User blog:Taldin/Tip of the Day: Changing Your Wikia Settings

I've been meaning to write this for awhile, but I never got around to it despite how much it's been bugging me.



There are some tricks to getting the Wiki editor to behave the way you want; for those of you who are reasonably tech-savvy, you've probably already done these things, but I thought I'd share just in case you hadn't.  Changing your account settings on the Wikia is as easy as finding the My preferences option in the user menu:

Stop the flood of e-mails
By default, the Wikia mails you every time a page you watch changes -- whether it's you or someone else on the Wiki. If you have a day where you make a lot of changes, you wind up with a lot of extra watched pages subtly added to your list, triggering a need to unwatch the pages or click off the "Watch This Page" checkbox every time -- especially if it's a high traffic page, like the FAQ.

Once you've brought up the Preferences page, turn off these items from the Email tab:

Follow Pages I... Scroll down the tab until you reach the additional options, which you may or may not find helpful to you. They show under what conditions the Wikia server will mail you notifications.
 * Edit - Every page you touch, even for a minor spacing issue, gets added to your Watched pages list.
 * Create - You might want to actually leave this on if you want to know who edits your new page.



Change the Default Editor
The Visual Editor doesn't work very well for me; it crashes at times, and the search function to include screenshots is not very intuitive, nor does it have a robust search. I much prefer the Classic editor controls. One of the things I do sometimes is look at the address bar - if the address for the page ends in 'action=vedit'  I just change it to 'action=edit' and reload, and that gives me the Classic editor for that page.

However, you can set the editor you use by default in the Editing tab:



Remember to Save your changes!