User blog:Dopp/Technical Update: March 13, 2012

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. Keep in mind that our system updates happen every Wednesday, 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.

New Features

 * We're releasing a lightweight editor for Message Wall that includes both a Visual Mode and a Source Mode. (The mode will match whichever mode you use in your regular page editing.) Both modes add buttons for Bold, Italics, Link, Photo, Video. You'll be able to test this editor on Community Test on Wednesday, and it will be released to all English Wikis with Message Wall enabled soon after.

Major Bugs Fixed

 * Emoticons will once again work in chat.
 * Problems with changes to a wiki's CSS and JS file not updating have been fixed.

Other Notable Changes

 * We are introducing some stability measures to our Chat system this week. Previously, if your internet connection had an issue for even a split-second, you would get disconnected from chat and then immediately come right back into the room. When this happened a lot, it was called "flooding" from all the "user has left" and "user has joined" messages in the channel. We've done some tweaking to how that system works, and it now has a 15-second delay to allow for reconnecting before reporting to the channel that the user has left. We'll be watching how this fix affects chat in other ways, and will continue to work on more solutions.
 * To help alleviate confusion for users about when and where a badge is not awarded, we have changed some of the Achievements messaging to use the term "articles" instead of "pages".

Select Known Issues

 * The "latestview" option of Special:WikiStats is not returning any data.

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