Hey hey, my lovely people! It's been a hot minute since I wrote one of these again, but you all were in great hands with Héctor. As always, the goal of these bi-weekly Technical Updates is to give you some insights into what's going on on the Fandom platform. We share with you a selection of bug tickets that got fixed since the last tech blog, as well as highlight some of the more notable changes and potential experiments. Aside from us sharing an update with you, this is also a great place for you to reach us in the comments with actionable feedback about a feature, share a bug report, or ask us a question.
Anonymous users see a prompt to log in where article comments used to be.
Announced in the last tech blog as being under development, this tech blog is to announce that as of yesterday anonymous users need to log in to read article comments. It was already the case that anonymous users could not interact with the comments without logging in, and now that has just been taken a step further. Instead of the comments, those users will now see a big banner prompting them to sign in or register in order to read the comments. To leave one themselves, it remains the rule that the account needs to be autoconfirmed before that becomes possible.
Recent Fixes[]
The close chevron on the banner ad was too small to click, with the scrollbar also covering the button. It was made bigger and and received some padding to the right to avoid being covered by the scrollbar.
Embedded videos with any sort of alignment on the page should work again. Where previously the placeholder disappeared, now the video should load and show up properly.
When closing the left panel on Discussions, this choice didn't correctly carry over when visiting a wiki page next. This has been corrected.
Hotmail/Outlook is no longer breaking the password reset tokens
Heavily requested and now here: the "ping-issue", meaning the inability to ping users on Discussions that have a special character in their username or who have not made any edits on the wiki-side of the community, has been resolved.
Some Table Progress Tracking related issues:
There no longer is an error on the first page load when multiple trackable tables are added to an article.
Table Progress Tracking currently does not support colspan and rowspan within a table. The error message that this is the issue has been clarified.
Some cargo table tables gave a Runtime Error when using Table Progress Tracking, though this has been remedied.
Table sorting was added to the feature
Fixes in Development[]
We are aware that there is an issue with the Account Rename tool, and the team is looking into a fix.
[Incoming Product Release] Site-wide Progress Tracking for tables release: For the past weeks, we've been working closely with communities to test out Table Progress Tracking. We're thankful for the invaluable feedback we've received from these communities, which has enabled us to move forward toward a site-wide release. Stay tuned for more information!
[Testing] Second failover test on Wednesday July 2nd, 7:00 to 8:00am UTC, entire platform in read-only mode: Just like the one we ran on Wednesday, May 21st, this second failover test aims to validate a system's ability to transition from a primary to a secondary or backup system in the event of a failure, ensuring minimal downtime. In order to make significant physical upgrades to Fandom's primary California datacenter, we need to cut off all network traffic to that datacenter during the aforementioned maintenance window. This will be the last of two tests. During this time, the entire platform will be in read-only mode. If you wish to be logged in during the test, we recommend starting your session before 7am UTC. Should you encounter issues where the pages aren't properly loading in read-only, please reach out to us in the #general channel in Discord.
[Incoming Product Release] Desktop UI updates to the navigation and drawer: After an experiment testing out the impact of these changes proved that there was no negative impact, you may expect the productization of these changes that aim to improve consistency without modifying content or behavior of the drawer. As a reminder, things you may notice sometime next week:
"Current" panel changes: The content previously stored in the "Current" panel has been moved to the "Explore" panel, and the "Current" panel itself has been removed.
"Menu" panel creation: A new panel, "Menu", has been created to sit on top of all the others, which will hold some things that we want quickly accessible in the navigation but don't want taking up too much space in the UI. The content of the menu breaks down into three categories: "Fandom property/app" links (which links to the content previously shown in the "Explore" panel"), Fandom "Editor" links ("Start a Wiki" – which will be removed from the horizontal navigation – and a link to Community Central), and "other Non-Fandom Brands" links (such as Metacritic and GameFAQ).
"History" panel and adjustments: Adds a new "Recent" panel to replace the tooltip view that currently exists when you exceed 3 "recent" items and the "History" option shows up. This icon will be triggered after five visited pages rather than three.
Color, font, and styling updates: In short, an effort to make all panels look and feel the same by unifying the used style, typography, and design where it makes sense.
[Tweak] Profile Panel link order has been inverted: Just a quality of life fix, the link order within the Profile Panel has been inverted to be more intuitive. The previous link order was a remnant of moving the profile button from the down left to the top right, where it made sense to have the most important links be at the bottom. However, that was not the case in its new location, and that has now been rectified.
[Removal] Removal of the in-line newsletter signup module: When you reached the end of an infobox on mobile, there was this rather big, in-content module asking you to sign up for the Fandom newsletter. However, this wasn't really doing anything beyond taking up space, so we took it out.
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, 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.
