Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-18812574-20180428150854

Marvel Infinity Wars is out, summer is coming, Netflix is looking prospective for new anime productions... and Bleach is as dead as ever. But hope is not lost friends, not as long as there are Bleach fans across the vast expanse of the inter webs to be found!

That said, there's no point in denying that wiki activity has seen a decline across the board. In an effort to renew interest in Bleach fanon, a few of us admins came together to discuss ideas about what could be done to increase activity. Eventually, we came to the agreement that it would be in our best interests to combine the communities of BFF and our sister site, The Bleach Fanon.

Now, let's get some of the nitty-gritty out of the way:

What would a community merge accomplish?

Since there are so few active editors on either side these days, merging wikis has the immediate advantage of doubling the user base. Even if this only results in ten or so active editors, ten is a huge improvement over five. And numbers tend to generate more numbers. So maybe ten could one day turn into twenty active members, which honestly is a pretty solid membership for a fanon wiki. Secondly, it would enable us to promote Bleach fanon on other wikis, such as affiliate fanon wikis and perhaps even Bleach canon wiki without having to worry about marginalizing the activity of another Bleach site in order to promote our own. Thirdly, it would simply make things more cohesive, and has the potential to unite everyone's efforts into a single fanon project.

This may all sound optimistic, but really when it all boils down there are simply more advantages than disadvantages for combining. The split that happened long ago is long-past, and perhaps it is time to finally and officially let bygones be bygones.

What a wiki merge looks like:

This is where things get a bit more complicated. A wiki merge means that we will be importing all of the articles from one wiki into the "target" wiki, with the end goal of closing down the merger's URL and consolidating all the Bleach fanon articles into one place. For purely pragmatic reasons, it is easier to export the articles of the smaller wiki and export them into the larger wiki (because of the fact that we have to move articles), so BF would be exported to BFF.

The most difficult aspects will be transferring articles that share the same name, as well as possible issues with template and image imports. However, we will be in contact with wiki's Community Central staff in order to resolve these issues.

That said, we won't proceed without first seeking member feedback.

That's where you all come in. Are you in agreement with the wiki merge? If so then simply post to affirm so. If you are not in agreement or have concerns about the merge, then please explain why. We hope to start the merge process in about a week, so promptness would be appreciated.

Finally, merging wikis also involves a lot of technical legwork that will involve some cooperation. Please let us know if you would like to help out, as there are some mechanical things we could use help with (such as page categorizations, renames, etc.).

As for our plans to continue activity after the merge, we are currently looking towards material from Bleach's light novels to draw inspiration from. In case you didn't see it, Sei made a master post about them a while back, and I would suggest giving that a read as well as considering reading the LNs themselves. And if you have any other ideas as to how we could increase activity, such as ideas that you would want to RP about, don't hesitate to suggest them! 