User blog:Dopp/Technical Update: October 18, 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.

Major Bugs Fixed

 * On wikis with the new navigation system, the search bar was missing on special pages using the AdminDashboard theme (ex. Special:RecentChanges).
 * Links in the profile header to Facebook, Twitter, and website were being rendered incorrectly in languages other than English.
 * When clicking on "Leave new message" on user talk pages, the editor box for adding the section headline was displaying the label "Edit Summary" versus the expected label of "Subject/Headline".
 * Bullets and numbers are back in article and blog comments this week after our initial fix didn't fully take hold last week.

Other Notable Changes

 * Dark theming on the Admin Dashboard will be released this week. Based on your feedback we've made the following changes: Dark wikis will now show dark grey page background, white text, blue links and light grey button colors on all dark wikis. One of our goals is to differentiate between tool and content areas on the site. We believe this compromise meets both our admins needs and that goal.
 * We're changing the top of Profiles to put both the username and the preferred name on the same line to reduce the size (we also tightened the spacing for content area below the name, too). If you have customized this area of the profile, you may need to update your customizations after this change takes place.
 * We'll be rolling out a few updates to Message Wall this week, including some improvements to Recent Changes (more still to come!) and better timestamps. Wiki Activity will also now name which user's wall a conversation appears on. We're still working on a number of features for Message Wall, and we'll update on you on them as we go. You can try out Message Wall on our Community Test Wiki.

Select Known Issues

 * We have found some wikis that are missing basic MediaWiki database tables (like page protection tables, for instance). If you are seeing an SQL error on your site, please contact us.
 * Special:ListUsers is not populating in a timely manner on newer wikis.
 * Other cached Special pages, such as Uncategorized Pages or Orphaned pages, also do not seem to be updating as quickly as they should. We are investigating why and will be making some improvements to our architecture to prevent this from happening as Wikia continues to grow.
 * Some people on Chat are getting "You are connected from another browser" error messages, and some are being disconnected at random times. We are working on this, but still need more detailed reports to help us track down the issues.

One Final Note
Last week we mentioned that there have been issues with the visual editor struggling to load or finish loading, and asked for more reports from those of you are experiencing this. We have made some changes that may have helped, and had less reports of issues last week. If you are still struggling with something in the Visual Editor, please let us know ASAP.

Thanks!

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