User blog:Jpearson/Technical Updates: September 8, 2023

Hey everyone!

Check out the latest Technical Updates since August 25th. We’ll continue to update the editor community on bug fixes and product development updates on a bi-weekly basis!

Notable Changes

 * Admins had issues with deleting replies in Discussions, where removing large numbers of replies led to an error message saying they were unable to delete more. We’re happy to share that this has been fixed and admins can delete replies!


 * 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.

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 is actively being 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. 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 the coming 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’re preparing to enable reported notifications to 25% of wikis and review 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.


 * Editor Engagament Experiement. 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

 * Structured data rollout. If you attended or tuned in to Community Connect back in April, you may remember that one of our big presentations was on structured data and how that’s a big project for us beginning this year. We’re happy to announce a progress update! After months of behind the scenes work, our Traffic team rolled out a change to output character data from portable infoboxes (like height, birth date, etc) as structured data in the HTML source (SEO metadata). This isn’t something that has any user-facing impact, but it helps Google better understand the character attributes and better rank your pages for more search queries that we weren’t ranking on before (like “what’s Jon Snow’s height?”). This enables more people to find your wiki pages through search results. This change, which we said we’d be testing back at Community Connect and are excited to update you on, is live for any character page on Fandom using portable infoboxes.

Platform 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!
 * Gamepedia backend. A backend change on Gamepedia wikis will be going live soon to improve how revisions are stored. This change, while not user-facing, will speed up future MediaWiki upgrades for Gamepedia wikis, which have come toward the end of migrations in our post-UCP upgrades.