User blog:LEGOSuperDKong/Preparing for Brickimedia

First off, I will explain what Brickimedia is, in case you do not know. If you do know you can skip down to the second section where I get to my main point.

Brickimedia is a collection of wikis which are moving from Wikia to a new site, namely http://brickimedia.org. The wikis are:
 * Brickipedia
 * Brickipedia Customs
 * LEGO Stories
 * LEGO CUUSOO Wiki

Why are we moving? Brickimedia would benefit the CUUSOO wiki a lot. Brickimedia has:
 * practically no ads
 * more freedom to edit various aspects of the site
 * friendly people who know their LEGO stuff

As part of Brickimedia, we (the LEGO CUUSOO wiki) would be one of four LEGO-centered wikis rather than one of thousands of wikis about every topic imaginable here on Wikia. Thus we would get a ton more traffic, new members, etc., and we would then be able to influence CUUSOO more than we do now.

The idea was brought to us about 8 months ago, and the community voted that we would move.

Everything was set until some hackers attacked Brickimedia's host (RamNode), and several sites were destroyed. Brickimedia was one of the few that were hit. Not much content had been backed up, and so it looked like Brickimedia was over.

But the designers set to work again, getting unofficial nods from some of LEGO's staff, and so after months of hard work, Brickimedia is now up again, currently in Open Beta. The site is now backed up so that all the progress that has been made will not be lost. The LEGO CUUSOO wiki is getting ready to move as Brickimedia is being tested.

That's where things stand now.

How to prepare
Because we don't want to force this on anyone, I will point out now that there is no requirement to move. This wiki will still be here on Wikia due to Wikia's policies. So, if you'd rather stay here and edit, that is perfectly fine. Most of the community will probably have moved on, though. So, for those who will be moving, here's what to do to get ready:
 * Create a Beta account on Brickimedia
 * Test Brickimedia by editing
 * Create and edit pages here so that we will have our info up-to-date for the move

Create a Beta Account
This is free and easy. You only have to provide a username and a password; email and real name are optional and not necessary. You can create the account here. Just please read the Terms of Use first.

Test on Brickimedia
Testing Brickimedia serves two purposes at the moment: There is currently a chat function, you can try various things out on it (if you know HTML you can use tags to change your text). There are a few articles on there which you can edit; also you can make a userpage for yourself. Editing isn't really hard to do, but if you do need help you can get on Wikia chat and ask Codyn or I to aid you. If neither of us are on chat you can always leave us a message on our walls, either on Wikia (Codyn's wall, my wall) or on Brickimedia (Codyn's wall, my wall).
 * 1) It will allow you to get used to the format
 * 2) It will help us find any remaining bugs

Edit here
This wiki has been a bit behind, I'm sad to say. When the Review results came out all at once, we were a bit too shocked to edit, I guess. But now it's been about a week since they came out and we still haven't update each page for each project... so that needs work. We also have a ton of red links. Those red links need pages. Most of them are for authors of projects. But some of them are for projects themselves. If you want to see examples of pages with a lot of red links, see here:
 * Cuusoo_Wiki:Featured_Project/Archive
 * List of Most Supported Projects (All Time)
 * Special:WantedPages (this is a special page with all the red links on the wiki)

I personally will be working on choosing projects for the vote here. I may also update our List of Most Supported Projects (All Time).

As content will not be imported to Brickimedia until February, we should edit content here in the meantime. Hopefully in the few months between here and the big import we can really improve our content.

There's a lot of work to be done. Please help if you can!