Eyo, my lovely people. Time keeps flying by. Feels like yesterday that I posted the last tech blog for June, and now we're already 2 weeks further, so I'm here with the first tech blog of July! As you know, we use these technical update posts to keep you all in the loop of what's happening on the platform by providing you with insights on some of the bugs that got fixed, changes we rolled out, and experiments we're running. If there's anything not clear or you have something to report, don't hesitate to reach out in the comments!
Announced in May already but in effect since this week, non-emailconfirmed accounts are no longer able to edit articles, leave comments, Discussion posts, or message wall posts, and upload new files on wiki's designated as "aimed at children". This is done as an extra safety measure for our younger users. The easiest way to check if a wiki you admin is marked as "for kids" is to see whether or not you have access to the "require all contributors to log in" button as a wiki feature on the admin dashboard. If you do, then the wiki isn't viewed as aimed at kids; if you don't, it is. You can check if your account is emailconfirmed on Special:Preferences, though those affected will see a notice about confirming their email in the bottom left corner as well as next to Feeds-entry posts. Read more about the change to only emailconfirmed interaction on wikis aimed at children.
This one may be most notable for our more code-savvy users, so shout out to our Dev Wiki community (where anyone can find a lot of helpful JS scripts) as well as our code wizards residing on other wikis: For the sake of making user-level JavaScript customizations easier (both personal and site-wide), messageWall.activated mw.hook is being triggered upon loading a Message Wall.
Acting upon community feedback, all Fandom widget css classes are now prefixed with wds- to avoid problems with local wiki code whenever the classes have a more generic name.
Recent Fixes[]
The EmbedVideo template will from now on support the use of YouTube Shorts URLs.
When there are a lot of references contained within a scroll box, clicking a reference link to one within this box should lead to the proper reference again.
The tooltip in Admin Dashboard for disabling anon edits no longer says "Wikia"
The file upload rate limit for admins has been increased to a max of 20 files per minute, whereas that of new users has been reduced to max 4 per minute.
Discussion moderators will be able to delete/suppress a reply inside of an already deleted Discussions thread.
Clicking profile names on Discussions no longer frequently triggers a "Something went wrong :(" error
[Design unification] Maps Progress Tracking: While the overall feature is still being worked on to ensure a practical application across verticals, coming next week, we will be removing all potential design variants of this experiment expect for "variant 3". Read more about the different variants. As such, it may be that users of gaming communities with Maps will notice a design change in how their map tracking option is presented. It will also be this design that will eventually roll out to Maps in general.
[Experiment] GameFAQs Player Stats Widget: The registered users on GameFAQs can submit detailed gameplay statistics, ranging from providing their overall product rating, the difficulty level, as well as the length it took for them to beat the game. Additionally, they can also share their status of owning the game and whether they actually beat it. With this experiment, we aim to test whether these user statistics could provide useful insights and interest Fandom gamers in understanding (or comparing) the overall gameplay experience. The experiment on desktop ran from July 1st to July 8th, while the mobile version will still continue on till July 16th.
Staged CodeMirror release: We've been talking about it for a while, but for those new to the tech blogs: we've been working on updating the CodeMirror extension, which is what provides the syntax highlighting in MediaWiki's wikitext editor. After a first release caused several bugs to surface, we've been testing the new update on a handful of wiki communities. As a last safety precaution, we plan to gradually enable the update in 3 stages over the course of next week, first on 10% of the wikis, then 50%, then 100%, all while monitoring for potential issues. On the 2017 VisualEditor - source mode, this will just be a performance update. Those using the 2010 source editor will notice some changes in the layout as well as the ability to now collapse and expand template code within the editor.
Mock of the experiment on desktop and mobile
[New Experiment] Suggested pages: It's been an ongoing struggle for communities to entice new – and even existing editors – to stick around. An often cited reason is "but the wiki looks so complete already, I don't know what to edit." With this experiment, we will show a prompt to new editors containing a call to action to continue making edits on related pages to the one they just made an edit on. The prompt will include a max of 5 hyperlinks pulled from the current page as potential other areas that may need similar edits. The experiment will run for 3 weeks. Read more about the Suggested Pages experiment.
That's it for the past weeks! Per usual, if you encounter something that feels off about the platform, please report it by sending in a bug report, 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. 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.
