User blog:Deadcoder/Petition to Allow Verbatim

As many of you are already aware, Wikia is disabling verbatim for a handful of cases: mainly for loading .js pages, and for a few other situations. However, I bring ugly news. This is just phase one. Wikia is planning on removing Verbatim entirely. As many of you know, this will mean migrating a lot of code. Some features will be impossible to port. This plan was revealed to me by a staff member who emailed me. Here are the emails:


 * Tim Quievryn, Sep 18, 2:56 AM:
 * Hello Deadcoder,


 * Thanks for contacting Wikia.


 * Since the JS restriction was put in place, it does seem as though we have had some wonkiness with Verbatim sometimes failing to load. However, I'm going to level with you - we are removing Verbatim from our servers in the next few weeks. We've been releasing a number of features to replace the most common use cases of Verbatim, but most of the functionality is going to need to be rewritten for Common.js file inclusion (with us obviously not removing Verbatim until the code review system is fully online). As such, my honest and best advice is to try to rewrite these to be invoked through that method as any bug ticket I open on this is going to just be closed as a WONT FIX.


 * Timothy Quievryn
 * Director of Technical Support
 * Wikia Community Support Team


 * Every week Wikia releases code to give you new features and bug fixes.
 * Learn what's coming out this week by reading our Technical Updates blog!
 * http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Blog:Wikia_Technical_Updates


 * Natewatson999, Sep 17, 6:37 PM:
 * User Deadcoder reports a problem with feature "Verbatim".


 * URL to problem page:
 * See Below


 * Description of issue:


 * Hello to whoever receives this.
 * http://codelyoko.wikia.com/wiki/Code_Lyoko_Wikia Code Lyoko Wiki has been having issues with Verbatim. For unknown reasons, the verbatim tags randomly fail, and they do their behavior for when someone tries to verbatim in a non-existent page. This seems to happen randomly. When it does happen, we have to pagemove the MediaWiki page. Using action=purge or cache-purging refresh doesn't work either. This problem has been confirmed in Chrome and Firefox on Windows and Android.


 * This problem has occurred on these pages:


 * http://codelyoko.wikia.com/wiki/Bruno_Regeste
 * http://codelyoko.wikia.com/wiki/Sophie_Decroisette
 * http://codelyoko.wikia.com/wiki/Gobelins
 * http://codelyoko.wikia.com/wiki/Thomas_Romain


 * From: Deadcoder

I know why Wikia is disabling Verbatim: because it's a security problem. However, the alternative tools don't replace everything right now. With that in mind, I propose this: Wikia should keep verbatim available, as a requested extension; like Maps and DPL are currently request-able. This should continue until all of the uses have been migrated. I think this would be a much better way to deal with the migration, since it would break less code, and it would help Wikia get a better idea of how Verbatim is used.

Please leave comments about your current usage of Verbatim, and if you think this plan could work!