Eyo lovely people, and welcome to October already! This month does not only mark the start of the spooky season, but also the start of the last quarter of the year! As usual, I will be taking you through a selection of changes that happened since the last Tech Blog two weeks ago. You can expect some noticeable bug changes, potential experiment announcements, and even platform-wide noticeable changes that happened since. If you have questions or suggestions about anything technical related, the comment section is always a good place to reach out. So let's see what happened this time!
The User Experience team has been experimenting a lot lately, most notably with the mobile and desktop drawers. These experiments are all part of an effort to try to declutter the user experience by shifting things around and out of the way. One of these experiments on mobile only proved to be a positive enhancement of the anonymous user experience, so it will go live as a product next week: While visiting wikis on mobile, anonymous users will have a bell icon in which they will receive the site notices and marketing surveys. By moving these notifications to the newly created bell notification drawer for them, it cleared up some of their browsing experience, which resulted in more engagement with the site.
Recent Fixes[]
On FandomMobile, the search, bell, and profile icons are no longer pushed off screen on Special:RecentChanges.
On FandomDesktop with the VisualEditor is your default, edit section headers coming from a template are showing as pencil icons again rather than "editeditsource".
Changes to the signup form made many about.fandom.com pages lose their styling for a while.
[Tweak] Interactive Maps improvements: We've been collecting a lot of user feedback about Interactive Maps lately, so it's always a pleasure when we can deliver on some community-requested features. The latest one being that a link to the map namespace has been added to the map that's embedded on a page. This way, map viewers on article pages can easily jump to the full map page in the Maps namespace (e.g. to access the talk page or see the map description).
[Tweak] Extend window between wiki closure and removal of database from 30 to 60 days: Wikis get created and closed regularly on Fandom in accordance with our Community Creation Policy. When a wiki got closed, anyone had 30 days the time to request a database download of the content on that wiki. This was always a rather short turnaround for everyone involved, so to remedy that, we've doubled the time one has to request a database download from 30 to 60.
[Rollout test] Use Reston datacenter to provide a faster service for nearby users: Fandom has different datacenters around the world to process everything that happens on the platform. One of these is in Reston, and it is used only in emergencies. In order to improve our service, we want to use this datacenter in a read-only mode for people accessing the platform from nearby places. Starting next week, the Platform team will serve part of the traffic on some smaller wikis from this datacenter for a week as a test. Depending on the results, we will extend the test to more wikis the next week, and if all goes well, this will be rolled out to more wikis and traffic.
[Code cleanup] Design unification of "Others Like You Also Viewed" widget: Running several experiments in search of the best user experience is great for the user, but it sometimes leads to inconsistencies between all the versions. That's sadly what happened with this widget in comparison to the others, so the team rectified that now.
[Bug workaround] VisualEditor fails to load due to certain wikitext: Due to a bug on Wikimedia Foundation's side, Parsoid (a library for bidirectional transforming wikitext and HTML) can't properly pass an argument to a nested extension if the extension is wrapped in another extension that uses HTML-format tags. This is causing loading issues for the VisualEditor. To work around the bug, you can replace all the parser tags with {{#tag:EXAMPLE_TAG ... }}parser function. We will continue to monitor this bug report in the meantime.
[Release] Structured Quotes fix, documentation, and release: Last time the FANDOMBot ran to add Template:StructuredQuote to wikis, it accidentally introduced a HTML code error. Earlier this week, the script started a new run to fix this issue. While we await proper translations, English wikis will also receive the template documentation for this template. As a last note, the bot will also finish adding the template on the last wikis who still don't have it. You can find more information on the structured quotes help page and in the blog about this first step in our bigger project around Structured Content.
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. 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.
