User blog:Jpearson/Technical Update: February 10, 2023

Hey everyone! We have a few updates since January 27, 2023. We’ll continue to update the editor community on bug fixes and product development updates bi-weekly!

Notable Changes

 * Bookmarks in the Fandom App. After a recent update to the Fandom app on iOS and Android, users were unable to access the content they had bookmarked. This issue has been fixed.


 * Encoding issues when accessing page history on mobile. For non-English wikis, mobile article history pages sometimes don’t load and show an error instead. We’re happy to announce that this issue is resolved!


 * Scrolling issues in the mobile editor on iOS. For mobile users on iOS, scrolling within the editor is not possible, preventing access to most of the page. Now, editors can easily access pages in the mobile editor!

Known Issues

 * Copy/Pasting issues in 2017 source mode. We’ve investigated why copying and pasting text sometimes makes the editor extremely slow, especially when syntax highlighting is enabled. Now, we’re considering solutions to fix the speed and will have updates in our next round of technical updates!

Mobile

 * Mobile CSS. We’ve kicked off an internal working group to review the customization policy and determine what updates to make for when admins are able to edit mobile CSS on their wikis. A first draft is currently being reviewed, and we’ll continue to refine it over the next few weeks while also conducting SEO tests with select communities. We expect to release mobile CSS editing before the end of this quarter, which ends on March 31st.

Discussions/Feeds

 * Post/Reply History. Post history is now live on select communities for performance testing and is now accessible from deleted posts and replies as well.  Thank you to the wikis who volunteered to give us early feedback on improvements to make before a wide release that will be coming soon! We've received great feedback and a few bug reports and are working to resolve as many as we can before full launch. We're also giving history another overhaul visually because of the feedback we've received from the test communities to make the versions easier to read.


 * Easier access to moderation tools. We’re excited to share that admins and moderators can access moderation and other user-related tools (like Special:Block and Special:UserRights) directly from a user’s profile in Discussions making it easier to access these tools.


 * On-site notifications for reported posts. We are continuing to test the code for providing on-site notifications when posts are reported. We expect this to be released in the next few weeks!


 * Anti-vandalism restriction. We are continuing to investigate adding in a rate limit to Discussions that will reduce the number of images people can post in a certain amount of time, following up on a recent wave of image-based spam attacks.

Platform

 * MediaWiki 1.39 Upgrade. Backend work on the MediaWiki upgrade is continuing to go smoothly, with a majority of extensions already prepared for the first migrations to the new version of MediaWiki. We know a lot of you are eager for an update, and we’ll have one soon once we’re fully confident on when we can begin migrations.


 * Extension Review. The Product and Community teams are working to create a final list of extensions for our public round of voting. Stay tuned for updates on Community Central!

Other

 * Editor Research. One of our themes for 2023 is going to be about finding ways to get more people editing on wikis. While that work won’t kick off for a while, our User Experience Research (UXR) team is currently working on multiple different research projects to learn more about how we can help make people’s entry into wiki editing easier.


 * Fandom App. We recently conducted a survey of Fandom app users to see what, if any, changes and updates to the app would be most useful to them. We will use these results to help determine when and if to make updates in the near-future.


 * Community Connect. Yesterday, we were excited to officially announce that Community Connect 2023 is happening in April! The event will have 50 invited users attending in-person, as well as a livestream for anyone else who wants to watch. The event will be held from April 23rd to April 27th in Atlanta, with a strong focus on product development work that we’re doing here at Fandom. Stay tuned for more details!

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!