User blog:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: October 25, 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.

This week our engineers have been busy working on Small Stuff Week, a week dedicated to working on minor bugs and requested design tweaks on a variety of our products. We will be updating you on the fruits of our labor there when the Small Stuff Week is completed.

Major Bugs Fixed

 * Wikis that did not have the visual editor enabled had an extra vertical scrollbar appear because the editor window was slightly taller than the user's browser screen.
 * The Wikia bot that helps set up new wikis, User:CreateWiki script, was earning badges. Code has been placed to prevent this from happening from here on out and a script is being run to remove the badges that bot has already "earned".
 * Speaking of achievements, we ran through a series of use cases where users were awarded a badge twice, removed the duplicate badges, and fixed the issues in the code that allowed for this.
 * Special:ListUsers was not populating on newer wikis.

Other Notable Changes

 * Recent Changes will now properly represent deletes and restores for Message Wall.

Select Known Issues

 * A handful of users have reported getting an error message when trying to upload an avatar that states: "Saving user data failed- your data should be in plain text". Please contact us with details (like what browser you're using and what image you're trying to upload) if you are seeing this so we can better troubleshoot the situation.
 * Chat is sometimes not displaying messages when our servers experience high traffic. When this happens, you might not see a message that you have been disconnected, but new messages may not appear.

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