Technical Update: August 14, 2012

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. Keep in mind that our system updates traditionally happen every Wednesday (this week we are releasing our code Thursday the 16th), so we’re posting this on a Tuesday to give you advance notice. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

Major Bugs Fixed

Our work on bugs related to the MediaWiki 1.19 upgrade continued over the past week, and included some of the issues listed below.

• For Message Wall wikis, the link to view a user's archived talk page had disappeared.
• The "show changes" diff page was extending past the bottom of the pop-up.
• The text "null" was appearing in preview mode while making an edit.
• The preview function of extended wiki navigation was being cut off.
• When moving a file to a new location that already existed, the "delete and move" function was only deleting the target page, not following through with the move of the previous page.

All in all, 27,000 wikis have been converted to 1.19, a number that will continue to rise rapidly as the script reaches smaller wikis that thus take shorter amounts of time to upgrade.

Other Notable Changes

• Wikia's performance team is testing a new feature called "lazy loading" to help load pages more effectively. "Lazy loading" is when parts of a page are loaded only when the user reaches that part of the page, instead of trying to load everything on page load. The team is currently testing this technique with article comments and images. You can see how these work for yourself by visiting Wikia Community Test Wiki.

Select Known Issues

• Some Help pages on Community Central are still showing duplicated section headings.
• Tooltips are not working in the Semantic Forms extension.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to leave them below. And if you have additional bugs to report, please send them to us via Special:Contact.

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