The Pitch to ESB

Hello everyone,

I am embracing a very ambitious project that may seem overwhelming to some. It may seem impossible to others. It may seem like it'll never succeed to many.

In the past, we have had several attempts to collaborate and affiliate with other large fan sites. Particularly The SpongeBob Community Forums. Massive discussions and connections such as SpongeBob Universe crumpled and fell apart. SpongeBob Infinity faded away and was abandoned. These are examples of unsuccessful attempts to expand the current community into something better.

From my experience, big communities tend to thrive longer than small ones. ESB has redirected many wikis to ESB due to them all having the same purpose. I feel like that should apply for the different options fans can choose to be a part of. ESB is popular for its content and reliability while SBC has been a striving social forum, with long roots dating back many years ago. I'd say it's time to try again for the third time to join forces.

I truly feel the outcome of this will be wonderful. The ESB forums, the SBC forums, the SBM forums merged into one forum will make a diverse and long lasting community. Speaking of which, the third large side I was referring to would be SpongeBuddy Mania. This website dates all the way back to 2004 and has grown since. It has a forum as well as a wiki.

ESB's forums aren't everlasting either. Concerns arising regarding lack of wikitext has been a significant issue - with the excessive wikitext use at the moment - and means a lot of ESB's common forum games, such as hurt and heal, will no longer be playable. I wouldn't really want a change from staff to drastically impact the wiki in a negative way. I mean, I try to find positives most of the time. Discussions can't support source code. You can't really control the size of images if you include them (e.g. source code: ). Some users prefer the set up of forums as well. The main issue is the wikitext use and I am unaware of any alternatives. That just contributes a reason why we should collaborate to the Planet SpongeBob project.

For those concerned with previous attempts, I will do my best to address them. I certainly feel the timing of previous projects SBU and SBI have been weak. SBU, a much larger and time consuming project than SBI, was done when ESB was midst the project cleanup and had yet to establish article guidelines. It's very clear which priority comes first. ESB wasn't old enough or stable for challenges like this. It was simply too early to even think about.

Secondly, the previous projects were rushed. Especially SBU. I need to remind that there is no urgency to get anything big like this done in an expected time frame. Projects like these need to be assessed carefully, taking step by step to achieve the final outcome. Ultimately, this relates to a collaboration Fandom is doing with another wiki company. The same ways they are doing it should be the same ways we should do it, if this passes.

Third of all, the approach of the SBU project was downright awful. I intend to be as polite as possible, but the initiative was to fork ESB off of Wikia and Import all content onto spongebobuniverse.com 1) Staff wouldn't assist with work like this. They don't recommend forking. 2) It would be split up. For example, even if the ESB community moved there, the url wouldn't be redirected and there can be a group of users who stay here to start a community. 3) It's way too complicated for a wiki that was still growing. That's not something that will ever be considered in the upcoming idea of mine. It was not the correct way to go about it.

Fourth: ESB had a smaller community back then. It gradually grew as time went on but more users mean more available to help. Tedious tasks like these require time and effort in order to get done properly and efficiently, and SBU was rushed, but didn't have too much of an experienced team as well. The new website had issues and the web developer host for the new website has failed to respond and has delayed it. It all went sloppy and unplanned.

There were so many factors into it that caused The SpongeBob SquarePants Wiki to withdraw from the SBU agreement. I feel like let alone that can help us progress from a much suitable angle this time around and become successful.

So as I said, the plan would be to merge ESB forums, SBC forums, and SBM forums onto a new website located at planetspongebob.com

Because SBC and SBM forum communities were built on the same software, they can be merged into one. As for ESB onto this, ESB raises more difficulty but I will say it's not impossible as ESB on Fandom and those forums are both built on MediaWiki. It will take time; we wouldn't want to mess up again but that's nothing the community would have to be worried about getting involved in too much as that'll be left to the volunteered web developers from SBC, ESB and SBM.

Finally, Fandom isn't exactly secure with the future of communication. For example, they started off with Forum:Index. Then they developed Special:Forum. Then they developed (as most of you already know) Discussions. Now they're developing a new feature. The future seems more towards making things compatible and I'm not sure exactly if they'll ever make something like Special:Forum to handle wikitext etc. Anyway, moving the current forum data before the conversion would mean that any new products related won't effect ESB and won't pose a potential negative impact to how our community games run.

Mainly, I feel enough time has passed (both for past projects and ESB development.) ESB is very stable and ready to reach for bigger heights. I will be trying to make the transition as smooth as possible with the others if this were to pass. I even wanted to affiliate with the SpongeBob Amino group (no importing or transfer of content will be done for amino). Just affiliating would be nice. Connecting communities of SB can get a great end result. With the involved parties: The SpongeBobia Network, The SpongeBob Community, SpongeBuddy Mania & SpongeBob Amino, we can make Planet SpongeBob a diverse, everlasting place that will thrive for years to come.

02:11, December 24, 2018 (UTC)