Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20201110180619

Hey all!

As you may have noticed, we haven't yet moved to the Unified Community Platform or UCP. That's largely because Tardis is one of the original 150 wikis on this platform, and it uses a lot of different features that have existed since 2004. We're trying to proceed cautiously, so that as little as possible breaks. We're still working on a few details, some having to do with Semantic Media Wiki (or SMW), a useful feature that only a few wikis have.

While I can't promise everything will work out of the box at the moment of migration, I can tell you that we've been working furiously behind the scenes to document and fix things as close to migration as possible. For instance, I've genuinely just gotten out of a discussion about how to solve for the non-existence of Soundcloud tags in the UCP.

This prudence has also intervened to slow progress finalizing things here at the forums. I wanna thank everyone for their patience on this. We know that our members here at Tardis use forums for sometimes complicated technical matters, in a way that few other wikis do. So an "all Discussions"-based solution won't work in a lot of cases. Instead, using a Discussions thread to point to an old-school Forum thread (sometimes called a DPL forum thread), like we used to use for the first decade of our existence, will give us the best of both worlds. We'll have the ability to use the Discussions bell menu at the top right of all pages to notify people of conversations being held in forums that will accept wiki-text.

Finally, these changes have also slowed progress on the promised changes to the main page. UCP has an impact there, too. Since my primary job at Fandom is the creation of main pages, I've been able to document a number of issues just in the last few months, most of which have now been fixed. One great example was the fact that, until very recently, the CSS class  didn't exist on UCP. That would have immediately broken our main page, so it needed to be dealt with first.

Still, I wanted to make the transition to UCP first to see the impact at Tardis — a much more complicated CSS setup than is typical around Fandom. I can then assess if there's anything that doesn't work and then move to a new main page. For sure, though, we will have a new design before the holiday special airs!

Thanks again for your patience! 