User blog:MisterWoodhouse/Pausing UCP migrations to resolve some critical blockers

'''As of September 22nd, we are now unblocked, thanks to the fantastic work done in this "all hands on deck" situation. Read more here.'''

Hey gang!

I have some big news regarding the Unified Community Platform. Based on your constructive feedback we have been collecting, validating, and iterating on, we have decided to pause all UCP migrations while we address some of the critical community-raised issues which are blocking current workflows and migrations. Although no date is set, we want you to be prepared that this pause could last until October.

How did we get here?
As users have been reporting bugs, we've been discussing them. We knew about some of these issues, but it was hard to identify when an issue reaches critical mass and informs us that we need to pause and say “hey, there's simply too much to keep going right now”. We're currently building a process internally to more efficiently escalate things to key decision makers, and for recognizing when we reach that critical mass.

Even with that, nothing can compare with a product being out in the wild for us to know how it's being received. The Unified Community Platform has been live on new wikis for a while, but seeing well-established communities on the UCP and hearing your feedback, which was no longer abstract, was vital. That concrete data and feedback made it easy for us to reach a consensus as a team on what needed to be done and develop a plan of action. Everyone internally is aligned on the user experience being the most important goal. We know the UCP needs to be better for current and future communities.

What happens next?
During this time, we will be working on some major issues you have identified regarding the editor and admin experiences on the UCP.

Editor

The 2010 WikiEditor will be coming to the UCP as a side-by-side alternative to the current 2017 Editor. While the 2017 Editor has been great for a lot of our users, particularly less experienced editors, it has become clear that it is not sufficiently meeting the needs of many power editors. This addition will allow power editors to continue their workflows while we keep working on the 2017 Editor’s source mode functionality. The continued availability of the 2010 WikiEditor will be contingent on editor needs, technological constraints, and code viability. We will not paint ourselves into a corner where we can’t update the MediaWiki software again.

Recent Changes and Social Activity

We are building a new tab for Recent Changes which will lay out Message Wall and Article Comments activity. We will also be providing an entry to Special:NewFiles within Recent Changes to promote easier at-a-glance image moderation. Our long-term goal is to find a better solution for overall at-a-glance moderation workflows, but we feel this will be a good temporary stop-gap in functionality. Additionally, we will be revisiting the accessibility of our at-a-glance moderation toolset in the future, particularly cognizant of neurodiversity.

It is important to note that this social activity feed will not be retroactive, as a “listener” process will be constructed to record the events and display them in the feed. It will only show events going forward, not the full totality of social activity prior to its release.

Migration Banners

We will be updating our post-migration banner messaging to be more accurate. Right now, migrations are listed as complete when some Message Wall and Article Comment rendering might still be in process. That is a bad experience because it leads users to believe content was lost in migration, so we will be fixing that gap in disclosure.

Bugs

We have already solved an issue regarding theme changes being reverted by an automated system. You shouldn’t see FandomBOT killing your theme changes anymore.

We are working on a bug with Lua imports from Dev wiki intermittently failing.

We are working on a bug related to CSS caching. Solving this should shorten the time it takes for your CSS changes to be reflected on your wikis.

We are working on a bug with pre tags impacting the source editor UI.

Additional Fast Follows

While these are not included in the Pause development work, we are tracking them for fast follows (meaning, changes that will be made very quickly afterward) once migrations resume. Link Suggest and Fandom-specific key shortcuts are targeted for addition to the UCP.

Why can’t you go back?
We will not be migrating wikis back to Legacy during this time. It would take more time to develop an unmigration solution than it will to unblock your workflows. In short, you would be living with the issues longer if we worked to unmigrate you back temporarily vs pausing and correcting. We acknowledge that this means there will be a few weeks of additional issues, but, given our current reality, this is our best path forward.

The constructive feedback that you, the admins and the editors, have provided has been invaluable. We fully understand this has not been a smooth process, and we deeply appreciate the patience and support you have shown.

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