I usually post these sort of things on the CEP Forums, but in those I feel like I have to set tempered expectations and treat it more like "Hey this is live on the site now". I wanna take posts on my personal website to be about my ambitions and hopes for the sites that can be separated from what's actually there.
Feels like the site had a bit of turmoil this year. I tried doing a LOT of major changes with the end of last year and the beginning of this one, some rushed a bit too fast. I pissed a lot of people off but felt it neccesary for the sake of the site. It was a lot of stress so I dipped from the site for a few months to go do other things. Now that I'm back though the improvements to the site and its editor have been substantial enough that I'm actively getting commits every single day by some very dedicated new people. That's the one thing I can rely on for a wiki- people will go, but new people will fill back in, and just making the barrier to entry less is the critical thing.
So now I feel the editor portion is in a place that I'm the most happy with. I had to give up the ability for commits to be public and moderated by multiple people, but in exchange I can manipulate the committed content with scripts to automate away a ton of the hassle with merging the changes. People can now finally batch upload photos! This has been something that has been fucked up for almost 2 years I think, feels great to see an active push for more.
The new editor also has simplified the syntaxical headache of the wiki for new users greatly, hiding and renaming fields based on what type of article you're making. The fact it can also autofill tags as you write them is another great feature. This was implemented to hopefully encourage people to go back and retag photos/videos to spread across more pages, and it seems to have been working!
The site is going through a major overhaul once again though, hopefully for the last time. My biggest pain with running the website is I HATE coding websites. It is so clunky and unintuitive compared to how I'm used to coding in Godot. The split of CSS, Javascript, and HTML is all just hell. So I did some research and landed on something called SolidJS, which for my exact use-case is really good at letting me write very simple code for just filling in all the loaded data of a page, and then a compiler does all the optimizations needed. The current Solid-JS tests for articles have been great, and this will make it easier to add new features going forward (as I have plans for that).
Homepage
CEP I've always battled over having "fandom content" present in it, because this fandom has had issues in the past of platforming and parasocialness, given its newest fans are always kids and teens. It also makes it unclear what would be considered appropriate to include, at what point is it a site archiving the fandom, and when does it become a platform to harass, callout, and create drama? This conflicts however with my want for the forums to be a space for the fandom to grow in and discuss stuff, because sometimes it feels like the forums and site are too separate, when I want it all a seamless experience that has clear "fandom" parts and clear "document history" parts.
I say this as the CEP-Solid update plans to have a new homescreen, which is gonna separate into more prominent sections for navigation. There's gonna be the news/recent changes section. There's gonna be a section for the pinned posts and the map, but then there's gonna be a 'Fandom' section. This section is going to include just some recent posts from the forum, but have its first shown feature be brand new YouTube videos in the fandom.
One of my most recent contributions was adding 400+ videos from LiamsExplorations and Sets, Streets, & Eats. I now have an automated software to turn YouTube videos into articles. I plan to add more from other channels soon. Adding this wealth of content made me think of just having a new section that shows the latest like 30 videos by filming date, and that be a prominent section. I think that would be a better step in showing viewers of the wiki relevant and entertaining videos. I would probably set up some sort of script to auto check some prominent channels, and I do a manual review to remove unrelated posts, but then other users can just post their videos to the site to get in that list. That would encourage people to share around what they've made and have it featured on the site.
I think that'd be something that encourages people to tag and make video posts that can grow the size of article pages, while being rewarded by having their stuff featured on the frontpage. I feel the wiki is a balance of creating incentive structures to let people do this menial work if the act of documenting isn't fulfilling enough.
Similarly, I think the news section will be expanded, and that will be done with another feature I have planned: archiving social media posts. Currently the site features an exhaustive list of Steam comments by Scott Cawthon, the first building block to this setup. CEP-Solid letting things be quickly put together would enable me to make custom stylings and articles for all manner of social media posts, Instagram, Facebook, X, BlueSky, YouTube, emails, ect. My plan would be to begin cobbling together an archive of all previous posts made in relation to FNaF and CEC, and then set up active scrapers for their feeds to continuously keep the homepage updated.
All of this combined would make a homepage that is extremely engaging to tune into, and hopefully that would encourage further participation in the forums and the site. While I'm not able to make the tours and video content that keeps the fandom alive, I hope my site can aid in keeping the community connected in some way.
Future Future Plans
Some of my bets do naively hinge on CEC going under, in the hopes that whoever owns the copyright next will be much more relaxed with fandom content- something I can start back up development of Reel to Real with using the Faz-Anim 2 engine. Whenever that becomes a possibility however I intend on having a large integration with CEP as a chance to have work on one contribute to the other. In my mind R2R would focus on letting users explore any store from any time period by having a very modular system for maps. CEP already documents when stages and arcades were present in a store- why not also append some location/rotaiton data to that on the pages, and then have R2R load that into the map using a prefab tied to that exact tag/page? If CEP says a certain showtape theme lasted from X time to Y time, lets have R2R automatically load that theme and showtape when a user picks a store at that time! This lets R2R just be a cultivation of assets and showtapes, while CEP becomes the database of facts that determine what is shown within R2R!
And I've floated the possibility of having some of that stuff be on the site itself. I could have showtapes be intergrated into articles, letting you see their signals and stuff live in a timeline, or having 3D models of props and stuff appear. Its tempting to do that, but that may be better to save for R2R itself.
The longterm roadmap regardless of those hopes is just continuing to make the site an essential part of the archival space. I want CEP to be the place you go to for everything, and its definitely not close to that yet. Lots of critical articles are missing, lots of stuff is not tagged, documents and other materials you have to go off-site to find, stuff like that. Its not something I'm able to do all myself, and I just hope as members contribute they're interested in picking up hanging topics.
References
- Cheese-E-Pedia Forums
- Cheese-E-Pedia
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