User talk:Bchwood

RE: Wiki suggestions
Hi Peter; in general, your ideas are not too far removed from some of the ones I've been having myself. Having spoken to Kacie during the last DH promotional offer, I was aware that something similar was probably planned for the release of part 2, and requested more lead time in preparing for any promotion since we literally had mere days for the first offer to prepare. While successful, it was not as smooth as I had hoped it would be. To address your points specifically:


 * Giving the main page a new background. Just to change things up a bit and keep the look fresh.
 * I believe there was some talk of this a while back in any case, so this shouldn't be too hard to organise.
 * Changing the Quote of the Week to a random quote generator that will automatically keep the quotes updated.
 * I'm not really involved in the Quote of the Week section of the site to be honest. While I have no objections in theory to the change, one of the other admins would be best suited to comment on how easy the transition would be.
 * Categorising the pages with no category. Making more use of the 1,000 photos that are not being used.
 * We currently have only 4 uncategorised pages, which is easily rectified. Categorisation is one of the things we keep on top of here. As for the images; we are currently in the progress of categorising and applying information templates to the wiki's images which you can appreciate is a massive chore. Unused images are regularly deleted if they serve no purpose on the wiki. We discourage galleries in our articles. Images should serve the text, not the other way around.
 * Adding more content to the Daily Prophet News page (such as the recently released HP DH 2 online game).
 * Again, no objection here. Just something that needs to be updated more regularly.
 * Reaching out to more affiliates to get more links set up which will help with Google ranks and bring more traffic to the wiki.
 * I'll begin cranking up efforts to increase the affiliate section in preparation for the release.
 * While the site abounds with HP facts and knowledge, we think it could benefit from more interactive elements- like polls and areas where users can chat about their opinions on things- maybe creating a link page to promote more dialogue.
 * And this is where we disagree. We are an encyclopedia, not a forum or a social networking site. When Wikia introduced blogs, we were overwhelmed with pointless entries that made viewing the RC difficult. Editors were not contributing to the site's main focus, which is the articles. We instituted a strict blog policy (we would have preferred to abolish them altogether) and we continue to enforce that. When article comments were temporarily turned on during the last giveaway, the comments bordered on the pointless and many were vandalism. We deleted them all. The focus of this site has always been - and will remain - to serve as an informative encyclopedia. For community, we have an IRC channel, as well as Facebook and Twitter to allow users to interact on a social level. Perhaps we should look to incorporating better links to these social outlets (a live Twitter feed on the main page, perhaps, and setting up links to forums on the Facebook site) to serve the purpose you are looking for. - Cavalier One Gryffindorcrest.jpg( Wizarding Wireless Network ) 09:27, March 9, 2011 (UTC)