User blog:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: March 22, 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.

This is a quiet week with no new features to report. With that in mind, our engineers were able to instead focus on bugs of all shapes and sizes. Major bugs fixed are detailed below as always.

Major Bugs Fixed

 * The email notification triggered by user rights changes had a few glitches.
 * A popup with the message, “Thanks for your edit. Can you improve any of these related articles?” was displaying for some users unnecessarily.
 * Theme Designer preview mode wasn’t working consistently.

Other Notable Changes

 * We're testing a new feature: Facebook Profile Sync. You can learn more about it and try it out for yourselves at one of the test wikis. We will also be activating this test feature on newly-created wikis for a few days. This is a short-term test -- we will turn it off soon to reevaluate -- but all content it brings into userpages will remain. We'd love to hear your thoughts!

Select Known Issues

 * When moving a blog name, comments sporadically disappear. If this has happened to you lately, please contact us. More examples we have, the easier it will be to spot the issue.


 * As we are moving where user preferences are stored to match MediaWiki 1.16 standards, we’ve been getting isolated reports that users are receiving watchlist emails for pages they are not watching. Just like the previous note, please contact us if this happens to you so we can more easily find the bug.


 * Wiki-defined content language ($wgLanguageCode) is overriding the language the user has chosen in Special:Preferences for a number of skin-specific features such as the Toolbar.

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