Blog:HighJewElfKing/South Park in 2023

Well folks, it's time to finally put this year behind us. Most of you know just how bad it has been and how excited I am for us to put it behind us. Let's recap, the negatives and positives are we get ready to usher in a better 2024.

Discord Madness

As most of you know, the majority of issues this year occurred on Discord. I'll spare the exact details but you are all familiar with the doxxing, grossly inappropriate behavior and TikTok kid takeovers, backstabbing and frustration that occurred this year. Discord fell apart by late August when a coordinated attack was launched by TikTok kids against SPS Discord staff. What ensued was a multi-month long harassment and doxxing campaign against many different people.

As it currently stands in December 2023, the bad actors on all sides are gone and the focus has been on and is on moving the community forward and rebuilding. I personally apologize to users who got caught up in all of this including people in our SPA community. Some users who truly needed to be kicked or banned, including former mods, are no longer active in the community. For the better, and bad faith users across both servers are all believed to be banned or kicked at this point.

We've lost dozens of good users across the Discords and community who have chosen to detach themselves rather than continue to deal with this and I certainly understand their decisions and I applaud the ones who are staying and seeking to help build back something better for fans and be active friendly members in our community.

Wiki Administrators

This year, we had two major staff changes to highlight. As a result of above mentioned events we lost one admin, JVM. JVM is a dear friend of mine, a passionate South Park fan, and a fantastic wiki editor so his loss is definitely felt daily. The good news is JVM will likely return next year so I'll keep you all posted.

We also had AppleBaby12 retire after her years of service here, due to her outgrowing the show. I sincerely thank Apple for years of service to the wiki. She started as a much needed Discussions Moderator and worked her way up in our community. Participating in projects and genuinely helped to improve the wiki. I thank her again.

As it stands right now, myself and SkyRider are running the ship and are doing the best we can despite being short staffed other staff members and general editors. We will look when appropriate to hopefully add more staff next year across multiple levels if qualified users manifest themselves.

South Park Official Discord

Look there isn't much positive to say about SPS Discord this year. The server started to have major issues in February that really manifested in summer 2023 leading into what occurred in August. There is a plan for what’s next to improve that server with a soft relaunch and build something better for fans. Those plans will start to be implemented next year and you'll learn more about that as we get closer.

A (Mostly Peaceful) SPA Discord

Thanks to aggressive moderation, open and candid discussion and us having the best users in the world, SPA Discord avoided most of the drama that occurred in the official Discord spiraling out of control. Our server did shrink in size, as expected due to earlier mention events and a decline in show/fandom popularity. The focus going forward is to make a space for fans that prioritizes users of an older age and our wiki editor community. While leaving some of our best longtime users in the community.

Thanks so much again to our users and mod team for keeping our Discord running smoothly this year, and you'll learn more about changes to our Discord as next year goes on that will come after changes are made to the Official Discord.

(Stats: SPA Discord lost over 1,000 members YoY, however throughout most of the year, retention of users stayed up well past the 20% benchmark.)

Season 26 and Paramount Movies

South Park’s 26th season premiered in February with Cupid Ye. The season had some bright moments but it felt over with pretty quickly. After a 7 month break, the South Park content resumed with Joining The Panderverse. South Park’s content for the year ended just a few weeks ago with the last special, Not Suitable For Children. If history tells us anything, the new season should be announced and around just after January and the specials remain a mystery. We also have Bigger Longer and Uncut showing in theaters again over the summer. We are going to be extraordinarily busy here at the wiki next year because in addition to the new season, the next topic is going to release smack in the middle of it all.

Snow Day!

It was revealed on August 12, 2023 that South Park would soon release a new video game called South Park: Snow Day!. We now know this game releases March 26th 2024. Of course, a release of a large/mid-scale video game is a significant undertaking for a wiki like ours which is in effect building “a wiki within a wiki”. It’s going to take the work of EVERYBODY we currently have and probably the work of anybody who has ever cared about this wiki to pull this off. Everything imaginable will need to be documented, from costumes to achievements.

Of course we will prepare as best we can with navigation, project planning and information and will make some fun out of it with Multiplayer matches and a full social experience across our Discord and the Official Discord. There will be more to come on this, and we are very excited. But as I said, if you care ANY amount about the wiki, just know we WILL 100% need you. It will truly be all hands on deck and the biggest project I’ve done in the last 7 years on the wiki.

The Wiki

Although it hasn’t been a splashy year for the wiki compared to past years in terms of projects and site changes. I promise next year is going to be very interesting.

Fandom

This year South Park Archives was proud to be the first wiki to be introduced into the Fandom Compass program, which provides us with cool data, some you’ll see below; and we benefited from tons of software improvements from Fandom. Aside from that, Fandom has unfortunately made some questionable decisions. Using (and doubling down on it) AI on wiki articles, actively censoring our content and making the ad experience unattainable. Look, we’ve all seen the videos about Fandom and the news of more and more wikis forking. I sure hope this company gets back to how it was in 2019 because if it doesn’t, it will only be a matter of time before we all sit down and look at other solutions.

Editor & Community Data

It’s time to look at what we achieved this year on the wiki.

• Our editors created over 300 new pages this year!
• The wiki averages during the week around 50-70K views
• During new episodes or releases this year, we’ve been as high as 150K views
• Cartman, Butters, Kenny, Stan and Kyle still remain the most searched for pages.
• Tweek, Craig, Randy and Tolkien as well as Liane and Mysterion made up the rest of the top 20 most searched for articles this year.
• Some of our most interesting cities and countries who visited the wiki this year include Jakarta, Tambov and Moscow Russia, Manila and Warsaw.
• Top visited cities regularly included: Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Atlanta and Dallas.

The Future

I’m so excited for next year. Putting this year behind us and moving forward will benefit everybody. I’m excited for the future of our wiki and I’ve even had some exciting conversations about SPA and making us the official wiki, with people who can actually do something about it for once, and I’m stoked about it. We got a host of changes coming to the Discords and we have two more P+ specials at the tail end of the year. But more importantly we got the new season around the corner and the release of a new video game! There is much to be excited about next year I truly believe.

Thank YOU

I don’t even know how to begin this section. So many of you have truly helped this year in so many ways.

I truly appreciate ALL of you for continuing to support me and this mission. JVM, John, Lemmi, James, Brian, Jazie and so many more of y’all seriously thank you guys so much.

A huge thanks to Airborn, Lemmi, Klaus, Standground for your moderating work and keeping our Discord running smoothly.

A huge thanks to SkyRider for rolling with the many punches that came this year and for the amazing work he does on this wiki. I love working with him on the wiki.

Most of our Discord users from SPA have been amazing this year and I seriously am grateful for that, from all the Jackbox games to voice calls and episode discussions, it has been an eventful year. Thanks to all of you.

I got to thank Mandy and Kylara from Fandom, as well as others from the company for continuing to offer support to South Park Archives. We all truly appreciate the partnership as we work to build the best South Park wiki out there.

Last but certainly not least, I got to thank truly from the bottom of my heart. The Editors and Readers of South Park Archives. Our editors have put in WORK this year to help us keep the site up to date and so we are seriously grateful for that. Our readers keep the wiki relevant by sharing and reading our content. So a major thanks to both of those groups for their immense support of our wiki. You all truly are the heart and soul of our community.

To each and every one of you who interacted with South Park Archives this year: Thank you! Your contributions, big and small, have made a monumental difference. We are so grateful for you choosing South Park Archives and believing in our mission.

On behalf of all of us at South Park Archives, we wish all of you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2024.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2024 FROM YOUR FRIENDS AT SOUTH PARK ARCHIVES!

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