User blog:Dopp/Technical Update: March 29, 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. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

New Features

 * Going forward, all new English wiki will have Page Layout Builder enabled, and new entertainment wikis will have some starter layouts in the system. (Note: this change may go live today.)

Major Bugs Fixed

 * When leaving a message on a Talk page, the “Subject/Headline” field now appears above the message, rather than below it. (Fix is already live.)
 * Page errors were displaying in IE9.
 * Image placeholders stopped allowing users to upload new images.
 * The TabView feature was causing system performance issues, and has been reworked to be both faster and safer.
 * Avatar images disappeared for some users.

Other Notable Changes

 * We are phasing out the old CreatePlates extension, which is enabled on only a small number of wikis. Wiki admins have been notified of this change.
 * We are going to be doing some A/B testing with the edit button this upcoming week. Pages may be displayed without the gray “Edited by” history dropdown bar. This change was successful in encouraging edits in the last round of testing, so may be rolled out sitewide if the next set of tests go well.

Select Known Issues

 * A restarting script sent out more than one copy of the weekly digest emails in some cases. Also, fixes elsewhere in the system meant that a group of people who hadn't received digests for a long time started receiving them again. If you are receiving emails that you do not wish to receive, simply click the “unsubscribe” link.
 * We’re continuing to track watchlist emails sent out due to edits by “WikiaStaff”. This is the result of background processes running after commonly-used templates or transcluded pages are changed. We are looking for ways to optimize the email to make it less confusing while still informing you that a key page or template has been changed that affects your page.
 * Animated images are showing no thumbnails.

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

Update: Some wikis are reporting that the Rich Text Editor isn't displaying at all. We've found that this is usually because of a conflicting error on the wiki's custom JS pages. If you're using a wiki with this problem and you're unable to find the error, please report it to Special:Contact and include a link to an edit page that isn't loading for you. Thanks!