User blog:--MULLIGANACEOUS--/Valentine's Day 2019: Massive nerfage!

Hullo Candy Crushers! Some great news for you!

It has been a while since my last blog post. But there has been some major events for this wiki since 2019. Firstly, most wikias have now been renamed as "FANDOM" sites, and that can be shown by the URL migrations. Nevertheless I still call it a "wikia" and will always call these FANDOM sites wikias. Then we saw several admins being officially demoted due to inactivity, and we are down to two bureaucrats left. Our remaining admins worked diligently to negate the extensive damage caused by the vandals which occurred in early February.

Even though I have been less active in playing Candy Crush games (I am currently playing War Commander), an eventful tweak has been established on Valentine's Day which nerfed hundreds of former six-colored levels to five-colored levels. They can all be seen in the Redesigning/Current page. This is the largest such redesigns since the formerly selective redesigns which rebalanced (and buffed) many of the level's move limits. Thank you for all the users who worked hard to bring these updates to the mainspace.

I also unofficially introduce my alternative account, which will serve as a semi-automated uploading bot for uploading "board blueprints" for configs, 8-bit style images which highlight level notes found in some levels up to the high 1000s. They now come regularly after each tweak and redesign and can be seen in the Redesigning/Current page.

As for this month, I am going to make a few announcements to update this wiki and I hope other contributes volunteer to focus on these edits in response to this major redesign event. This is a good opportunity to earn ranks as we have a shortage of Content Moderators. Please comment on the bottom of this page to discuss about the February Roadmap.

Things to do for this Wiki
We should update the mainspace Levels page and their Past Versions continually as tweaks and redesigns come in continuously, at a rate of once every business day. For the past year or so, users who worked on past versions and new releases, especially and  worked on detecting redesigns and past versions of levels while I use my automated program to extract these redesigns to assist them in their mainspace work. Cheekian's contributions to the past versions put his edit count to 30K and he is now the #2 user in this wiki in terms of badges.

Even though we live in opposing time zones, as the redesigns and tweaks usually come during Cheekian's evening hours and my morning "dead-time" hours, it is still important to keep the redesigns as a secondary reference to the past versions of levels.

(1) Put the most recent tweaks on mainspace
Cheekian, who was credited for regularly putting tweaked and redesigned levels on the mainspace, has stated that he will be on break for a short time for Lunar New Year, and offered the responsibility to upload mainspace updates to the relatively new rollback.

The redesigns for February has been quite extensive, and we saw several levels being tweaked without immediately being updated on mainspace. With over 300 levels redesigned as of now, most of them being color nerfs, we should show more engagement to put all of these nerfs to the mainspace.

Users

(2) Naming and formatting for Past Versions pages
Thank you for all the users who updated the Past Versions of levels regularly. However, there are a few minor issues with the formatting of Past Versions levels, especially those that are recently redesigned and those of high levels.

(2a) Most of the high episodes have been "soft-released" for Windows 10 two weeks prior to the "official" HTML5  release. At the current rate of releasing new levels, at a rather rapid two episodes a week, that means, as much as four episodes are currently exclusive to Windows 10.

It seems quite redundant to call past versions "First Version (Mobile) / Second Version (Windows 10 App)" especially when a level has been redesigned while still only "soft-released" for Windows 10.

(2b) Additionally, I have slightly modified Level 4000/Versions's infoboxes so they go directly after the header rather than before as what Cheekian did. This makes it easier to identify which section you are on when you are using the source editor to edit Past Versions pages and also makes it slightly neater due to how the horizontal rule lies just above the infobox.

However, a possible reason why this might be justified is that an unnecessary space is present if the infobox source text is followed by a new empty line and then followed by the main comments. To fix that, write the comments 'right after' the infobox source text to remove the unnecessary space.

Here are a few proposals:
 * If the redesign name is of the form "First Version (Mobile) / Second Version (Windows 10 App)", it becomes "First Version (Mobile)." Only versions only playable while it was just prereleased for W10 shoudld be titled "N-th Version (Windows 10 App)."
 * Also, provide the date when this version is in effect. For redesigns in major redesigning event, they should also be named, much like earlier levels. The version history of the Redesigning/Current page can also be used to determine the date of the version.
 * The infobox should now lie just below the Level 1 header in Past Versions page.

Users

ß, anyone??
We are down to two bureaucrats for this wiki (which is still good enough). Some of the users may know that I might be the next bureaucrat, but it seems that it might be time for me to apply for bureaucracy in March. You can also cast an unofficial vote for my ß-crat nomination. We also have a great shortage of middle-ranked users such as Content Moderators.

It is also the time which I officially apply for adminship for other Candy Crush games as my config extractor is complete.

Happy Valentine's Day to all of you and enjoy the candies, especially the heart text candies. Oh, I actually call it "Valentine's Winter," or "Valentine's Summer" if you live on the southern hemisphere.

a mulligan. (talk) 00:32, February 15, 2019 (UTC)