Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-24006128-20200319160218

Hey gang!

First off, I want to thank all of you for all the feedback you've provided since the Unified Community Platform went live last week (and all the feedback for that as well)! We've been tracking all of it, making bug tickets where it's immediately actionable, and triaging with the developers.

Here are the highlights of the most recent release, which went out about an hour before this post:

Preferences

- The preferred editor preference was successfully transitioned to handle the two modes of the 2017 Editor, rather than the discrete editor options of the legacy platform

Message Wall

- Registered user notifications have been corrected for Message Wall posts and replies

- Message Wall replies sometime being attributed to the wall owner, rather than the writer, have been corrected

- Message Wall entry point errors have been resolved

Galleries

- Gallery Builder for UCP fixed

- Galleries additional properties are now working

- Design improvements for slider galleries

- Inserted galleries should now be visible within the visual editor

Theming

- Theming added for Special:NewPages

- Theming added for Special:ListGlobalUsers

In addition to these fixes and additions, we made a number of hotfixes for more urgent matters over the past week. There are a lot of other fixes and tickets being actioned right now. These are the highlights of what made it into today's release.

Tracking Feedback

As I mentioned, we're tracking user feedback on the UCP. We have a shared repository for it where people from different user-facing teams at Fandom are all recording what y'all have to say about the platform, specific features, etc. and making note of when feedback is repeated by multiple users. I want to dive in on a couple pieces of that feedback here.

Wiki Activity

The biggest piece of feedback we're tracking is WikiActivity versus Recent Changes and I owe you an apology on this one. I did not communicate this change ahead of time and, as such, it caught several of you off-guard. WikiActivity (also known as MyHome) is a custom Fandom extension designed to encourage new users to see where the wiki was being edited and dive in. It was not intended as an admin tool and, due to this focus, we missed the adapted use case from admins. We hear the feedback loud and clear that several of you prefer WikiActivity to Recent Changes when it comes to at-a-glance moderation of your wikis. We also heard the feedback that Recent Changes is not as accessible as WikiActivity for users who have different consumption needs.

We have two things we'd like to see play out in the near future: 1) We would like to see if WikiActivity was adapted as a tool for moderation on the legacy platform because it was presented front and center as a tool while Recent Changes was not and 2) We would like WikiAcitivity users to give Recent Changes a fair chance to see if it can meet your needs.

Recent Changes is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation as part of MediaWiki, so keeping it up to date as we move forward with future MediaWiki releases is rather developer light in terms of resource allocation. In terms of futureproofing, finding a way forward with Recent Changes is the smart decision from a platform maintenance perspective, but we want to make sure it's also the smart decision from a user perspective.

One thing I value in our editor population quite a bit is how y'all are able to make incredible use out of every tool we provide, sometimes beyond our intented use cases (as demonstrated here and with features like Special:Forum). It is my hope that Recent Changes can be a tool that works for you. If it's not that in its current form, let's work together to see if we can tweak it in order to get there for you. If not, we can reassess and find a good way forward.

CSS and JS

Many of you noticed that robust customization is not yet available on the Unified Community Platform. That is not a bug, that is intentional. Custom JS relies upon a content review system which is not yet ported from the legacy platform, so it will not be enabled until that happens. Having the simple customization options available now allows us to have a better baseline for chasing down core functionality bugs without issues being confounded by community customizations. Once we have the platform in a good place with core stability, we can let you get back to your usual creative ways :)

One Final Thought

I'd like to give a big shout out to the UCP Supertester group. This is a group of 82 staffers, Wiki Managers, and Content Team Members who have done a phenomenal job with internal testing of the platform. Without their incredible contributions, we would not be here talking about UCP releases in anything but an abstract sense. 