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:jack_o_lantern:Welcome to the latest wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s happening for October 31st::jack_o_lantern:

:ghost: What’s happening?Our article discussion pages are expanding and now have new interactive features! You can now up/down vote, comment, and share. There will also be new discussion pages coming out each week moving forward. Currently, all moderation is done in-Haus, but I’ll let you know if that might change. Check out some discussions here: wikiHow Forums: Ask questions, share knowledge, get answers.

:bat: What’s happening?You may see new stamps from wikiHow Brand Ambassadors on both staff-written and community-written articles that say “Reviewed by”. These ambassadors are experts that review articles and then put their stamp of approval on them. These stamps help show readers that extra expert eyes have looked over the article, which in turn helps search engines send more people to see them! If you see an expert review stamp on an article that you worked on, kudos to you!

:black_cat: You may have noticed:We launched the ability to change your own username. This can be done from the Profile Box on your user page, but note that it can only be done once every six months! I’d also love a message from you if you choose to change your name so I still know who you are:joy:

:spider: What’s happening?On a related note, the new “partial” accounts are now getting fancy new auto-generated usernames! If you see a username that has the format of WikiAnimalVerb123, that’s likely someone who wants to save their quiz info or participate in discussions, but isn’t necessarily looking to volunteer around wikiHow.

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Can we please stop listing username changes on the move log? https://www.wikihow.com/Special:Log?type=move&user=&page=&tagfilter=

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I brought up that issue with Jayne a couple of days ago, and she helped me by providing a JavaScript code for hiding the demotions from the NAB log, which were helpful in deriving codes for hiding autopatrolled revisions from the Patrol log (since there are so many of them due to new users’ profilebox pages) and hiding moves caused by renames. These one-line codes could be run in the console, or made as browser bookmarks. (I’m not sure if I’m allowed to share those here)

While it’s convenient personally, I would agree that’s not the best solution site-wide and we should have better options to filter out such changes.

If the filter’s not happening, perhaps we could impose an autoconfirmed restriction on changing your username? Autoconfirmed’s time requirement would be plenty of time for all the spambots to get blocked (Admins ask to wait 72 hours before reporting a Userpage violation which is shorter), and the contribution requirement, I believe, would greatly filter out a bunch of the other people who just set up their profile to their liking but never contribute.

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@EpcotMagic I’m curious if there’s a particular reason you need them removed from the logs? At the moment, the best option would be to apply a JavaScript code to remove them as needed.

@Bhoimus We cannot change who is able to change their username, because it’s important for those who are making the “partial” accounts mentioned above to be able to change their names if they don’t want to keep the auto-generated one.

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not sure I’m ready to go public and semi-private over why just yet. But wouldn’t it be better to put those into the User rename log? https://www.wikihow.com/Special:Log?type=renameuser&user=&page=&wpdate=2024-12-31&tagfilter= @jayneg

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They are technically “moving” pages, so that’s why they show up there. I’ll pop it down as a “like to have”:slight_smile: