User blog:Jpearson/Technical Updates: September 9, 2022

Hey everyone!

If you’ve been searching for tech updates on the blog, look no further! We’ll share notable changes on the site every other Friday. This update is meant to keep the community informed of changes from our Creator Tools team that could potentially affect you and to ensure you are aware of what’s happening on the platform. If you have questions or need any support, reach out to our help desk or send any updates you have on the respective Discord channels.

So, You Received a Notification For This?
That’s right! We wanted to make sure as many editors on the platform as possible could see that we’ve relaunched our Technical Updates series. We won’t send something like this every time we post a Technical Update, but we wanted to get this one in front of as many eyes as possible so you all would know to expect to look out for these updates every other Friday. Feel free to follow along as we update you on all the most important changes to the platform!


 * Please Note: Off-topic comments&mdash;particularly those about the aforementioned notification, as this section explains the reason for the notification&mdash;will be deleted.

Notable Changes:

 * We’re doing post-release fixes for reporting markers on Interactive Maps. If you haven’t seen the latest updates, check out the blog.
 * For the Mobile Theme Designer project, we’re aiming to deliver a testable version of mobile theming for Community Managers and Wiki Representatives to do some initial checks & testing.
 * Users reported receiving 503 errors when editing large pages. This is after making any edit to a large page and hitting “Publish”. The page loads slowly and the 503 displays, but the edit does still display. This issue is now resolved.

Issues Fixed This Summer:
This is our first Technical Update in a while, so we thought it’d be a good idea to include some of the bugs that we fixed this summer. Our developers work in two-week sprints (which is the technical word for development cycles), and each sprint has a set amount of time allotted for bug fixing. So there’s a lot we can report on from the last few months!


 * For logged-out users, the logged-out QuickBar had an issue that was causing too much spacing between different items on the toolbar. This was fixed in June.
 * Cargo queries were spiking, causing a delay in other tasks on the platform and causing performance issues. This was fixed in July.
 * When browser window sizes were reduced, the QuickBar folded to be double in size and hidden partially behind the global navigation. This was fixed in July.
 * Safari was changing some numbers into links, much like how telephone numbers in text can be converted into a link to click the number and call it. This was fixed in July.
 * In the Visual Editor Source mode, text selection behavior on long pages was broken, resulting in an inability to edit long pages. This was fixed in July.
 * Moderators and administrators were not able to view deleted Article Comments on a page without other comments being visible, creating a gap in their ability to moderate pages and unconstructive behavior. This was fixed in July.
 * On FandomMobile, switching editor modes sometimes resulted in breaking the scrolling behavior in the editor for iOS devices. This was fixed in July.
 * Changing a marker icon in Interactive Maps was not being reflected when entering into Preview for the edit. This was fixed in July.
 * After updating a map image, zoom levels were not being updated. This was fixed in July.
 * After esports wikis were migrated to MediaWiki 1.37, VisualEditor was made the default editor when that was not the intended behavior. This was resolved in July.
 * Wikis using the CharacterEscapes/ParserPower extension saw the extension’s behavior change after migrating to MediaWiki 1.37, causing errors on the wikis. This was resolved in July.
 * Interactive Map edits where nothing on the page was changed resulted in an Unsaved Changes message. This was fixed in July.
 * Pages with Cargo queries were missing their table of contents. This was a core change in Cargo itself, which is a third party extension, but we reverted it on our end to maintain the expected user experience. This was fixed in July.
 * The InfoboxBuilder “Edit source” option was broken on some wikis and missing on others for users with VisualEditor enabled. This was fixed in July.
 * Buttons within the VisualEditor were difficult to see on some wikis while using dark mode, causing accessibility issues. This was fixed in July.
 * The “Live Updates” button on Special:RecentChanges and Special:SocialActivity did not match. This was fixed in August.
 * Edits to local AbuseFIlters were not showing up on Special:RecentChanges after the migration to MediaWiki 1.37, despite that behavior working on MediaWiki 1.33. This was fixed in August.
 * Local blocks continued to show the message “Account creation disabled” message despite the option being removed from local blocks. This was fixed in August.
 * In the ThemeDesigner, new uploads weren’t being properly auto-protected for page moves and file page edits. This was fixed in August.
 * On Interactive Maps, a scrollbar was missing from the Delete Category confirmation modal. This was fixed in August.
 * On wikis with FandomMobile’s dark theme extension enabled, the RecentChanges legends box were not styled for dark mode. This was fixed in August.
 * Categories that were added to an Interactive Map were being added to pages that the Map was transcluded on. This was fixed in August.
 * The 200-character limit for Interactive Maps descriptions was unintentionally overwriting the 300-character limit for Marker descriptions. This was fixed in August.
 * Special:Reports for Interactive Maps was often not loading on non-English wikis. This was fixed in August.
 * If two users were editing an Interactive Map at the same time, the second edit was overriding the first without providing an error message that changes have already been made (like regular Edit Conflict warnings). This was fixed in September.

There were also a handful of single wiki issues that came out of the MediaWiki 1.37 upgrade which were also resolved, and handled one on one with the community admins.

Not every Technical Update will have a list of bug fixes this big, as this was to show you the bulk of the editor-centric bugs that were fixed over the course of the summer. 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!