Hey hey, lovies! Happy to see you all tune in for this first technical updates blog of October! Normally I'd say "first of two" this month, but as it turns out, since these blogs come out every other week on Friday, we'll have 3 this month! In this series, we aim to inform you about some of the more user-facing bug tickets that we fixed since the last tech blog as well as some more that we're working on and envision to have fixed before the next tech blog. We'll also alert you to some product tweaks or experiments that are running or notable changes that went live. In reverse, this is a good opportunity for you to leave us your constructive and actionable feedback in the comment section, or report on a new bug you've found.
We've been making a big push with web accessibility this year, with the release of Fandom's accessibility statement, a help page, monthly Office Hours in Discord, and a hackathon. These are all different steps towards a common goal: spreading the word on web accessibility and taking the necessary actions to make content on Fandom wikis accessible to everyone. While Fandom continues to do its part, last week, a new resource was released: an accessibility checklist. The aim of this checklist is simple: help you pick out accessibility areas that can be straightforward to implement but have the biggest impact. These areas are broken down into six sections: Design and color, Format, Templates and coding, Tables, Images, and Language. These tips are taken from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 (WCAG), which is widely seen as the gold standard for web accessibility. Read more about the introduction of our new accessibility checklist
Recent Fixes[]
On several wikis, image thumbnails were reported failing to load.
Logged-in users couldn't access file pages for a short period of time.
All moderated Discussions posts now show the name of the moderator who deleted the post, no more "Deleted by ."
Selecting the Inknut Antiqua font for h2 headings within Special:ThemeDesigner caused scroll bars to appear next to headings.
The Suggest Pages (Thanks for editing!) module was missing a close button.
Section links in differences are not adjusting well to dark theme backgrounds; this was noticeable on the diff sections within the edit summary and the recent changes.
Long toolbars could become hidden behind the global navigation on the left when resizing the screen.
webp images are no longer converted to png even with ?format=original
Animation on hover for all the panel chevrons in the left navigation was missing.
The spacing between icons within the Recent section in the left navigation was wider on closed wikis than others.
Horizontal groups on infoboxes on FandomMobile didn't use full width, therefore appear off-center.
Fixes in Development[]
Anon users are sometimes unable to load files in the lightbox when the file name includes quotation marks.
This table from Red Dead Wiki is using a row at the end for notes that's clearly not useful for progress tracking. These rows can be excluded and the checkbox won't be shown.
[Tweak] Ability to disable Progress Tracking from selected table rows: Aside from this automatic exclusion, you also have the option to decide for yourself to exclude specific rows from tracking within the table. This is particularly useful for tables where there is an additional row used to explain something. Read more detailed instructions on how to do this on the updated help page
[Tweak] Improve error message for row validation: While error messages are already in place to alert you to issues with Table Progress Track, the message itself wasn't always the most helpful. In this case, the message did specify which row was causing the error, i.e. "You have x issue because of y row". This is fine for shorter tables, but for long ones, people were forced to resort to other measures to find the exact row with the issue. To improve this situation, the row causing the error will now be more clearly indicated so you can more easily find it on the page to rectify the issue.
[Tweak] Replaced FANDOM with Fandom: Fandom has known a few names over the years and even some spellings, one of which being FANDOM. This old branding was still visible in some places to people who had their preferred language setting set to Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese but has now been removed.
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.
