Winter starts to fade away as we welcome in spring. As the grass becomes greener, something else is also welcomed in... It's the WiiLink news!

This month was full of small updates, but we've got a big story at the end, so keep reading! Let's get started.

Smart advertising

Let's talk a little bit about Wii Room and the web panel. When you visit Wii Room, you'll encounter advertising banners on the main screen. These banners advertise Wii Room shows, other services, rooms, and anything else related to WiiLink. On our backend side, we can have up to 30 of these banners uploaded, meaning that at any point there can be up to 30 different banners. This is quite useful as there's always different types of content we want people to check out, but results in it taking a significant time to actually see every banner. This in itself is not a huge issue, because we can just place our most important banners first. However, this was not possible. Because of how our web panel works, Wii Room lists the banners in the exact order they are displayed in the web panel. And the order in said web panel was uneditable, only ordering banners by their upload date. This resulted in the newest information actually showing up last, heavily impacting our ability to show new shows and rooms to users.

This month, we've finally changed this system! We have implemented reordering into the web panel, allowing us to order everything as we intend. We've taken this opportunity to reorder the entire list of banners, so try visiting Wii Room now to see new promotions you may have missed!

Shift the discourse

We've recently seen some people pushing back against Discord's push against user privacy and wanting to switch somewhere else. While we don't currently have any clear cut plans to pivot from Discord, we will always try to support people who don't want to use mainstream software for any reason. We wanted to remind you in this time that WiiLink Forums is available to all users with WiiLink Accounts, powered by Discourse. The forums is relatively quiet now, but there's always people active there, and we hope that the forums slowly grows as more attention is given to it. We'll also try to post updates there in the future, so stay tuned!

Additionally, frequent updates are almost always shared to Bluesky as well as the Discord, so feel free to follow there for quick updates!

State of play

For a while now, we've known that we can export Nintendo Channel user data to use outside of the Wii. However, we haven't really tried or figured out what to use this data for. We're now happy to announce that we're internally experimenting with using this data in other forms! While most people may know Nintendo Channel as just the channel to watch new Nintendo information, it also lets you check your game playtime, and recommend games to other users. All of this is collected as user data for the channel, which can be used outside of the Wii if it's needed.

We're not quite ready to share what this will become available as, but we're excited to share what this becomes in the coming months.

A passion in sports

It's time for our returning segment on old Wii Room shows! This time, we're talking about The Passionate Nadeshikos. Known as 情熱のなでしこたち in Japanese, this show is extremely hard to find online. In fact, there's literally no evidence of the show existing we could find aside from this page:

Yeah. The word Nadeshiko is associated with sports since the popularity of Nadeshiko Japan, a women's football team in Japan. It's used to refer to female athletes, and that's exactly what the show was about. The series followed various young athletes in their fields in a certain time of their life. Of course, we can't really get into much details without any footage. All this information is based off of a single sentence in the Wii no Ma website, and we're really looking for more intel on these shows. Help us track these shows down! You can find the Lost Media Wiki thread here.

Just put the eat in the bag

And for our last announcement, we're finally ready to release Food Channel: Just Eat Edition! We have been teasing the channel for months (possibly years), but everything is now ready to go and we're opening the doors to the open beta of Food Channel Just Eat... on April 12th.

If you remember the launch of Food Channel: Domino's Edition, this will work slightly differently. The beta will launch with availability for six countries: The United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Austria and Italy. These markets have been tested and should work fine. However, we'll also be working hard to get other countries supported by Just Eat working as well. These countries include Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia. We can't guarantee that all of these will work in the future, but they all use the same API, which would make it possible to get it working. (Note: Canada and Israel use a different API, and thus is not planned to be supported.)

We'd also like to remind you that Food Channel requires a WiiLink Account to function! We moved away from linking your Wii to a Discord account in the beginning of 2025, and we now have our own independent system for ordering food. If you're yet to make your own WiiLink Account yet, take this opportunity to make one! We have big plans.

We also want to make a huge shoutout to our very own giustino. His reverse engineering of the Just Eat API made all of this possible, and we owe him a huge amount for getting us to this point.

That's the end of this month's news. Now remember: April 12th. Food Channel x Just Eat in Europe. We know that people in Europe have been keenly waiting for the moment that Food Channel would be available in their area, so please hang on just a little longer for the launch. Now, what's happening tomorrow anyway? Oh. Oh no.