User blog:HighJewElfKing/Blog Draft NYE

(Image is REHASH 13.png on SPA)

Hey gang! As I said before, we never have witnessed a year quite like 2020. I know we’re all excited to get it the hell out of our lives and move on to 2021. Before we do though I wanted to look back on the year as it relates to our wiki, myself and South Park.

Myself - Fandom Community Connect
I’ll start with myself, in January I got the chance to join 63 people in Orlando for Fandom Community Connect. Including our current wiki manager KylaraE. It was an amazing chance to meet Fandom users and the staff for the 3 day event. As well as getting the chance to ride “Dumbo the Flying Elephant” at Disney World. I met a lot of cool people, and was able to represent SPA there and have discussions with Fandom staff about wiki features and the upcoming UCP. I have attached some photos below including for many of you the first time you get to see me irl. In the first one I'm on the left in a photo at Community Connect with Fandom's Vanguard group. The 2nd is me at the Aria in Las Vegas slamming down a Fat Tire (Unrelated to Community Connect but another face reveal). The third one is a group photo with everybody who was at Community Connect, you can find me with my laynard backwards.

Myself - Fandom Wiki Manager
As a negative as some of you know. I lost my job as a Fandom Wiki Manager in June. It was a pretty fun gig so I was upset about it. Particularly because I wouldn’t get to work with such a great team anymore or as much. I became a bit more popular in February on Fandom, Doing Adoptions for users who were looking to gain admin rights on Movie TV wikis. Although I was around Fandom a ton, it didn’t let me be here as much as I wanted. So if there’s any flip side to what happened, I’m able to be here much more regularly once again. (Shoutout to the team: LuchoFigo85, KylaraE, Spongebob456, SliverFlight, ReverieCode, TimeShade, Corey and Lady Lostris. I miss all of you)

South Park
Yes, South Park this year wasn’t too good. We got our first ever hour long episode with The Pandemic Special as we got to see South Park’s take on the crazy year. That was awesome, but aside from that it’s been very very quiet aside from probably some Phone Destroyer updates. The Pandemic Special was counted in Season 24, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a normal season. We may have to keep up the wait until after a wide COVID vaccine is available. Or Matt and Trey could bless us with another special. The sad truth is we simply just don’t know when or IF new episodes or specials are on the way. We will let you know as soon we hear anything.

Our Wiki: The UCP
In October, our wiki was upgraded to The UCP. Fandom’s newest Wiki Software upgrade. It’s a big update that had lots of mixed reactions within the Fandom Community. It has and continues to have negative reactions here. It was launched here with many many problems and caused a lot of things to break. It’s all fixed now, but the UCP is far from perfect. No doubt many updates from Fandom are planned for next year so we’ll have to keep our eyes open. Here’s hoping it gets better I'm sure it will as time goes on.

Our Wiki: The UCP
In October, our wiki was upgraded to The UCP. Fandom’s newest Wiki software update. It’s a big update that had lots of mixed reactions within the Fandom Community. It had some pretty have negative reactions here during the launch. It was launched here with many many problems and caused a lot of things to break. It’s all fixed now, but the UCP is far from perfect. No doubt many updates from Fandom are planned for next year so we’ll have to keep our eyes open. Here’s hoping it gets better I'm sure it will as time goes on.

Our Wiki: New Background & Admins & Projects
Aside from the UCP we had many changes here on the wiki. We welcomed FOUR NEW admins this year. SkyRider747, HerbiMetal, LuigiMaster747 and Trisolaris from the SP Game Wiki. Sadly, Jamesb1 retired in September. We are currently merging Fandom’s South Park game wiki onto SPA. We expect to be done early next year. HerbiMetal gave us a new background on the wiki, the first background update since 2012. SG gave us our first MAJOR main page update in over several years. South Park Archives had an insane amount of growth this year, although I can’t give specific numbers because that data isn’t available to me yearly. A whopping 78% of users visiting were new to our wiki and that’s JUST IN the LAST 30 DAYS. We also had over 1800 new pages created THIS YEAR. We completed at least 4 major projects as well. (Oh and by the way the SPS wiki had no edits in the last 60 days.)

Our Discord: Exploding with popularity
Our wiki blew up this year, but our Discord has absolutely exploded. In December 2019 we had 500 members. We are at over 900 now. So a huge thank you to our new users and nitro boosters. Sodosopa is our most active server channel and had in the last 30 days over 36,000 messages sent (Thanks Da Cat). Over 33% of users on our Discord joined in 2020. We really like the community that we have on Discord and we’ll continue to improve it as best we can. Also a shoutout to Airborn & Leopold H Wang our current chat mods. I also want to shoutout HeidiTurnerStan for his work on our Wiki Discussions as a Discussions Mod.

The Future
We have VERY ambitious goals for the wiki next year. We will do our damn best to get heard by South Park Studios with a potential partnership. We will have more projects to update content, improve the wiki navigation and tons of other cool improvements. Me and SG have a future roadmap we will stick to as we keep working to improve the wiki and make it the #1 source for all things South Park. Trust us, we have VERY BIG PLANS AND GOALS.

Thank you and HAPPY NEW YEAR
I want to start by thanking the most incredible Admin team on Fandom for their hard work this year. I want to thank the best Co-Bureaucrat trusty sidekick on earth SilasGreaves12. I want to thank everybody for their support of me. I want to thank and welcome Kylara to our Community from Fandom as our new Wiki Manager and thank her for listening to our concerns. I want to thank our Discord & Discussions Mods for their work combing through tons of messages and posts during an average week. But most importantly, I want to thank all of you. Our amazing editors, readers, Discussions and Discord users. Our editors for their tireless work improving our wiki, our readers for checking out and choosing our wiki and enjoying our work. Our Discussions users for starting and sparking some pretty amazing conversations. Our Discord users for entertaining us all for hours on end every day and creating a fantastic community. No matter who you are, if you interact with South Park Archives in any way, I want to say THANK YOU for your continued support. 2020 outside of our community has been pretty shit, so cheers to you all as we flush this year out and welcome in what we can only hope will be a better 2021. On behalf of the admin team here at South Park Archives, Happy New Year and have a SAFE and prosperous 2021!