User blog:Dopp/Technical Update: April 12, 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 on some items. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

New Features

 * Our Help Wiki's Search tool now uses Google search. This is just an experiment to evaluate whether it improves search quality and user experience. We do not plan to release this on any other wikis anytime soon.

Major Bugs Fixed

 * Image gallery editing wasn't working in Internet Explorer for a few days.
 * Special:WikiStats wasn't showing March statistics
 * Search results pages were sending people to an anchor mid-way down the page rather than displaying the top of the page.
 * Site wasn't respecting user preferences around when to display table of contents

Other Notable Changes

 * We've been improving the back-end stability of our Chat feature (which is still in development) and we are excited about the progress. We have several more rounds of development to do before it's ready for everyone, but we will be adding the feature to a few other select wikis for further testing soon.
 * We're upgrading five extensions on our site to be up-to-date with the MediaWiki SVN version of those extensions. All extensions are usually upgraded when we upgrade the overall MediaWiki version, but these extensions were done now because of performance improvements. The extensions are: Cite, DynamicPageList, PageBy, LabeledSectionTransclusion, and HTMLets. These extensions should not have had any major code changes, but please let us know if they are not working as they formerly were.

Select Known Issues

 * We continue to improve our Special:Unsubscribe feature (accessible by clicking on a link in most Wikia watchlist or founder emails), but there continue to be some edge cases. If you have any trouble with your email subscription preferences, please contact us via Special:Contact.
 * Some changes went out last week that have affected some minor yet popular Monobook stylings, such as the RecentChanges page or location of the Footer (which seemed to have magically appeared in the sidebar). Most of these have already been fixed, but if any unexpected changes remain, please let us know.
 * A few users (possibly those who have logged in to our test servers recently) have had their email address dropped and a default address added. If you aren't getting watchlist emails, please check the your account's email address setting first.

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