User Ajedi32 stumbled upon our ROBLOX Wikia a few years ago to find that it was totally abandoned. There were barely any posts on the page, and traffic was low. He took it upon himself to do something about it. Thanks to his efforts, the ROBLOX Wikia now receives 250,000 unique page views a month, and continues to grow.
“I wanted to bring it back up and get it healthy, so I went to the Wikia help pages to figure out how to get things going again,” recalls Ajedi32. “I started out with some minor edits and basic articles. Once people realized that the Wikia page wasn’t completely inactive, they started to come and check it out. That’s when it totally took off.”
To better understand the metrics, we talked with George Jones, Program Director at Wikia. According to Jones, people have contributed over 2,000 separate pages of content to the Wikia since it was reborn, and several gaming companies he’s worked with have cited the ROBLOX Wikia when trying to illustrate how they want their page to look.
“The ROBLOX Wikia is growing at an extremely healthy clip,” says George. “The traffic is on track to multiply five times by the end of the year. It’s one of our fastest growing Wikis in general.”
Ajedi32 asked a few of the friends he had made on ROBLOX to contribute initially, though a lot of the people who began contributing were, according to Ajedi32, “random people who just showed up and started making edits and contributing.”
The Wikia now features bits of information from all over ROBLOX, including polls, recent blog articles, tweets, and featured games. With a steady stream of contributors, Ajedi32 has been able to manage larger policy discussions, and still keep an eye on a RSS feed that updates him with edits that people make. He revived the ROBLOX Wikia, and now works to keep the quality standard high.
In the meantime, Ajedi32 has been busy building games on ROBLOX, including the ever-popular ULTIMATE Build to Survive, which has been played over three million times. He created the game after noticing that survival games in general had begun to trend.
“There were a lot of single disaster-survival games on ROBLOX–but each had its own theme. It was like ‘Survive the Avalanches’ or ‘Survive the Flood’,” recalls Ajedi32. “So I thought people would appreciate a game with every single disaster built into it.”
Pictured disasters include: Raining cats and dogs, nuclear explosions, toxic waste barrels and a zombie swarm
The game revolves around building structures in less than two minutes to protect yourself and others from a myriad of different attacks–whether snow monsters, missle-firing dragons, nuclear blasts or a massive chomping ball. Each of the attacks come from different angles and in varying shapes and sizes, so no one building is the right one to help you survive.
“ROBLOX certainly has a lot more stuff now than when I started out,” he laughs. “I like that I can use it as a platform to actually apply things that I’m learning about.”
For newcomers, Ajedi32 offers the following advice: “When I first started, I wasn’t even trying to build a popular place. I just experimented with the starter level. Experiment with all the different tools and keep an eye on what other people have built for inspiration. The key is to build places that people enjoy, even when there’s not a ton of people in them. If you’re just starting out, try building something using parts that you don’t have to script, like an obstacle course. There’s a ton of components that have already been made that you could use.”