User blog:LunaStar724/Wikia Announcements (July 16, 2020)

Hello everyone! Hope you're all doing fine during these times. This announcement will only cover changes made over the past few days, so some changes made from January to June may not be included here.

After just under 7 months, the Community Boats page has been updated! There were 225 boat images and 1 boat video posted over the past 7 months where boats were not being added, and all of these have been placed in Chapter VII and VIII! If you have some builds to showcase, whether they be old or new, make sure to post them in the comments for the main Community Boats page!

From this point forwards, boats will now be added at some time during Saturdays, UTC +08:00.

There have been some updates to the Boat Class Guide as well:


 * Materials will no longer be taken into consideration for Set 1 classing.
 * Ever since material scaling was introduced as a small bug (and now as a feature), users are now given more freedom as to the size of the details on their ship. Large builds are no longer required for players to create intricate details. Following this, some builds are meant to be purely aesthetic, and use materials purely for their texture whenever creating a build. Class descriptions will still assume that the build is a boat. For non-boat builds, class descriptions are still applicable.
 * Class descriptions for Set 1 classing mention a boat's ability to get to the end. Nowadays, this may not hold true for all boats, as given the wider movement options we have (such as wheels, jets, motors, and thrusters), even a Class 1 boat may have the ability to reach the end. These descriptions will stay for the purpose of making classical boats without movement mechanisms easier to visualize and class.
 * Set 2 classing is now arbitrary and optional.
 * The detail on a boat/build is viewed differently by every person, and our perception of a build's detail could change over time, which would create a lot of inconsistencies within the Community Boats pages. Ever since material scaling was introduced, it has been made possible to create details that were never possible before, so some boats that would have been considered detailed back then may not be considered as detailed today. Users may still mention the amount of detail on their builds in the description.

Boats posted from Chapters I to VI will still follow the old class guide format, that is, their materials will still be put into consideration.

Along with these changes, a few modifications to the Wikia's code has been made such that some of the intensive code that runs on Community Boats subpages will now only run on those subpages, making the entire Wikia run a bit smoother. The code itself has been optimized to run faster, so Community Boats pages themselves should run faster as well. You may need to refresh your browser's cache to experience these changes. They're not really visible, but it should help to lessen the lag on the Wikia as a whole.

Along with these changes, there is a possibility for another Boat Building Competition. Unfortunately, given the amount of time we have left, we cannot theme this said competition around the 3rd anniversary of the Wikia. More information about this may be posted up to a week from now.

That's all for this announcement. Make sure to stay safe!