Only three days left until the Joey Drew Studios Employee Handbook completely comes out. As you know, the guidebook copies are sold at the Comic-Con and just got some a lot of preview leaks of several pages (I can't tell who showed them to me), and it turned out outstanding, building me a lot of hype enough to purchase that full guidebook as soon as it comes to my nearest bookstore! Some references straight from the guidebook are already added to the pages. With a lot of history details, further character bios, a bunch of dates to expanded the timeline, few mentions on some few real-world topics, and the franchise's expansion, the Bendy Wiki is slowly becoming a bigger, better encyclopedia about the Bendy series' in-universe and as well some real-life topics.
Real-life topics you're wondering? Well, first we got the Popeye and Dick Tracey characters mentioned in the Dreams Come to Life novel's preview pages, the novel's rating guide revealing some World War II topics (such as Nazis and concentration camps, probably just for the backstory of Buddy Lewek's grandfather since he's a Polish Jew), and even the United States federal government's service revenue Internal Revenue Service (mentioned once in the Employee Handbook guide). These are highly alluding the fact that the Bendy franchise is set in our exact world but with the alternate history where the whole Disney brand is just Joey Drew Studios themselves; Joey Drew instead of Walt Disney, Bendy instead of Mickey Mouse, etc etc etc. It's just like how popular media franchises has real-world setting with alternate histories (The Simpsons for example). You can check this category here. Pages on people from real past histories are guaranteed if some of their names are notified in the Dreams Come to Life novel or future Bendy media projects, hopefully.
Now for the announcement on the Bendy Wiki's layouts and changes... I decide to plan changing the entire layouts in the style similar to back where the Wiki was first created; some types of grey color matching the old BATIM credits screen which I consider this to be the best basic themes for the Bendy Wiki. So that way, I'll become no longer stressed or downright confused anymore to make up my mind constantly on which color themes should perfectly fit. Same treatment goes to the main hub page, since its custom layout looks honestly bland and makes each link almost blending the layout's color. The Russian Bendy Wiki's custom layouts for the main page are actually really cool, and if I got some time, I'll ask the Wiki's founder for the right codes to insert for the main page's heading layouts (albeit with different images).
For navboxes: to make the current navboxes way far less cluttered as we're getting an ongoing amount of pages, they're getting completely separated to organize. For respective character pages, they will get separated navboxes like "Joey Drew Studios crews", "Lewek Family", "Cartoon Characters", etc. Location navboxes (like "Establishments", "The Cycle", etc.) are getting made soon. Some like "Ink Monsters" and "Toon Monsters" navboxes will be made for the monster pages. And so on! Similar to the Wikipedia website. Please keep in mind that not all pages will have navboxes, for instance like the Hello Neighbor's Mr. Peterson page is neither classified as an ink or toon monster to deserve a navbox. I already changed some of the navboxes' codes btw.
Now on pages: whether you like it or not, half of the mechanic pages will be deleted while some (like controls and options) will probably be moved to the game pages. While they may look helpful, none of these are interesting. The Bugs page is becoming a nightmare, and it's hard to keep it organized when a huge list of glitches and bugs get inserted. Their textures will go to the texture file category for the game files archives, however they still cannot be necessarily used for any pages because this Wiki is not an image-hosting site. The Achievements list page is still needed, and there will be separated achievement pages for complete detailed guides and trivia facts while making a new category for them. The Health page is needed as well, but will be renamed to "Deaths" while making a new "Events" category for this page once the World War II page gets made someday or if we get enough more mentions from the guidebook and the novel's release.
There will be possibly some new rules added, and other already-existing rules are getting changed to become a bit way less strict: No need to give a user a warning for making a rule-violated page, but the warning will be still given if the violator repetitively uploading irrelevant pages depending how much amount it receives. For images, if rule-breaking images are uploaded, they will be deleted without receiving a warning, but... If the images are re-uploaded or further images not used for pages are uploaded over three times, the user will be warned, second offense will be given a second warning, and third offense will be a 3-days block and so on. The warning templates would possibly be removed, and warn the users with our own words instead when they break the rules.
About the character/monster model views and animation gifs, I really hate to announce this change but these have to go while keeping the gifs of unused animations for this page. It seems to be too much of a work even after BATDR comes out, while gifs with longer animations can't work properly. You can still view the animations from Pascal's official videos on the models' animations, listed in the gallery pages/sections.
Finally, the gallery sections and pages: I want to announce that the galleries need to be completely organized by removing nearly-duplicated screenshots (along with tagging them for deletion in their file description so we the admins can delete them) while keeping those with all advanced setting enabled only. Prototype and pre-update BATIM screenshots will get either deleted or moved to the prototype pages or trivia sections. Some gallery pages, like Bendy's, needs a lot of improvements though.
Speaking of achievement pages, I'm mostly not sure if I can make a new badge track to earn for editing these pages or not. But, I believe 6 badge tracks (Characters, Monsters, Items, Locations, Objects, Soundtracks) are enough.
These plans and changes above will probably happen before (not all) or when the BATDR Steam page is uploaded. Please stand by until the whole Bendy Wiki changes!
Best regards,
GJ-Lewis X