Help:What's different on Miraheze?

Page is a WIP

Things operate a little bit differently on Miraheze than they do on Wikia. Here's a few things that are different on The Sims Wiki now that we're on Miraheze.

Wider layout
On Wikia, page content was restricted to a fairly narrow layout, surrounded by a lot of wasted sidebar space on both sides. The left side was completely blank or filled with annoying advertisements, while the right side contained the infamous Wikia Rail that contains distractions like "Featured Pages" showing irrelevant content. Page content often appears squished and narrow, and pages appear to get long fast, even when they aren't.

On Miraheze, page content gets more than 80% of the screen's width on desktop, meaning that content won't appear squished or compressed. Everything will be comfortably spaced out and there is a lot more breathing room in all of the pages. This makes some community pages, like the community portal, look more spacious and modern.

Sidebar
The classic sidebar on the left side of the screen replaces the wiki navigation bar at the top of the screen. This means that page content isn't pushed further down the screen, so there is no need to scroll down to read the page's content. Customizable tooltips can be added to the sidebar, and unlike the wiki navigation bar on Wikia, there is no irremovable "Explore" column; virtually everything in the sidebar can be customized.

Chat
Wikia's chat functionality is no longer being maintained and is fairly dull and featureless. We retired it in 2019 due to lack of use, so we do not expect this feature to be missed here. We highly encourage users to use Discord instead for real-time chat.

If there is demand for it, Miraheze includes the MediaWikiChat as part of its optional extensions package, which can be enabled in three mouse clicks. In the meantime, Discord should be the chat option of choice. IRC continues to remain available as well.

Uploading
Special:MultipleUpload does not exist on Miraheze. In its place is MsUpload, which is easier to use. Whenever you edit a page, there is a box that says "Drop files here"; all you have to do is drag and drop the images you want to upload into that box. You can upload as many files as you like. Unlike Special:MultipleUpload, you do not need to click and upload each image one at a time. This means it is much easier to batch-upload lots of images at once.

Additionally, you can now upload images from the web without having to first download that image to your computer by providing a URL to that file.

User masthead profiles
The "masthead" that appears above your user page on Wikia has been removed. We experimented with using the SocialProfile extension to get back those features, but it caused too many problems and we had to disable it. You can, however, still get creative with your userpage. Want ideas? Check out this userpage from Wikipedia!

Galleries and slideshows
Images in galleries have a white border around them by default. You can disable this by adding  to the   tag.

Slideshows on Wikia were invoked by using. On Miraheze, slideshows are invoked by using  (note the difference). Slideshows do not automatically scroll through all of the images; readers must click on the arrows in order to go through the images. We encourage editors to carefully consider whether a page using a slideshow really needs it or not, or whether a regular gallery could be used instead.

Comments
Comments can now be added to any page on the wiki, regardless of what namespace it is in, but you must enable that functionality manually on each page first. Simply add  to the page, preferably at the bottom. A comment box will appear, and users will be able to leave comments there. Previously, users could only leave comments on pages in the User blog and Fanon namespaces.

User blogs
User blogs do not exist on Miraheze. There are MediaWiki extensions that provide this functionality, but we've experienced too many issues with them. User blogs were a seldom used part of the wiki, frequently used to ask questions that should've been asked on more appropriate venues, and are not a good replacement for more dedicated websites intended for this purpose, such as Tumblr and Blogger.

The Sims Wiki Community News, once hosted in the user blog namespace, is now in the Project namespace, which is much more appropriate. See The Sims Wiki:Community News.

Help pages
Wikia used a centralized help page system where help pages from the Community Central Wiki were automatically transcluded onto every wiki on the network. For example, if "Help:Editing" was created on Community Central, all wikis would be able to see the contents of that page if they visited "Help:Editing" on their wiki. Miraheze doesn't do this, so wikis need to either write their own help pages or copy them from MediaWiki.org. On The Sims Wiki, we've chosen to write our own help pages. You can see a directory of our help pages at Help:Directory.

Lua
Many of our templates are now using Lua modules for part or all of their code. Lua is more efficient and runs faster than wikitext template markup. Lua also allows for more functionality than wikitext does.

Template:Infobox Sim
To accommodate the new custom content namespace, the  parameter for Infobox Sim now requires the "Fanon:" prefix if you want to use it in the fanon namespace to link to a fanon neighborhood. You can choose to wikilink this or not—the template now intelligently handles both inputs. For example, if you want to link to Fanon:Foo, you can call the parameter with either  or , or with   to hide the namespace prefix.

Template:Infobox lot
Infobox lot now categorizes pages in the fanon and custom content namespaces. Previously it would not categorize pages outside of the mainspace.

Template:DiscordIntegrator
This template, which was used to display a Discord widget on Wikia, is now deprecated on Miraheze and should not be used. Please use Discord widget instead.

Gadgets
For some reason, Wikia broke the user gadgets functionality on our Wikia wiki. This functionality is not broken on the Miraheze wiki, and we have a much larger selection of gadgets that you can enable. Since Miraheze uses more traditional MediaWiki code, most gadgets from sites like Wikipedia will work here with minimal or no modification required.

Analytics
On Wikia, analytics data, such as viewcounts, are restricted to administrators only, and sharing this data publicly with other users is discouraged, though this is not explained. On Miraheze, this data is publicly accessible to anyone at Special:Analytics.

Deleting
Deleting a page works much the same way it does on Wikia. The main difference is that, when you delete a page, you get sent to a screen confirming the deletion and offering you options to view the deleted page or protect it from recreation, rather than being sent pointlessly to the main page.

Blocking
If you block with autoblock enabled, a cookie will be placed on the blocked user's computer that prevents them from getting around the block by changing their IP address. Without this, blocked users can simply get around the autoblock by changing their IP address.

Revision deletion
You can now use revision deletion to hide individual edits from page histories. This tool was restricted to VSTF and Staff on Wikia. You no longer need to delete entire pages or email Staff to expunge problematic edits.

Mass message delivery
You no longer need to run a bot of your own to send messages en masse to many users at once. Important announcements can now be sent using the MassMessage extension.

Page protection
It is now possible to protect pages from editing by unregistered users only, allowing users who are logged in to edit (even if they are not yet autoconfirmed).

MediaWiki namespace
The MediaWiki namespace is no longer restricted from editing. You can now edit all pages in this namespace freely.