User blog:Jpearson/Technical Updates: August 11, 2023

Hey everyone! Check out the latest Technical Updates since July 28th. We’ll continue to update the editor community on bug fixes and product development updates on a bi-weekly basis!

Notable Changes

 * When editors created an infobox and set row labels, it failed to update the source variable name. We’re happy to share that this has been fixed!


 * Users will no longer experience issues when they open the mobile editor on pages where tabber is present. When using source editor mode and trying to switch between VisualEditor and SourceEditor pages, editors won’t be stuck on a loading state on the page as they edit.


 * Trying to undo an edit in the FandomMobile skin didn’t work correctly - rather than submitting the undo edit, editors ended up back in the full-page editor. Now, editors can undo their edits. Any user who likes to moderate wiki content on mobile should go to Special:MobileOptions and enable Advanced Mobile Contributions:

Known Issues

 * When editing on mobile, two related issues occur for users: some text that is on the page is lost when saving, and some text that was deleted from the page is restored after saving. A fix is in progress and we’ll report in the next update.

User-Generated Content (UGC) team

 * Thanks extension is in testing. Thanks is actively being used by many editors, but mostly to thank experienced editors, not new ones. Because of this, we won't launch it everywhere as a default feature - but we will add an Admin Dashboard toggle to give admins the choice if they want to use this extension on their wiki. Stay tuned to learn more about Thanks extension and other extensions you can utilize in an upcoming blog post on Community Central.  We’ll provide more updates about Thanks in the coming Technical Updates.


 * Reported Notifications. As previously announced, moderators are currently not notified in any way when social content on their wikis gets reported. The UGC team is working on notifications alerting moderators of content that needs their attention which will decrease the average time it takes for reported content to be actioned. As we continue to prepare for a wider release, we'll be sure to update the progress in future technical updates!

User Experience (UX) team

 * Image lightbox on desktop. We recently reverted a change that removed the extension of an image from the title of an image lightbox on desktop. The initial change was part of our clean up of the lightbox for logged out users, including removing images that weren’t relevant to the subject of the page. However, feedback from the editor community was that seeing the extension was useful for them. We’ll be figuring out how to move forward with the change in a way that does not reduce the utility of the lightbox for editors.


 * Image lightbox for mobile. A similar cleanup of the image lightbox on mobile is now live! We’ll be continuing to iterate on this version of the lightbox with additional visual changes.

Traffic team

 * Structured data rollout. If you attended or tuned in to Community Connect back in April, you may remember that one of our big presentations was on structured data and how that’s a big project for us beginning this year. We’re happy to announce a progress update! After months of behind the scenes work, our Traffic team rolled out a change to output character data from portable infoboxes (like height, birth date, etc) as structured data in the HTML source (SEO metadata). This isn’t something that has any user-facing impact, but it helps Google better understand the character attributes and better rank your pages for more search queries that we weren’t ranking on before (like “what’s Jon Snow’s height?”). This enables more people to find your wiki pages through search results. This change, which we said we’d be testing back at Community Connect and are excited to update you on, is live for any character page on Fandom using portable infoboxes.

Platform team
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!
 * Gamepedia backend. A backend change on Gamepedia wikis will be going live soon to improve how revisions are stored. This change, while not user-facing, will speed up future MediaWiki upgrades for Gamepedia wikis, which have come toward the end of migrations in our post-UCP upgrades.

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