User blog:Kirkburn/Technical Update: October 26, 2015

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. 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.

Note: this release includes planned changes from last Thursday's cancelled release.

Major Bug Fixes

 * We have fixed an issue that caused Wikia Maps to occasionally be inaccessible (with an error message that the map server can not reached). This fix is already live.
 * On Monobook, the JavaScript review process tab will be restored to working order.
 * Text labels in Facebook widgets/plugins will be localized according to a user's language preference (or the community's content language, for those not logged in). Note: this is the second implementation of this change, as the first caused problems.
 * On Insights, the 'used on' links will now point to the correct locations.

Other Notable Changes
Detailed CSS updates can be found at http://report.wikia.net - the diffs show changes to .css, .scss, .tmpl.php, .html, .sass and .mustache files in Wikia's codebase.


 * For security reasons, the Verbatim feature will be retired in the near future. Please see this forum thread for more details on why this change is being made, and how to deal with it.
 * The unique (some might say 'bizarre') behaviour of Special:CSS is being retired - it will now redirect back to MediaWikia:Wikia.css, showing the standard CSS page editor.
 * The special syntax highlighted editor currently used on portable infobox pages will be rolled out to all template pages, to give a consistent user experience. The existing user preference to disable syntax highlighting will turn this off.
 * [Username]/chat.js will added to the personal JS whitelist.
 * For performance reasons, the reply button will be switched off when a Message Wall thread reaches 500 replies. Existing threads that break this limit will continue to show normally, but new posts cannot be added.
 * Video view counts will be removed as this data is proving unreliable and thus unhelpful.

Select Known Issues

 * We are continuing to investigate an issue where anchor links (e.g. "#3") within threads are not behaving correctly, getting 'stuck' on one number.

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