why I unified template documentation, make crafting grid templates modular (creating them are way easier than they have been before) and introduced the TemplateData extention. I wanted anyone who wished to contribute to be able to.

The next step I was planning to take is to gradually phase out the staff rank believe it or not. I was planning to promote trustworthy staff members and demote the rest (one stepping stone was to let staff decide who should be staff, believe it or not, I was responsible for approving staff application before that). I was also ready to step down and abolish the lead position and give the adminship full reign over the direction of the wiki. This is how it should be. Any wiki should be self regulating and any kind of adminship hegemony is unnatural and serves as a barrier to easy access. I get why the current staff may want to keep the staff rank, and I admit my views are a bit too idealistic without proper research to back it up. This is also why I've said that the wiki is stagnant. Stagnant in the sense of organization. In terms of content, the wiki is doing just fine. But apart from making the wiki software more stable, there isn't really any direction that the adminship is headed towards to. (This is my opinion. I've only really checked the wiki out for a couple of days. I may not have the entire picture. If you feel this is untrue, then by all means continue what you are doing.)

This tells you the reason that the first thing I post after I revisit the wiki is to post about editor retention. Editor retention is the only reason I've taken the wiki in the direction it has gone. And I am sad that it has not kept heading in that direction (I am serious, an MS Paint award is not a sincere award). There may be efforts to welcome new editors, but I haven't seen a community wide effort to push for that. That was my ultimate goal and the ultimate reason I fell out with the team. I pleaded them to actually promote the wiki actively, but the response that came back was, essentially, "perhaps you aren't competent enough, we should find someone else". Part of me am glad that they did not follow through and got another wiki lead, but part of me is also sad that perhaps the new lead would continue what I left.

Thus I urge, strongly, for current editors, to revisit this issue of editor retention. Do the proper research, the links I provided are merely resources, and take the appropriate action. Create a clear direction for the wiki (eg. foster a welcoming and accessibile enviornment for modded players). To reiterate, you need to accept the bitter truth, there is going to be the day when you are unable to continue your work, and you need someone to take your place (you are important!). Start early, so you can find good talent. I do not hold the final word of any wiki policies, as I no longer have any kind of power, but I do hope that every one of you will share by belief that editor retention should be the goal of any wiki.

I also want to reaffirm my gratitude for current wiki staff members. I have not interacted with many of you and you have done a great job. My comments are in nature a bit hostile, as they are in a conflict of the status quo. Please don't take it that way. And as many of you (if not all except retep) never seen the state of the wiki when I started to work on it, please understand that the '''only reason that you are able to work on the wiki today, is that I believed in editor retention and worked to accomplish that'''.

And to xbony, my comments are not meant as critism, if you believe that you are falsely accused and that other people agrees, then declare it wrong and move on. There is no need to be upset. You did a great job and I want you to continue to do so.

-- Jinbobo (speaking as Former Wiki Lead). July, 2016

Above plain wikitext is signed. This was hastily typed and may contain errors, if you spot any of them, please add an errata section after the signature and do not edit the wikitext as that will invalidate the signature. --J.

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Addendum
Here are my reasons to oppose to any form of exclusive rank, be it staff, or the pro label. Ranks are fine if you have established rules for joining and clear roles for the rank. I personally believe that an excessive user rank structure is an impediment to open and easy access. The first two reasons are the main reason I think this way.


 * Establishment hegemony: The same people occupy important positions for too long and no fresh ideas are injected.
 * New editor mentality: They have staff, why should I bother contributing. (this is a wiki after all)
 * Overwhelming: There are too many ranks to climb. The ladder is hard to navigate.
 * Intimidating: Everyone editing has X rank, what if I make a mistake? Do those people with rank Y override my opinion?
 * Time commitment: It appears that the purpose of editing the wiki is climb up the ranks, and I don't have the time for this.
 * Undervalued contributions: This person has rank X and I have rank Y, does that make his contribution more important or valuable?
 * Fixation on prestige: He got rank X and has Y edits. Does that mean I need Y edits to obtain that rank? (edit counts are counterproductive! By all means include it on your user page, it is a metric of your impact on the wiki indeed. But putting it on page level 2 (one click from the main page) might not be the wisest idea. I realize this now and I regret including that on the staff page.)
 * Improper motivation: User X join the wiki with the specific intention to get to rank Y for bragging rights. However, User X does not fully understand the workings of the wiki resulting in low quality contributions.
 * Sense of divide: The most visible people here all have rank X, but I have rank Y, does that mean I am unwelcome here?

The reason I hope the team cut down on the number of ranks is to give the image of an even playing field, that the different right classes are established only out of necessity (eg. editor, sysop) and not arbitrarily.

To stress this again. You do not need to answer to me, I'm only providing feedback. You should value feedback, even if it is a criticism of your actions. It is, after all, the nature of it. I encourage you all to invite editors, new and old, to participate in this discussion. The cost of maintaining a wiki only grows not shrinks. -- 73.73.175.189 01:47, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Comments
You may leave your comments here. I am leaving it as is and will not be providing any more comments. The staff and admin should come to a consensus of the situation at hand and any actions to take among themselves, however, anyone is free to participate in the conversation.

There is a page for the category overhaul, btw. It's here. I don't really think it's up-to-date, though. It's more or less Santa's project.

This wiki has not declined. I'm very insulted that you think it is. It's been going places. It's moved in status from "that other wiki" to "the new wiki". We're actually used now, actually relevant now, believe it or not. When I joined the wiki, we had about 5000 articles. It's now at around 11,000 articles.

I think the direction we staff are taking is obvious- we're going up. I've been trying to work on 1.8/1.9/1.10 documentation, so when that version becomes the version that everyone uses, this wiki will be a well-established reference point, and hopefully will grow in usage and editors. Other staff are more focused on making up for what we have in 1.7 documentation, since there's plenty to do there.

I removed TemplateData a while ago, because it doesn't work if you have VisualEditor disabled (like me, and many other editors do). I strongly dislike VisualEditor- I don't like correcting every edit. It's just bad. I don't think levels give an impression of a closed community. Actually, I think the opposite- editors look up and say, hey, I can do that. Either way, it's still very easy to edit.

Why are you bashing the IP award? It's funny. It's encouraging, a warm welcome, in my opinion. You get it if you make a contributing edit. And if you use your regular account, you get the good old classic bony welcome. Some new users have used their user talk page to ask questions, which I think is cool.

About templates btw- one thing I don't mind taking credit for the MediaWiki:Gadget-toolbar.js. It adds a toolbar with all of the FTB Wiki's most used templates. It makes it a lot easier to new users to use templates. Getting new users to understand templates is tough, and there's no magical way to do it. But we haves guides, we have the toolbar, and we have staff that help out.

Mobile sucks ass. We get it. That's something we want to improve at some point; actually, we want to improve the entire skin.

What's next? Policies. We're working on that, but ultimately having a formula for every single thing is silly. We expect staff and editors to use common sense. We don't want to make a hundred thousand byte policy just say "be a good guy"- that's pretty much redundant, and a waste of our time.

I don't like wikilove or similar extensions. If you need a special extension to tell someone thank you, you're kind of lazy. It means a lot more to just to say "thank you" then to mess with barnstars and cookies. They really don't mean anything.

We have guides. Here's a nice guide to assist with templates. I also started a general getting started guide, although it's quite incomplete (but still useful).

I had an editathon a while ago. That was great on newcomer participation. Went really well. People know this wiki is open to the public. It's not in its dark ages anymore. It's a real shame that this wiki was once only accessible by staff; It should of [this is where Retep bashes me for grammar] been open to all users day one, this day, and every day in between.

The currently editorship isn't low. It's pretty much higher then it's ever been, and I intend to push it and the wiki as far as it can go. Modded Minecraft isn't going to die, at least not any time soon, so mod documentation will always have a place. I plan to monitor this wiki even when it does, though, kind of like a dragon watching over its treasures. -Xbony2 (talk) 15:40, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I have PRO hidden for myself btw. If you don't like it, hide ".gamepedia_pro_user:before". We could hide it globally, but Gamepedia might not like that. -Xbony2 (talk) 15:52, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I said I wasn't going to comment, but Xbony2 here is making it difficult. I am not saying that the wiki is declining. I'm suggesting that the wiki is stagnant. The edit count may have risen, but from what I can tell, editor retention remains a problem (just from me looking at the active users list). My intention is to draw attention to the issue to the problem of editor retention and implore the team to take it seriously. I do not have the stats to back any of my claims up. These assessments are made purely based on what I've seen in a single day. I hope to team would be able to monitor the actual amount of new editors and their retention and consider whether the obstacles I've outlined matter to the wiki and take the appropriate action. I intended this comment section to be a dialog and discussion between staff members and editors at large and not as a section for responses to my post. You may want to restructure this section. The reasoning behind inviting regular users is to be able to get actual feedback from regular/new editors, this I highly advise you include this in the forum, the site notice and where. This is a great timing as the editathon (good job) just concluded and we have fresh editors that may be willing to share their experiences as new editors. As for Xbony2, I'm taking back my endorsement as he does not seem to take this issue seriously (I highly doubt you've even looked at the links). You can joke with established users all you want, but you need to take a good look at the attrition pipeline and think about who you're potentially driving off. I want to reemphasize, there will, not might, be one day you decide to retire from wiki work and you need editors to fill that gap. Editor retention is important, the stakes are higher than you think it is. I implore to everyone that is currently involved with the wiki to treat the issue with care.


 * This was not intended as a criticism of the wiki and I apologize if any of you took it that way.


 * tl;dr this should be a dialog between editors at large, this is a good starting point. what I've stated here are only suggestions, you need to decide what's important and what actions to take.

Plain wikitext up to the previous line is signed.

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 * -- 73.73.175.189 02:28, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
 * If you were just going to lay out a big proposal and not respond to any criticism of it, I'd be awfully disappointed.
 * Yes, keeping editors around ("editor retention", as you like you call it) is an issue. I know it's an issue. We know it's an issue. I take it seriously. That's why I'm the person who usually welcomes and assists newcomers, that's why I'm the person who has been creating/improving tools and guides to simplify the wiki experience. I'm very much insulted that you don't think I take this issue seriously. According to SatanicSanta, what I've done on this matter has been quite helpfully, thank you very much.
 * But yes, it's true I just skimmed through the links you provided. Although there's many things we can learn (and have learned) about Wikipedia, but their growth problems are much different than ours. We're a gaming wiki, and the average age of our viewers is about 15. We're largely incomplete, whereas Wikipedia is largely complete (or at least, it looks largely complete). The way we create articles and the way we delete them is far different. I could list differences all day. The point is, I'm much more interested in your and other users' suggestions to improve this wiki, not Sue's suggestions to improve Wikipedia.
 * This is very much a criticism of this wiki, and a criticism of my actions and the actions of other staff, even if you say it isn't. I know you have good intentions in mind, but your re-enterance to this wiki has been more of a disturbance than a help, and I'm not the only editor who thinks this. -Xbony2 (talk) 11:45, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Santa also proves that as useful as the welcome messages are, none of the editors on the list have actually stayed around for more than a few weeks. It's all well and good getting 100 contributions off people, but if they then disappear never to be seen again, users will never have any experience to keep the wiki up (you can't keep training people for them to leave). Long term retention is the overarching issue, and nothing has been done to handle that (at least successfully). The recent edithon is a chronic example of this, none of the editors stayed after it had finished, some didn't even stay the whole week, and that was with a Steam card to bribe people to edit more. IP hasn't proved it's even helped as much as the welcome messages either, how many users have actually made accounts that received it? There's a fair chance most IPs don't even read their talk pages.
 * The links might be more general, but the other comments are direct for applying to the wiki. We may hate the visual editor, but for new users it's so much easier than editing the raw wiki text, so having to cater for them is a fair thing to do to encourage editors to learn the (complicated) template systems more gently. The mobile skin is hell for using when Gc doesn't show and neither do navboxes, there's an entire user-base excluded because the js doesn't load. It's comments like this that we should be taking on board, rather than blanket rejecting as being for a different type of wiki.
 * I feel we may be being too defensive to actually look at how we've ended up in the situation we're in. Jin may have not put his point across terribly well in the most effective way, but the truth is we haven't had many long term editors at all, and most of the content comes from only a few people. If we want to be able to keep up with the ever changing modded Minecraft seen, we need to get more editors that play with different mods. Looking at how empty mods like Thermal Expansion is despite it's huge use is evidence that the current editor set doesn't play with it, and because there's so few, it leaves no one to actually document it. Jin is really just making comments and suggestions about the situation, whilst some of them may be more focused on individuals, the hostility they have been met with probably makes them seem more criticising than they were intended to be. To ignore and reject all of them I don't think is the best idea for the long term, an outsider's view is useful to see what the rest of the world thinks of what's happening, especially if they have experience in what we're doing. There is no need to agree with absolutely everything Jin's suggested, but I think we should explore them at least for our own sake.
 *  Chocohead Nag • Edits • Staff 15:13, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Again, I apologize to xbony2. I want to say that the entire team has done a great job. You guys have taken the wiki to places I could never taken it to. I want to reiterate that my comment is to suggest to you that your current model is in my opinion not sustainable and I urge you to evaluate the situation. I thank everyone who has taken my comments seriously and taken concrete steps to address it. I also urge to not just discuss this issue within the team, outside feedback from potential editors, former editors, new editors alike are important as you may be blinded by your own views. I do not intend to reenter the wiki business. I have, however, poured a lot of effort, just like all of you, into the wiki, and I feel obligated to bring to light an issue that I have deem important and remains unsolved. This in part, is failure on my own part. I hope that you believe that I have the best intentions in mind. Thank you.

Above plain wikitext is signed.

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 * Random point- this format was a bad format. I wish you structured it like a normal talk page message. Also the PGP signature isn't necessary, it's just making things hard to work around.
 * I'm sorry for being hostile and reactive. I know I have been.
 * Wanna know my story? I wasn't around when you were around. I joined the wiki, on its original address, on the 15th of July 2014 (shit, my 2 year anniversary is in ten days). I really wish I joined the project sooner, but I am young, sixteen, and I bet I would of been kicked with my lack of professionalism if I joined in 2013 :P I edited some of the IC2 pages, and some of the Nuclear Control pages- I'm the current maintainer of Nuclear Control. I was a GregTech fanboy, so when GregTech called this their official wiki, I called it my own as well. I became mod maintainer (DAC) and part of staff on October 28th, 2014. I branched out to documenting other mods. In 2015, wiki editing became my main hobby. I edited pretty much every single day... I figured out how to use translation markup (it's really quite simple) and become a translation administrator on May 4th. I don't know why, but translation and linguistics is something that interests me a lot...
 * I remember during summer, I saw a Direwolf ForgeCraft video. It showed an early version of Immersive Engineering. I said, shit, that's going to be the next big mod, and I swore to document it. And I did, once it was released. It's one of the most referred to mods on the wiki. The mod author has kept updating the mod, and I've kept updating the documentation on it, and I'm about sick of it xD
 * I've kind of become the most active editor on the wiki. You can measure it in edits, wikipoints, or better yet time spent. I got a package from Gamepedia in November cause of it, with some fun shit in it, a tee-shirt, hydra plushie, some other fun stuff.
 * I've still been around, pumping out documentation for various mods and patching shit up. I applied for admin/bureaucrat February. Really don't go so well for two reasons. The first being I didn't explain so well what I'd do with these rights. The second being I was applying for bureaucrat and skipping admin. I figured that all of the current admins are bureaucrats already, and if you trust a user enough to be admin, why not the extra right or two of a bureaucrat? My group reform proposal had admin and bureaucrat merged, but Retep and Santa stomped on that shit like a wack-a-mole. I closed the application on the condition Retep and Santa improve their lack of activity and responsiveness. Currently, they do it in waves, but they've improved, I guess. -Xbony2 (talk) 01:57, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Mhm. The point of my story is to tell you why I'm pushing for this yet again. I agree the format here is bad, so perhaps dedicate a new page for this, with the staff's own take on this?

For the record, I think I've only really kicked one single person out for being extremely immature (of course after consulting the staff editors), right Santa? *cough chris cough* –  -- 73.73.175.189 03:34, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm against some of your points on groups. Maybe they hurt retention somewhat, but I think most of the new users are more discouraged by 1) documentation is boring to create and 2) documentation is hard to create. I don't think it's really groups. There are other things I disagree with it, but this is one of the main things. -Xbony2 (talk) 01:09, 7 July 2016 (UTC)


 * As long as there is overwhelming consensus then it is fine (get feedback from actual users!). I accept that I may be wrong on certain points and you should too. You seem to be too attached to your ideas. All I want from you is an acknowledgement to look into this issue, nothing more nothing less. My comments are only suggestions and feedback, and you should take it that way. Imagine I submitted this as a survey response and I've left the section that solicits permission to follow up blank. I am doing this because I am clearly not the person you should be discussing this with.


 * (My entire point is if it's hard for new users to begin. Make it easy! VisualEditor removes the wikitext barrier, it's a start, but it's not good enough. The points listed are only examples, there might be more, of potential reasons new users may be discouraged by excessive amounts of ranks. You may disagree with them, but are you willing to accommodate people who think that way?) -- 73.73.175.189 03:44, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm going to work on creating a survey for general information.
 * VisualEditor is generally bad. The main reason we have it on this wiki is because Gamepedia put it on all of their wikis. When we first got it, we talked about trying to remove it, or trying to hide it. The idea behind it is great, but for whatever large amount of resources that have been sinked into it, it hasn't impressed me much. For spelling/grammar fixes, it works well, and that's why I won't advocate for removing it- you shouldn't have to understand complex markup just for that. But it is no solution for the "wikitext barrier"- templates and tags are a massive hassle through it, and most pages that have been created purely through it get covered with template messages (Infobox needed, Cleanup, etc) or nowadays get pretty much rewritten by me. -Xbony2 (talk) 14:51, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
 * It should be a solution for it though, all the antics with the template data and such to make them work better in it is what's really necessary, it's just with none of the editors really using it no one's ever tried. Not to mention how you fixing them is not a viable solution to the problem what so ever. The best view I suppose is to ask the people who have made a few edits whether they'd rather use it and clunk about or read a huge wall of text about Cg/Crafting Table and Gc then edit the wiki markup directly.  Chocohead Nag • Edits • Staff 15:13, 7 July 2016 (UTC)


 * I want to complain about a thing that is unrelated. the baseline on the doc tpl headers and cbb headers is off. And it's annoying me. 𝜘 -- 128.135.100.114 16:14, 7 July 2016 (UTC)


 * I agree to Jinbobo that the "pro" mark is stupid. The symbol gives the view that it is a closed community and has the appearance that some are "pro", and the person who wants to help and purely looking for the first time, thinks he is a "noob".


 * Guides: Meanwhile, I have found many pages you would need for edit (internal and external) but some I still have to ask. An overview of all possible stuff (with links to the special pages/guides/template definitions) I miss to this day. Some useful pages are hard to find and accessible only via detours. For example Special:TileList. --LuminousLizard FTB Wiki Staff de-N / "en-2" (talk) 17:25, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
 * We can't really do much about PRO, even though it is pretty clunky. Curse will probably do something to improve it; users from the Minecraft Wiki and WOWpedia wikis among many other wikis have complained about it (they're big wiki fry compared to us small wiki fry). You can hide it in your CSS though (the users of the Minecraft Wiki made it into a Gadget, which I think would be a cool idea to steal).
 * As for lists, the sidebar has links to important things, like the community portal (which is an outdated page I need to get around to improving. It looks like it's admin only though, which is probably why I haven't), the recent changes, the MOS, the noticeboards, the full list of templates, modules, special pages, mod abbreviations, etc. I'd to work on making an improved sidebar some time, though. -Xbony2 (talk) 19:49, 4 July 2016 (UTC)


 * I don't particularly agree about "pro". I don't think it's significant enough to turn off a large amount of editors just by seeing that people here are "Pro". It also hasn't been around long enough for us to observe a significant effect. Since it's been around, there hasn't been a change in the amount of non-staff edits.
 * Most of the administrative stuff lately has been around changing and creating new things in Tilesheets and OreDict, not really things visible here on the wiki in some fancy way like RC. For example, these extensions now have APIs that we will soon be using to import tilesheets and stuff with Peter's tilesheet program. Another example of this is that tiles can now be translated. You wouldn't really know that this happened unless you looked at the special pages and noticed the new "TileTranslator". There are also some other projects that we've been slowly working on, not just as administrators but as a group together, like deprecating G, the category overhaul, and as of yesterday deprecating/deleting all of the Help pages.
 * I also don't agree about the level of groups. I agree the amount we have sucks and we need to remove a few of them, but I really doubt it has an effect on editors. Most editors probably won't even see the various rights and groups unless they look at special pages or random users profiles (most of us don't even use the UserProfile as our main user page, so that's even more unlikely).
 * Criticism vs compliments/thanks is something I plan on surveying here. I just have to write some code to help me do the actual surveying. Once I do that, we will be making appropriate changes. I have personally noticed that the majority of the things on user talk pages are either "welcome!" or "you did this wrongly", especially since we got rid of the thanks extension. That extension is kind of annoying and I agree with xbony that it's lazy, but I also feel like it's much better than having dozens of "thank you" messages on their talk pages. That might be more annoying to be honest. When we had WikiLove we never used it as anything but a joke. You can see that on many of our talk pages and talk page archives. We do encourage that users read our crafting grid guides and such, but having new users understand how tilesheets works is kind of ridiculous, especially since they can't even import them. All we ask of new users is to give us the tiles and we do some magic shit.
 * Mobile sucks. I use mobile all the time, and I hate it. Super unusable. You can't even view tiles. Definitely something we need to fix.
 * Interaction and cooperation with FTB has slightly improved, but we still haven't been mentioned in the news posts despite being told that our news will be included. Somewhat disappointing, but there really isn't anything we can do but bitch, which we do.

--  Satanic Santa 🎅F T B Wiki Admin 19:38, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Apparently the “crisis of the staff system” began way earlier than when I questioned whether is it needed (I wasn’t honestly aware of this message back then). with Jin that its mere existence may hinder the input of new users. — NickTheRed37 (talk) 14:54, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
 * And yet, staff and ex-staff are the only ones that complain about it... -Xbony2 (talk) 15:01, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
 * That can very simply explained due to beside the occasional IP edit, we don't have any editors that don't have extra rolls (like being a translator). The fact there are no other comments at all is proof we have a very deep problem with retaining people just as editors without giving them more important jobs. Whether the staff system is to blame is another matter, but compared with the current system it certainly can't make it any worse.  Chocohead Nag • Edits • Staff 22:24, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
 * >extra rolls
 * To recap everything, why do we want to remove staff? What effects do we think will occur with the removal of staff? This is not a sarcastic comment, but a question I'd like you/others to answer in one string of comments so we can through it properly. -Xbony2 (talk) 01:11, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
 * For the record, I am an editor without an extra roll. &#8212; ScottKillen Staff [ ⌨ ] 02:32, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I guess my comments here might be relevant, seeing as how I am a new user and all. First, I am grateful that this wiki exists. For me, it allowed me to return to the community that demanded so much of my time with a lesser commitment. (For me, this is lighter work than modding.) The main obstacle for me to remain in the modding community was the huge amount of politics surrounding the deeper levels of modding. (If you want to do anything in MinecraftForge it is political. If you are "connected" there is a low barrier relative to those who are not "connected".) Now that I have participated in the community here for a bit, I see some kind of political machine...which makes me nervous and hinders creativity. I guess there will always be people in any community who seem to mostly be maneuvering for more "power", regardless of how insignificant that power is compared to the Grand Scheme&trade;. From my standpoint, it is this (and not privilege levels) that is the real monster. Give me a framework and I will work in it...but unpredictable flux is dampening. Regarding the privilege system, I understand the need to protect certain areas...and what we are really saying here is that the inadequacies of the software need shielding. I would much prefer the technical solution of improving the software so it is more difficult to abuse--but technical resources are scarce. As I have been able to piece together this discussion from several places, I understand that my comments here may or may not be helpful. If this ramble helps, please use it, if not, please ignore it. Either way, I am all for whatever lets me do what I came here for: to properly document mods. My current level of privilege seems to be the sweet spot.&#8212; ScottKillen Staff [ ⌨ ] 03:18, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
 * It's better to talk than not to ^^ -Xbony2 (talk) 08:59, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Protection
Requesting a 7-day auto-confirmed protection on Getting Started (Botania), because the vandalism I just saw there was probably the craziest vandalism I've ever seen >.> and it was by a combination of two IPs -Xbony2 (talk) 19:46, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Eh... It's only been vandalized once, which is actually pretty good for those guide pages. Those IPs are blocked which should be enough. --  Satanic Santa 🎅F T B Wiki Admin 19:49, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Eh, but I'm not sure if the second IP was just a pile-on effect or an alt of the first, considering they were the exact same time frame. And if said user has one alt IP, who says they might not have another? Either way, it's safe to give it protection, and it's only for a week. -Xbony2 (talk) 19:53, 7 August 2016 (UTC)