User blog:Jpearson/Technical Updates: October 20, 2023

Hey everyone! Check out the latest Technical Updates since October 6th. We’ll continue to update the editor community on bug fixes and product development updates on a bi-weekly basis!

Notable Changes

 * Editors experienced a 500 error when accessing Post History on wikis. We’re happy to announce that this has been fixed.
 * If you edited an existing gallery in VisualEditor, it didn’t recognize the pre-existing content. Once editors added a new image, it created a new gallery under the existing one. The UGC was able to find a solution.
 * User talk page editor had no minimum height, preventing editing on shorter screens. Our UGC Team found a fix and editors can edit thats to the enforced minimum height.

Known Issues

 * Template pages created by the new InfoboxBuilder do not have the example infobox for editors to reference. We hope to have this bug, which proved more complicated than originally expected, solved soon. Stay tuned!
 * Editors reported that the editor preview works fine, it just doesn't show an update if you've previewed the page once, then edited a template used in it, and then hit preview again. It shows a cached version of the preview, rather than a fresh one.
 * When editing on mobile, two related issues occur for users: some text that is on the page is lost when saving, and some text that was deleted from the page is restored after saving. A fix is proving far trickier than expected, and we’ll continue to report in the future updates.
 * A fix for the “Mark All as Read” notification issue, where some users are not able to mark notifications as read, is currently in testing. We hope to have this bug, which proved more complicated than originally expected, solved soon.

User-Generated Content (UGC) team
Thanks extension is in testing. The team is currently working on the previously cited engagement issues on certain pages that had the Thanks option, like Special:RecentChanges and Special:Contributions. Once those changes are complete, if they're successful, we'll release Thanks as an opt-in feature beyond the 10% of communities it's currently active on.

Reported Notifications. As previously announced, moderators are currently not notified in any way when social content on their wikis gets reported. The UGC team is working on notifications alerting moderators of content that needs their attention, which will decrease the average time it takes for reported content to be actioned. We rolled out reported notifications to 25% of wikis, and the results of this launch proves the report notifications made the impact we were hoping for. On average, 34% more reports were actioned within 7 days due to notifications, and there was a 32% decrease in the time it took to action reports. We look forward to rolling out this feature to all wikis in the near future.

Traffic Team
Quick Answers. Our Traffic and UGC teams are continuing to work on editing tools for Quick Answers, which we aim to release before the end of the year. You can read more about what that entails and how you can engage with Quick Answers. We’re also continuing to run a test of newly generated questions on 150 character pages, but it’s too early to see the results of how those performed.

If there’s anything you still think needs to be fixed that hasn’t yet, please be sure to either contact your Wiki Representative or, if your wiki doesn’t have one, send us a bug report!