User blog:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: January 31, 2012

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. Keep in mind that our system updates happen every Wednesday, so we’re posting this on a Tuesday to give you advance notice. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

New Features

 * We're adding the ability to leave comments on blog posts and articles (where article comments are enabled) in our mobile skin. These comments will be for logged-out users only, until we release our mobile Log In tools (which are coming soon).

Major Bugs Fixed

 * In the recent revamp of Special:Preferences, we the preferences for "follow pages I create" and "follow pages I move" ended up in a different tab from the other checkboxes to follow pages. These will all now be in the same place in the email tab.
 * A number of features of Special:WikiStats were not returning any data or were returning inaccurate (usually very low numbers) in recent weeks.
 * The cross-wiki notification bubble hasn't been clearing easily for Message Wall notifications. We're releasing a fix that will mute the notification bubble for 24 hours if you click the "x" to close that bubble (affects only Message Wall notifications displaying on non-Wall-enabled wikis). The best way to clear your notifications is still to click "Mark All As Read" in your notification drop-down menu on wikis with Message Wall enabled.
 * Special:Following now displays Message Wall follows.

Other Notable Changes

 * Following some feedback from our community, we have made some tweaks in some recent CSS changes to section headlines:
 * Reduced margin above H2s. It's still a larger margin than it was originally.
 * The "Read More" headline for related articles (at the bottom of articles) has gained the extra margin to look consistent with other H2s.
 * Tightened the line height on Admin Dashboard to allow for 3 lines of text to fit.
 * We originally developed Message Wall to convert all Talk Page Follows to Wall Follows; however, we quickly learned that this resulted in too many notifications for many people. We've cleared all Wall Follows on Community Central, and are removing the Wall Follow sync from the feature so future wikis won't experience it. If you're already enabled Message Wall and are getting complaints from members receiving notifications for conversations they're not involved in, you can request that we clear all Wall Follows on that wiki via Special:Contact.

Select Known Issues

 * Searches are sometimes taking a long time to complete. This will be cleared up soon.
 * The upload time represented in the New Images on this Wiki module is off, sometimes showing files that were uploaded days ago as being uploaded one minute ago.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to leave them below. And if you have additional bugs to report, please send them to us via Special:Contact.