Technical Update: April 4, 2016

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. Keep in mind that our system updates happen every Tuesday and Thursday - today's notes are for tomorrow's site update. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

Major Bug Fixes

• We recently fixed a bug that was causing ListUsers information to be outdated or incorrect - cleanup is ongoing, but it should generally be returning to normal now.
• We will fix an issue that could cause polls to display incorrectly on Forum and Message Wall pages.

Other Notable Changes

Detailed CSS updates can be found at http://report.wikia.net - the diffs show changes to .css, .scss, .tmpl.php, .html, .sass and .mustache files in Wikia's codebase.

• We have expanded use of the newer mobile layout and retired the older mobile skin (known as WikiaMobile).
  • All articles will now load in the new mobile layout (previously there were some that did not).
  • Content in other namespaces will now display to smartphone users in the desktop Wikia skin. One of the immediate benefits of this change is to make Forum and Message Wall threads more accessible to mobile users.
  • A small number of communities will still be seen in WikiaMobile on smartphones as part of a test that is ongoing.
• The following features are officially considered deprecated, which means they are no longer in development and are not supported:
  • Wikia Maps
  • Top 10 Lists
• The 'NewWindowLinks' extension no longer opens links in a new tab due to a browser behavior concern. Note that users can still choose to open links in a new tab (or window) via methods like the link's context menu, middle-clicks and CTRL+click.
• As we continue to work on updating the login process on Wikia, the new login style (such as seen on Community Central) will now open the login prompt in a popup window instead of a modal dialog.
• We recently added a switch to Special:WikiFeatures to allow communities to enable the new 'Europa' infobox styling, which more strongly matches local theming.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to leave them below. And if you have additional bugs to report, please send them to us via Special:Contact.

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