User blog:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: February 16, 2012

Our regular release was delayed this week, and we expect it to go out tomorrow. Here are some highlights on the changes that are planned.

New Features

 * We are enabling across Wikia a new feature called "New Window Links", which will allow users to designate links on their site to, upon being clicked, open up in a new window instead of forwarding the user along in the same window. Here's some examples of the syntax:
 * local links:
 * external links:
 * interwiki links:
 * mailto links:


 * We're updating the Category pages on the mobile skin for a smoother experience. Wikis with Category Exhibition View enabled will also see images for visual browsing.


 * We're updating our Log In and Sign Up forms, and we'll release the changes to Community Central (and a few other wikis) this week for testing (with a release across all English wikis shortly to follow). More info coming soon in a full blog post.

Major Bugs Fixed

 * Red links for uncreated pages are being restored to article preview. The loss of a CSS class caused all links on preview to appear as blue, regardless of whether they were already created or not.
 * Thumbnail generation issues from last week seem to have resolved though we continue to look for long-term improvements on our system.
 * Improvements have been made to the Theme Designer's backend connection that corrected an isolated to a few wikis but highly-visible bug of the wiki's theme background not updating.
 * Users with = or & symbols in their usernames will now be able to use Special:Chat again (there was a bug preventing them from accessing it).

Other Notable Changes

 * We're adding a new email preferences to Message Wall. Now you'll be able to select from: (A) an email for every message (the previous default), (B) watch-list style emails (one message per thread since the last time you visited -- the new default), or (C) no messages. Option B is new with this release.


 * The Welcome Bot is being updated for Message Wall to be more compatible with how it has worked in the past: contributions will appear under User:Wikia and will be hidden in Recent Changes and Wiki Activity. They will still be signed by an active admin.

Select Known Issues

 * JavaScript and CSS changes are not being seen on a simple cache clear by the user's browser. There are some caching issues on the server side.
 * Anon notifications are not working for User talk pages.

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

RELEASE UPDATE - 2/21/12

Hi everyone! There's a lot going on at Wikia this week, including a special training program for our engineers, so please bear with us while we switch things around a bit.

There will be a partial release this week (2/22), which will include Mobile category page changes. New Window Links and thumbnail generation fixes are already live. Other changes mentioned in this update will be released next week (2/29).

Due to changes made since we last published these notes, the following updates have also been added to this week's release:


 * The Gaming Calendar has been fixed, and will be re-released to English gaming wikis.
 * We're adding a "Hide All" checkbox to the My Favorite Wikis section at the top of your profile, so you can choose to not display them if you wish.

Thanks for your continued support as we work to squash bugs and make Wikia a great place to edit!