User blog:Kirkburn/Blogs, sharing and email improvements!

Good morning,

Today we are improving three aspects of Wikia: blog articles, emails and article sharing.


 * Blog comments and the watchlist
 * The main change for blog articles is to improve the connection between the watchlist and blog comments.
 * If you have "Add pages I edit to my watchlist" switched on, commenting will add the blog post to your watchlist.
 * If you have "Add pages I create to my watchlist" set on, creating a new blog post will add it to your watchlist.
 * This all leads up to: if you have a blog post watched, and you have watchlist emails on, new comments will send you an email! Find out immediately when people are discussing your post :)
 * We have also condensed all blog comments into a single group on the enhanced recent changes list.


 * HTML emails
 * We have also been hard at work improving our systems to allow us to send HTML emails. While the user preference has been available for some time, we will only start sending the first HTML versions of emails out over the next couple of weeks. But don't worry - we don't plan to create all-singing all-dancing emails with flashy gifs and iffy Flash - we'll be using it to make the emails clearer and easier to use.


 * Sharing articles
 * Finally, we've been working on a feature to make it simpler than ever to share articles with your friends. You will find the link "Share this article" in the top bar of content pages - clicking this will pop up a selection of pre-made links for the top sharing websites.
 * For logged-in users, the sites you use the most will float to the top of the list (based on your choices), while for anon users it'll order itself based on combined clicks across all Wikia.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

18:05, September 30, 2009 (UTC)