Hello, hello, hello! As the end of year is approaching, so is our yearly code freeze, and therefore the end of the Technical Update series of 2025. If you missed any of the previous tech updates, this is a series published every other week with a selection of the more user-facing bug tickets, releases, and other relevant updates on the platform. Per usual, an announcement of this blog post goes out to anyone who has been active on this wiki in the past 90 days. It's also a good place to ask questions in the comments, but know that the best place to leave feature suggestions and feedback is via the Community Feedback board. With this being the last tech blog of 2025, I want to take the opportunity to thank you for a year of fruitful collaboration and feedback sharing, it's been much appreciated! I wish you all the best, an amazing holiday season, and look forward to continuing this journey with you in 2026! Let's dive in for the last time in 2025!
If you created a new wiki recently, you will have noticed the enhancements rolled out to the newly created wikis. We've added new resources and optimizations to facilitate the growth of new communities, specifically with new editors in mind. These improvements range from surfacing links to resources (think help pages, policies, and accessibility tips) more clearly, adding new visuals, and facilitating page creation with a predefined format, to showcasing more clearly some of the new features Fandom has to offer, such as Interactive Maps, table progress tracking, and StructuredQuotes. For more details, read the "We Are Improving the Creation of New Wikis" blog post.
Recent Fixes[]
When you were not using the wikitable or article-table classes to style your table, the sortable arrows were not visible.
The profile panel did not close using the ESC button on smaller viewports (<1440px) when an overlay was present.
Web accessibility in mind, the color of the .tocnumber element on both light and dark theme got tweaked to meet the minimum color contrast ratio thresholds.
Due to outdated HTML within the favicon code, the image was not properly showing up on non-English wikis when using the Safari browser and causing Google to often ignore locally defined favicons for these non-English wiki, in favor of the English wiki's favicon. The change does still need to be added to the Discussions side of the platform.
The import page will no longer show a "success" notice when the import failed due to a global block.
OGG files no longer display poorly on Category pages and in galleries.
Fonts on FandomMobile were not rendered correctly compared to their Theme Designer preview.
It will no longer be possible to create a wiki with a dot (.) character in the wiki name; while those wikis were correctly created, they broke the Secure Socket Layer certs, causing a warning about a potential unsafe site to show up.
Some of the images used in the left navigation and history panels were still using a centered way of cropping, often leading to awkward crops.
Portable infoboxes incorrectly used the caption for the "alt" text in galleries used in portable infoboxes.
Fandom app on iOS would revert back to the default Fandom theme when clicking a Discussion post.
User toolbar wouldn't stay dismissed and reappeared when reloading the page.
Section anchors in the local navigation got duplicated and thus broke the link.
[Partial release] Discussions post previews on pages: For the past weeks, we tested out the release of a feature displaying previews of Discussions posts underneath articles. Since no lasting problems were encountered during this period, the module was released on all English wikis that 1. have Discussions enabled, while 2. also using Discussions tags, and 3. Do not have Article Comments enabled. As a quick recap, this feature shows up to 15 relevant, non-locked, non-flagged Discussions posts tagged to the article to logged-in users, while logged-out users are asked to register before they can see the post previews.
[Tweak] Uncollapse Comments header on mobile web: To make it more visible to visitors that there is a social side to Fandom as well, alongside the encyclopedic information, we have uncollapsed the Comments header on mobile for logged-out users. Rather than nothing at all, they will now see a prompt to register and join the conversations with likeminded fans about their topic of choice.
[Tweak] Reduce CSS requests: custom imports: As announced some weeks ago, we identified that many wikis experience performance dips due to many custom CSS setups loading multiple separate @import statements (e.g., importing one file, and then another, and another). While this is something every community can improve on manually by combining multiple custom CSS files into a single CSS module whenever possible. we have automated this process in the background. Last week, we enabled a backend optimization that automatically analyzes @import rules in custom CSS pages. If they're internal wiki links, then they'll be merged into a single page load (thus reducing requests). If it's an external link, the loading process will remain unchanged. The goal of this change is to improve overall loading performance. Should you experience loading order issues because of this, please contact your local administrator to, or if you are said administrator, check and reorder the local @import statements. If there are severe issues and that does not fix anything, please do contact Fandom Staff.
[Upcoming Change] Warning prompt when leaving Fandom to Discord: Over the coming weeks, we will release a modal that appears when you click onto an on-Fandom link to a Discord server informing the reader that you are leaving Fandom and the server is bound by Discord's terms of service and support. This is meant to clear up any confusion about the ownership of the server and that Fandom does not control the activity on this external service.
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!
Lostris is a Senior Product Support Manager. When not online, she lives to travel, play roller derby, and escape the world by watching anything that has a good plot, good acting, and preferably a ton of sassy one-liners.
