Hey hey, lovelies. Welcome to the last Technical Updates blog of November and the penultimate of the year! As per past editions, we use this blog series to update you on the latest bug fixes, some fixes that are in the works, potential experiments, and Fandom-wide platform changes. This blog is announced on this wiki to reach everyone who's been active here in any form in the past 90 days. Feel free to ask questions in the comment sections, but know that you can also share your feature suggestions and your feedback via the Community Feedback board.
Some characters, such as single and double apostrophes, when used in the user's profile bio were replaced with their HTML entities.
Receiving message wall messages from a user whose username ended in a question mark broke the notification link, as the URL interpreted the question mark as separate from the username, therefore linking to the same username without the question mark instead.
Sitenotices/Anonnotices float in the bottom left corner, where they get partially hidden by the cookie banner. To remedy that, the notices will load above the banner. Other tweaks have been made, both on desktop and mobile, to ensure the visibility of the cookie banner.
The My Fandom page showed up in the browser language rather than the user's Fandom preferred language. The user setting will now be respected.
The "saved filters" dropdown in Recent changes was using incorrect CSS styling, which caused the three dots to be 'clumped' together with the text rather than being displayed in columns.
Although the functionality was still there, the svg indicating the "remove category" icon was missing from the category section on articles.
FandomMobile didn't display the category module for non-content namespaces.
Reverting to an older version in Special:ThemeDesigner led to a "Loading history entry has failed. Please try again." error.
Using link= in the image links within galleries triggered the image lightbox on mobile rather than the intended redirect to the article.
Fixing the broken local wiki navigation links caused local navigation links to the help namespace to no longer redirect to Community Central. This has been rectified.
Tweaks were made to the color scheme of the button label and icon in the logged-out Article Comments prompt to make them more accessible.
The lists on Category pages in classic view sometimes didn't break into another column, creating a very long page.
Audio files were missing dark theme for captions on FandomMobile
Recent changes content got pushed to start at the middle rather than the left on FandomMobile; this was rectified for grouped edits.
Second infobox image on FandomMobile wrongfully promoted to hero image
Fandom logo redirected to fandom.com/explore pages when other language than English were set in the user preferences
[Test] Discussions post previews on pages: Earlier this week, a new feature test displaying previews of Discussions posts underneath articles was released. This feature is similar to the community-created custom scripts like RelatedDiscussionsPosts. In turn, that script has been made for personal use only. We initially made an early test on 6 wikis with low traffic, before expanding the test on 98 approved wikis without Comments and without scripts. Readers will see up to 15 relevant, non-locked, non-flagged Discussions posts tagged to the article, and can jump into the full thread by clicking the preview. Logged-out users are asked to register before they can see the post previews.
[Experiment] Collapsing content headers on Mobile: Starting next week, we'll be experimenting with a new mobile experience that collapses all H1+ content sections by default. The intention is for this to be better for UX, as it's easier to find things you're interested in and mirrors the Wikipedia mobile experience people have come to expect. All information before the first in-content heading (infobox, lead image, intro text, etc.) will remain unchanged.
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.
