User blog:Jpearson/Technical Updates: September 22, 2023

Hey everyone! Check out the latest Technical Updates since September 8th. We’ll continue to update the editor community on bug fixes and product development updates on a bi-weekly basis!

Notable Changes

 * When viewing the blogs on a wiki on Special:Recent posts, the blog posts would show up embedded within each other. Each blog will now show up in its own box rather than embedded within each other.


 * The tag worked in the desktop skin, but users experienced an error in the mobile skin. We’re happy to announce it has been fixed!

Known Issues

 * When editing on mobile, two related issues occur for users: some text that is on the page is lost when saving, and some text that was deleted from the page is restored after saving. A fix is proving far trickier than expected and we’ll continue to report in the future updates.

User-Generated Content (UGC) team

 * Thanks extension is in testing. Thanks continues to be actively used by many editors, but mostly to thank experienced editors, not new ones. Because of this, we won't launch it everywhere as a default feature - but we will add an Admin Dashboard toggle to give admins the choice if they want to use this extension on their wiki in the near future. We’ve made some fixes to Thanks including consistent styling of the Thanks feature throughout. When editors reloaded Special:RecentChanges with the live mode when a new edit was made, the thank feature lost the parentheses around it. We also fixed the link that is added to send a Thanks via RecentChanges. It had some spaces that caused undesired effects with word wrapping. Stay tuned to learn more about Thanks extension and other extensions you can utilize in an upcoming blog post on Community Central. We’ll provide more updates about Thanks in future Technical Updates.


 * Reported Notifications. As previously announced, moderators are currently not notified in any way when social content on their wikis gets reported. The UGC team is working on notifications alerting moderators of content that needs their attention which will decrease the average time it takes for reported content to be actioned. We’ve rolled out reported notifications to 25% of wikis and are reviewing the results of this launch. Stay tuned for more updates!


 * First-Time Editing Experiment. The UGC team experimented with showing first-time editors a web notification right after they publish their first edit, to thank them and welcome them to the editor community on Fandom, as a way to give them a more positive impression of their first contribution and motivate them to edit more. A previous version of this experiment, where the notification was a stand-alone pop-up message rather than a regular web notification, performed significantly better, and so we will be delivering the first iteration as a full feature, but this is currently still in testing.


 * Editor Engagement Experiment. This social proof experiment showed that visible page stats and a reminder that each page is created by fans can result in significantly higher registration rates (and, by consequence, likely an increase in editors). However, it also pushed down page content, which is likely the cause for the decrease in time visitors spend on the Fandom site and PVs/session that it caused.

Traffic team
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!
 * Quick Answers. We recently released a feature known as Quick Answers, which helps search engines like Google recognize more easily what kind of information is present on wiki articles, boosting your pages' ranks in Google search results and so increasing traffic to your wiki. Upon its initial release, users didn't have the ability to edit the answers generated. Thanks to the community’s feedback, we are excited to announce that admins and trusted users will have the ability to edit these questions and their answers in the near future. Stay tuned as we share more about this in an upcoming dedicated blog and Technical Update!