User blog:Dopp/Technical Update: May 31, 2011

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've updated the emails that wiki founders receive when they create a new wiki, and when there is activity on the wikis they've created. Part of this update involves creating a new set of email options for wiki founders under Preferences. This time, these preferences are wiki-specific, and you'll have more granular control over which emails you want to receive.
 * We plan to release the redesign of our visual editor to a few select test wikis later this week, including to Community Test, our central test wiki, so you will be able to demo it here. Assuming everything goes smoothly, the redesigned editor will be available in Wikia Labs later next week as a preview demo for all wikis. It will stay optional for at least two weeks to allow people to adjust to it before it is fully implemented site-wide.

Major Bugs Fixed

 * The "Community Messages has been updated" notification bubble was reappearing unecessarily after users tried to close it. That bug is fixed.
 * The Search Suggestion feature had stopped working properly in Monobook. Resolved.
 * Several lines of text were showing errors on the Special:ListUsers page when a search yields zero results. Fixed.
 * When we moved the Log Out button to the user preferences dropdown menu, some design glitches arose for very short usernames or languages with longer text translations, where the menu would extend too far to the right. These glitches have been fixed.

Other Notable Changes

 * Our A/B test data on AJAX page loading (discussed last week) has been inconclusive so far, so we are expanding the test this week from 3% to 10% of our logged in users. So far, there are no identified bugs, and the test is running smoothly.
 * For users who have enabled the "Follow pages I edit" option in their Preferences, leaving a comment on an article did not lead to following that page. After tomorrow, it will.
 * Some wikis have been removing the "added by..." image attribution area from photos via a CSS hack. After tomorrow, staff members will also have a way to remove it from wikis via a setting (which will also remove it from the code on the page). If you need your CSS adjustment replaced with a setting change, please contact us at Special:Contact or comment below to request it.

Select Known Issues

 * Our image serving software is having an occasional issue grabbing an image from a page and placing it in a category gallery thumbnail. If this issue is happening to you, try changing the width of the image or gallery on the article page and this should alleviate the issue. If you have more examples of this happening, please tell us about it by reporting it to Special:Contact so we can continue to identify the patterns.
 * Reference tags sometimes fail to be recognized if the edit that added the tag occurred using the Rich Text Editor.
 * Wikis that use the tag are seeing badges pushed to that feed twice. Note this does not happen on the normal Special:WikiActivity page.
 * Some image reuploads (including avatar changes) aren't updating properly. If this happens to you, please let us know.

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

UPDATES:

6/2/11: it looks like the image attribution removal setting has not gone live yet. Sorry! I'll come back to these requests and fulfill them once it has. 6/3/11: Okay, looks like I'm 0 for 2 on popular announcements this week. In addition to Image Removal not going live, the Editor Reskin didn't either -- they decided to delay a bit for some final tweaks. Sorry about that.

(Oh, the joys of trying to do pre-release announcements!)