Forum:Temporary forums/Admin announcements

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The New Forums are (almost) here!
Hello, all!

We're happy to announce that, with the Forum namespace unlocked, we're finally able to move into some permanent New Forums. Thanks to everyone for how much you've shown up in making Tardis:Temporary forums happen, and helping the Wiki achieve as much as it did in these diminished circumstances. The New Forums are still very much needed — but we've cleared a way a lot of long-running issues and old policy bugbears, successfully catching up with the past few years' backlogs, such that what we are looking forward to does really get to be the fresh start of a whole new era.

While SOTO's still working on finalising the Special:Forum archive, we're taking this chance to officially migrate. The Temporary Forums are moving to Forum:Temporary forums for now, with some cleanup to come brushing it up as a completed archive. In time, we'll have a central landing page for the Forums, linking to all the archives; but this may take a week or more, as there are several important things to prioritise. (In any case, while archiving all data for history's sake is paramount, User:CzechOut, in his contacts with us active admins, did wish to express his personal view that a lot of the Special:Forum era material was old enough that, even without new evidence, it was long-overdue for review by the community. Admins don't write policy, and neither does the past: you, the community do. Those other things just help to codify and operationalise it. The spirit of T:POINT applies — don't waste everybody's time, don't restart an old thread unless you have an actually fresh look at its topic — but once new Forum threads become possible for all to open, don't be frightened of a prior ten-message discussion ten years ago. "Fresh" doesn't have to mean "specific new evidence", it can just mean "this is reflective of a decade-old community and view of what the Wiki is all about, we have a strong inkling the current majority does not support that rule, or that it is in spiritual conflict with more recent jurisprudence".)

Don't worry, though: our ongoing discussions are going to move directly into our still-being-built Panopticon. While the Tardis Forum works on restoring its interior dimensions, please bear with us and do not open any new threads for the next few days. (But, of course, feel free to work on OPs in sandbox — and don't worry: the list of proposed threads will be retained at the archived version of Tardis:Temporary forums itself. As we make it through those, given the extraordinary circumstances, we'll do the unthinkable i.e. editing the archived page, so as to note that X or Y thread has been posted in the new forum.)

We'll make another announcement when things are fully open for business. For now, you're welcome to come over to Forum:The New Forums to give your thoughts as we restructure, and tell us about any bugs you're noticing. (Just give it a few minutes if it's something new. We might be working on it.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:58, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

User rights nomination: SOTO
In accordance with procedure, let it be known that I have now nominated long-time admin User:SOTO for the higher rank of Bureaucrat at Tardis:User rights nominations. This functions similarly to an ordinary admin nomination, so please proceed to that page to leave your comments, support, and possible concerns! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:01, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

10,000 Dawns crossovers
Something people have been awaiting for a long time! Our admin team's perseverance in getting to the bottom of the procedural issues with regards to the frozen 10,000 Dawns crossover thread from before Special:Forum's collapse has, at last, been rewarded. After conversations with our Wiki Representative User:Spongebob456, and with Fandom's Senior Community Manager for Entertainment User:idekmandy, we have been given official notification that… "Fandom does not weigh in on local wiki policies to this extent, and from what we (Fandom Staff) know about the situation, it seems like the only legal issue was doxxing in relation to the thread."

- Fandom

We were further advised that if we admins were to make a decision to validate the stories directly (in light of the fact that the final, interrupted Special:Forum thread started with a presumption of validity, and would have ruled as much by default unless good arguments were provided in its predetermined time-span), we would be permitted to do so: we were told that if we "want[ed] to take care of this issue without a thread (thus avoiding legal implications), then that [wa]s [our] decision and not on Fandom to “give clearance”".

After some discussion, however, User:Bongolium500, User:OncomingStorm12th and User:SOTO agreed with me that doing things by the book once and for all would be preferable, now that we have been permitted to do so. As such, normal T:TF protocol will be bent for the sake of righting this old wrong, in that the next thread to be created once a slot opens up (so, foreseeably, this week-end) will be the restarting of the Dawns thread, with an OP by one of us admins. Given the unavailability of the archives, this OP will recount the facts of the case, and reinstate the framework of the final thread: default validity, final call for anyone with solid, substantial contravening evidence to bring it forward.

This is already a given for all threads, but please, everyone, be on your best behaviour in that thread once it arrives. No baseless aspersions on real-world persons or publishers; no personal attack; and definitely no doxxing. We, and Fandom, are trusting that the community has grown since 2019, and can have this final thread in peace. Don't make us regret extending that trust. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:22, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

and
has been converted into a "tab style" template like. In addition, has been created to better identify those rare cases of a story being completed but not released. These templates make use of a design by User:OttselSpy25. Bongo50  ☎  18:47, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

A new template,, has been created. This template is used to make an image appear at the top of the page on the mobile view only (Mobile Only Picture). It is also used, more usefully, to set the "page image" for the page. This is the image that appears in category pages (when using the default "dynamic") layout and in the trending pages list. This is useful for pages such as appearance subpages that use the new tabular format where the space taken up by an image would squash the table, allowing these pages to still be illustrated if they become featuring. Bongo50  ☎  21:27, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Mastodon
I have created a Mastodon account for the wiki. Mastodon is a delocalised social media network and I have created this account in an attempt to connect more with the wider Doctor Who community and to share cool but obscure pages with a wider audience. If anyone else would like access to this account to aid in running it, please let me know. You will need some way in which you can be contacted off-wiki. If you have your own Mastodon account, checking out the account and following it would be very appreciated. Bongo50  ☎  21:27, 2 April 2023 (UTC)