Last Day at Wikia
Pals, collaborators, and fellow Wikians,
Today I have the sad responsibility of sharing that this is my last day at Wikia. I joined the Community Support team in February, 2011, and the last year and a half has been a privilege. You're an amazing community, and I've deeply enjoyed the opportunity to hang out with you, share in your inside jokes, chase down bugs on your behalf, and advocate for your requests as we roll out new features.
I've learned so much here at Wikia, and I'm looking forward to bringing all this wiki community wisdom to future projects, wherever I go -- which could be anywhere. I'm going back to my roots as a freelance consultant, and there are many clients in my future that will now hear me say things like, "Assume good f…
Technical Update: May 30, 2012
Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. This week, our system update is happening on Thursday instead of Wednesday, so our update is a day later than usual. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.
- We're enabling Search Suggestions on our mobile site. Now, when you type a search, you can see suggested articles as you type. Click the name of an article to visit it directly, or click the "+" icon beside it to populate the search field with that title and keep typing.
- The "view full site" link will once again function in the Mobile skin.
- Our thumbnailer was not generating thumbnails for large SVG images. This is now fixed.
- We have tweaked some copy on our founder emails to prevent mail…
Technical Update: May 15, 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.
- We're adding the ability to zoom in on photos from the lightbox viewer on mobile devices.
- Searching for a query that includes a namespace (example: "Template:Character") will now display pages from that namespace in the search results.
- Page titles in search results were being truncated in some languages.
- Special:WhatLinksHere was giving incorrect results, most notably for videos.
- We're adding a preference that enables "go" search (clicking "search" will take you directly to an arti…
New Global Search, plus Updates to Local Search
As Dan discussed yesterday in a post about the big picture of search development, we are now investing in improvements to search at Wikia. Search is more than just a way to navigate to a specific page -- it’s also a way to discover new content, browse related articles, and explore a wiki.
Our goal with improving search over the next couple of months is to bring Wikia’s search not only up to industry standards, but also to a place where our communities get the most benefit out of it on both a local and global scale. Today’s update is still part of the early stages, and we have more in the works coming soon.
Here’s what’s new right now:
We now have a global search with grouped results. Previously, if you searched for a wiki on the Wikia.com hom…
Technical Update: May 1, 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.
- We've added a Table of Contents to the tops of article pages on mobile, which is condensed by default. Just click the down arrow at the top of any page to expand it.
- Special:WantedFiles and Special:WantedPages were showing different results from Special:Whatlinkshere
- We are continuing to make improvements on mini-editor load times after discovering some causes of isolated lagging in the last few weeks.
- The user toolbar was not "floating" with the user while scrolling down the page…