User blog:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: October 16, 2017

Here are the latest technical updates on FANDOM. Keep in mind that our system updates happen every Tuesday and Thursday - today's notes are for tomorrow's site update. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

Release Schedule Changing
First, we'd like to announce that code releases on FANDOM will now regularly occur four times a week. This change will begin next Monday, October 23rd. This is a direct result of our experiment back in August. Internally, the experiment found we had the capacity to release code additional times per week without impacting the QA process or causing additional bugs.

Releases will now occur on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. FANDOM does not schedule code releases on Friday to prevent any bugged releases that might affect the site over the weekend.

As a result, this blog will be discontinued and, matching our system from the experiment week, move over to the Community Central Forum. We will create a Forum board specifically for Technical Updates on Wednesday and post the first releases notes there on Friday, October 20th. Wednesday's blog for Thursday's release will be the last blog posted here. We will directly link to the Forum board so that you may subscribe to the new location.

The thought process behind shifting to a Forum thread is:
 * Most tech companies use a Forum-style messaging system to announce code changes. Shifting to match this will allow for a more consistent experience across websites for our technically-minded users.
 * Structured blogs work best when there are many things being released. With more code releases, the number of items per release naturally decreases, meaning the blog structure may be too formal.
 * Forum has a natural reply functionality that makes it easier for users to address specific problems and allows staff the ability to reply to specific questions.
 * We can now use the Forum thread title functionality to draw additional attention to important changes.

Notable Changes
Recent mobile app updates are listed on Apps Technical Updates, and detailed site CSS-related updates can be found at http://report.wikia.net
 * Our Android and iOS community apps have received an update. For the list of new features and newly added apps, see Apps Technical Updates.
 * User avatars will now be served under HTTPS.

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