User blog:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: May 24, 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

 * We'll be running an A/B test on a new AJAX-based style of page load. This change will create a smoother and faster browsing experience, with less of a delay on page loads. The test will affect 3% of logged-in users.
 * Wikia Labs will be going live to all wikis soon. This is a tool that allows admins to turn experimental features on and off for their wikis. There are no new features in Wikia Labs yet, but this change will make it possible for us to enable Chat for all wikis in a few weeks. It will also be used to demo the new visual editor reskin soon.

Major Bugs Fixed

 * Main page gallery slider wasn't responding to mouse clicks in Chrome. Now fixed.
 * The "Wiki Activity" and "Random Page" buttons had layout glitches if text was slightly longer (as is sometimes the case in languages other than English).
 * Accesskey+O is usually a shortcut for the login/signup window, and that functionality disappeared for awhile. It's coming back now.

Other Notable Changes

 * TONIGHT: There will be some scheduled maintenance on our servers, and our images will be in read-only mode for several hours starting at 10 pm PST. You will still be able to edit, but won't be able to upload new images to the site.
 * Version 2.0 of the LyricWiki app is now available in the Android market, now with dramatically improved search functionality.

Select Known Issues

 * It appears that issues with re-uploading new versions of already-created images continues to break. We've implemented a number of fixes, but there's more work to do. We'll be making more changes soon to improve the update speed of these files.
 * Files using the OGG Video Player are not generating a thumbnail.
 * Photo gallery: Orientation functionality (i.e. the ability to choose between 'square', 'portrait' and 'landscape') is not able giving the correct results for the 'square' option.

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