Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24739709-20151026190758

Edit: The retirement date has been pushed back to Friday, October 6th This has been edited below to reflect the new date.

Verbatim is a Wikia tool to inject HTML code into pages with minimal effort and fuss. You’ve done some amazing things with it. It’s also insecure and dangerous.

You may recall that we had a security issue back in August, which we talked about here in the forum. Since then, we’ve been performing a complete security audit on Wikia to ensure that the site is as secure as it can be. We’ve made a significant number of improvements on the back end already, and we’ll continue to roll out new features going forward, like the Javascript review process and MediaWiki whitelist and the new form to report security concerns.

Unfortunately, one fact has become clear: Verbatim can’t survive on Wikia in its current form. It’s far too vulnerable to malicious code. That means we have to remove this particular functionality from Wikia, and we’re doing so on Monday, November 2nd Friday, November 6th.

However! This may seem like I am bringing you a problem, but I am also bringing you solutions. We’ve devised a path forward for the vast majority of Verbatim use cases, and in many cases the solutions have already been well-documented on our help pages.

Far and away, the most common use case for Verbatim is to embed Twitter feeds and posts. That’s why we’ll be using an script developed in conjunction with the Volunteer Developer team to convert all Twitter embeds that still use Verbatim into the new, safe format outlined on Help:Social media integration. This script will be run before Verbatim is retired, and you’re welcome to make the switch in the interim.

I encourage you to take a look at our notes on personal and community CSS/JS, as they’ll be helpful going forward. The other most common uses are covered by existing features, all of which have help pages:


 * Facebook: Help:Social media integration
 * YouTube: Help:Video embed tool
 * SoundCloud and Spotify: Help:Audio
 * Weibo (Chinese): http://zh.community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:社交媒體整合
 * VK (Russian): http://ru.community.wikia.com/wiki/Справка:Виджеты_социальных_сетей

These features represent the overwhelming majority of Verbatim usages. If you have questions - technical or otherwise - we can answer them below, and always feel free to contact Special:Contact. 