User blog:Jpearson/Technical Update: December 2, 2022

Hey everyone!

Check out the latest Technical Updates since November 18, 2022. We’ll update the editor community on bug fixes and product development updates bi-weekly!

Notable Changes:
There weren’t any major user-facing changes fixed since our last Technical Update, but keep on reading for the Known Issues we’ll be working on next as well as the Development Updates section for the major feature work we’re currently focused on.

Known Issues:
The following are known bugs (or areas of improvement) that are currently in progress and that we hope to have released by the time of the next Technical Update:


 * Editors experience an error on Special:Analytics display and seeing 0 views. Special:Analytics always displays the correct data of the last 30 days, including the previous day. If there is a delay, a notice is displayed that data for the last two days can take longer to be gathered for technical reasons
 * When a user taps “preview” on the final screen of the mobile editor flow, the page preview loads exactly as the page will look like after saving - with styling intact. Some users experienced styling issues in the mobile editor flow. This was technically fixed, but there seem to be lingering issues.
 * Template editing in the mobile editor shows editors a blank page.
 * Mobile editor doesn’t respect user preference, so if editors have source set as their default, the mobile editor still loads visual mode first.

Mobile Theming
Over 103K wikis have mobile theming! Mobile theming is a default feature that no longer requires an opt-in. We skipped communities with mobile custom CSS (to ensure that rolling out the feature doesn’t break anything with the mobile CSS) and those that still have contrast issues. As soon as those issues are resolved, any community that doesn't have theming yet because of contrast issues will automatically get mobile theming,

Discussions Moderation

 * Post/Reply History. The CATs development team completed the work associated with post history and is being tested internally. We hope to have this ready for some select communities to test it live starting next week. This has been far more complex to build than we originally anticipated, causing delays. Since we do not release new features too close to the holidays to avoid issues bothering our users while all developers are on break, we may need to postpone releasing post history to all communities until January. We will update you on this in our Technical Update on December 16th, which will be the final Technical Update of 2022.
 * Report Notifications. Unfortunately, the work on post/reply history took longer than originally anticipated so we can now confirm that, as hinted last week, we will not be able to complete this project this year. Work on report notifications will start in January, and the designs for them are done.

Mobile Editing

 * Advanced Mobile Contributions (AMC). In addition to the recent release of Advanced Mobile Contributions, we’ve also added a link to page history on mobile web pages. We still need to add some styling to diff pages for AMC, and that work will likely be done this year, but it won’t become the default for everyone until early 2023.
 * Performance Improvement. We have been working on mobile editor performance improvements, including the recent release of enabling lazy loading of images in the mobile editor. We plan to make a few additional changes soon that should hopefully have a measurable impact on load times.

FanCentral

 * Initial implementation work to allow for the enabling of Discussions on historically Gamepedia wikis is done and in QA. Next steps will be ensuring that the work done has officially removed the technical blockers. Discussions for Gamepedia will be opt-in through request to Wiki Representatives or through our Customer Support team.
 * Article Comments will also be available via a toggle in the Admin Dashboard, as well “Require all contributors to log in." Message Wall will not be added to the Admin Dashboard at this point due to some technical complexities involved, but should be something that can be enabled by staff through our backend. Quick note: due to the limited time we have to release this, we are not able to have notifications for comments and posts/replies on Gamepedia wikis appear in the Gamepedia tab of the notification menu. They will instead appear under the Fandom tab. These are also all opt-in features for Gamepedia wikis.
 * We will be adding the ability to remove a passive fandom’s content from displaying in a user’s feed. After this change, cards from passive fandoms will have an additional option of “don’t show posts from this fandom” in addition to the option to actively follow it.
 * Discovery units, which are the promotional modules that logged out users see across the site recommending they visit FanCentral, will now open in the same tab.
 * Backend work is completed for the Recently Updated Images module that will be added into a user’s feed. Front-end work is currently being worked on now.

Platform

 * Design review continues for Two-Factor Authentication, which will be finished soon.
 * Early work is being done to prepare for next year’s upgrade to MediaWiki 1.39.

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!