Malware warnings on Wikia
Hi everyone,
Yesterday, a number of users encountered warnings indicating that an ad provider we use was attempting to load malware on their computers. These warnings were triggered because the ad network was listed as suspicious by Google Safe Browsing. When Google lists a site, it causes certain browsers (especially Chrome) to show a big red warning message that the site is trying to load malware.
While we do have reports from users of Chrome, Firefox, or Kaspersky Antivirus that some ads were trying to load content from a potentially unscrupulous source, we have no reports of actual virus infection. For this reason, we believe that very few, if any, users were actually exposed to malware.
Upon receiving the first reports of these proble…
The future of Central Wikia
Hi everyone,
Last month, Sannse posted on the forum to ask what you thought the future of Central should look like. It's a subject that we've been thinking about a lot at Wikia because we don't believe the current system supports the community in the best way possible. Today, I'd like to share some plans for the future of Central.
First of all, the current Central will be split in to two different sites: 1) a corporate site, with information such as Wikia's "About Us" page and Terms of Use, and 2) a community site, designed to help Wikia community members find each other and find help. The corporate site will be entirely new, live at www.wikia.com and have a custom skin and homepage designed to show off "what's hot" on Wikia and make it easi…
Fall 2009 Update
Hi everyone! With the Fall season about to wrap-up, it's time for another update!
In October, a record 54,000 editors made a record 1.6 million edits to a record 3.1 million content articles! Do you sense a record breaking theme?! More than 26 million people visited Wikia, making it the 75th most popular website in the United States. Furthermore, Wikianswers skyrocketed from 50,000 questions in the last update to over 400,000 questions today. Wikianswers is now one of the five most-visited sites on Wikia. Have you seen it?
To make sure you know what's going on at Wikia, we created the Wikia Staff Blog and invited staff members from various positions to post updates. More to come, so be sure to check back on a regular basis. While we are work…
Introducing: Magazine Creator
- Use the magazine creator widget on the left to access the MagCloud toolbar. Just browse the wiki and add any articles you'd like in your magazine by clicking the “add” button.
- Rearrange your articles in the perfect order - Klingon weapons, favorite NASCAR drivers, best COD weapons or whatever you like!
- Design a cover, either by using our easy cover generator or uploading an image of your own.
- Then, publish your magazine directly to MagCloud. From there you can order as many copies as you like for you and your friends!
Magazine Creator is live for most English-language wikis that use the Monaco skin. As always, if you have any thoughts / questions, please leave a comment below!
Lucene Search launching soon
Hi everyone,
This Wednesday, we are tentatively planning to release a new search for Wikia called Lucene Search. This is the search engine that Wikipedia has been using for quite some time, and provides a number of significant advantages:
- Short words are properly indexed (the old search ignored words with fewer than 4 letters).
- Numbers are indexed.
- "Common words" are indexed (words such as "from", "with", and "what" were previously ignored).
- Search is no longer case sensitive.
- Relevance should be dramatically improved--results are ranked by how the search terms are used within the page, number of incoming links to the page, and a number of other factors to provide the best possible results.
- Results display the rendered text of the pages rather t…