Notable Change
- Ad Experience Update
Recent Fixes
- Dark theme incompatibility for several
Special:RecentActivityFandomMobile elements:- The filter box
- Text, including the "no saved filters" popup
- "Saved filters" text
- Opacity for the time period selector subheadings ("Recent hours", "Recent days")
- QuickBar overlaps the site notice on narrow screens
- Register an email drives you to Community Central instead of your wiki
- Search box is missing when viewing Discussion post thread
- Unnecessary going through the QuickBar in collapsed state while back-tabbing
Development Updates:
Consumer Tools
- [Test] Discussions post previews on pages
Platform
- Cloudflare implementation against bots
UXFCP
- [Tweak] Drawer design update
- [Tweak] Desktop drawer overlay to black
- [Tweak] Clarifying theme changer button descriptions on FandomMobile
- [Tweak] Removal "
New" tag from the theme switcher on FandomMobile - [Tweak] Fix broken local wiki navigation links
Hello, lovely people! Welcome to the middle of November, between Halloween and Thanksgiving for those celebrating! This would probably be the only Technical Update we are publishing this month because of how the calendar is and because today we start to publish them on Mondays. But don't worry, each two weeks we're always updating all of you about user-facing bugs, product improvements, and other general announcements. If you have any questions or feedback for us, don't forget to use the comments and let us know about them!
Notable Change[]
Starting November 25, we're updating how ads work for logged-in users on Fandom. This change reflects the evolution of our platform and our future direction.
Historically, most logged-in users were editors. Now, the majority register to track progress or follow discussions rather than contribute, so the old rule of "logged-in = editor" no longer applies. Our goal has always been to provide editors with a clean experience that recognizes their contribution. That remains unchanged. Active editors will continue to enjoy little-to-no ads. We're even removing the few remaining ads editors see today in the coming weeks. (details soon!)
For all other logged-in users, we're introducing an ad-light experience with fewer and higher-quality ads. This represents a substantial improvement compared to their logged-out view. You can read more details about the update in the "Create an account" Help Page.
Recent Fixes[]
- Various poorly themed elements on the mobile
Special:RecentActivitydark theme have been made compatible with dark theme-styling:- The filter box now has a dark style.
- Text, including the "no saved filters" popup, now has good contrast.
- Styling for the case when you do have saved filters has been adjusted to conform with the theme.
- Opacity for the time period selector subheadings ("Recent hours", "Recent days") was changed from 60% to 80%.
- On wikis where a Site notice is active, the user QuickBar is overlapping it on narrow screens, especially on mobile devices, which also hides the content area including the link at the bottom to change the skin. We have fixed this issue by collapsing the QuickBar when the user is reaching the global footer area, and it's expanded again once they return to the top of the page.
- When you were registering an email address for creating a new Fandom account, you were driven to Community Central instead of the same wiki you were coming from. Users are now driven to the Main Page of the same wiki where they are creating the account.
- When you were going to Discussions using the icon or the url directly, and then clicking on a post, the Search box was missing.
- When going through elements within the QuickBar using the keyboard tab, after collapsing its state, if you were back it caused going through it backwards awkward, because it was hidden. Now going backwards with the tab omits the QuickBar if it's collapsed.
Development Updates[]
Consumer Tools[]
- Product Support Owner: Héctor
- [Test] Discussions post previews on pages: Fandom is working on a new feature that displays previews of Discussions posts underneath articles, similar to community-created custom scripts like RelatedDiscussionsPosts. Testing begins later this month, starting with wikis that do not already use Comments on article pages. Readers will see up to 15 relevant, non-locked, non-flagged Discussions posts tagged to the article, and can jump into the full thread by clicking the preview. Logged-out users are asked to register before they can see the post previews. To pave the way for a native Discussions module, the custom scripts have been hidden for logged-out users and will be retired when testing begins.
Platform Team[]
- Product Support Owner: Antonio
- Cloudflare implementation against bots: During the last month, the team has been working to implement new solutions against several waves of bots we identified. One of them was the use of Cloudfare, a service of cybersecurity to mitigate issues like DDoS. After a test on a clone version of the Game of Thrones Wiki, and fixing some related bugs, we felt comfortable releasing it. This change should be transparent and functionality and data shouldn't be impacted.
User Experience (UXFCP) Team[]
- Product Support Owner: Lostris
- [Tweak] Drawer design update: We have been recently updating the designs for the desktop and mobile drawers. The desktop version now contains the Explore menu with page recommendations, a new card style for the first card and some changes on the width and button styling. On mobile, cards also have a new style, and the design is cleaner, refining background color, font styling and element positioning.
- [Tweak] Desktop drawer overlay to black: When the user's desktop screen size is small, we show the desktop drawer on top of wiki content, with an overlay to indicate it's a "modal" state. Before the light theme had a white overlay and the dark theme had a purple overlay, but this was no longer consistent with the new drawer colors. As such, the color pallet has been updated to the standard true-black (#000) overlay with opacity.
- [Tweak] Clarifying theme changer button descriptions on FandomMobile: Fandom offers both a light and dark theme experience on Fandom. To switch between the themes on mobile, you can access the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines icon), and click the last offered option. Before it said simply "Light Theme" or "Dark Theme", which could lead to confusion with not knowing if you were on the light mode or if clicking it would take you to the light mode. This was especially the case on wikis with very similar themes. To remedy that, the tooltip on desktop has been adjusted a while ago, and now the same change was added to the mobile experience: the button has been adjusted to now say "Switch to Light Theme" and "Switch to Dark Theme". As a general reminder, Fandom's Customization policy stipulates that a light theme has dark text on a lighter background, and dark theme has light text on a darker background.
- [Tweak] Removing "
New" tag from the theme switcher on FandomMobile: We're a bit late with this, considering the ability to enjoy a light and dark theme on Fandom has been added in 2021, but until recently, the FandomMobile theme switcher button still held the tag "New" to it. It was beyond time that this was removed.
- [Tweak] Fix broken local wiki navigation links: It was discovered that it's quite a widespread issue of broken links being present in the local wiki navigation menus, which lead to 404 "page not found" errors when clicked. This negatively impacted the user experience as well as Fandom's SEO ranking. As a remedy, if the broken element has nested elements, the link will be rendered unclickable. If not and the page does not exist, the link/text will not be rendered at all. To make the link clickable, all you'd need to do is create the page. If you customized your local navigation with CSS targeting
a, you may need to tweak it to also target.wds-dropdown__placeholder.
That's it for the issue! Per usual, if you encounter something that feels off about the platform, please report it by sending in a bug report or your feedback, reach out to your Community Manager, contact the Product Support Owner on their Wall/talk page, or just simply sound off in the comments here. Remember to include a link to where you're experiencing the issue, a screenshot if it is something visible, as well as steps to reproduce your issue. As always, thank you for helping us by continuing to communicate. Happy editing, everyone!
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