Technical Update: February 27, 2017

Here are the latest technical updates on Fandom. 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 are working on fixing some recent issues with Message Walls - such as where user pages are unexpectedly being listed in threads, and some caching problems. This is partially because our recent performance improvements made Message Walls 'too fast', so some events could end up taking place out of order. Rather than slow it down again, we're making sure those events take place as intended.
  • Update: some threads may now show "This message cannot be found" notes, replacing the (unexpected) user page posts. These will also be cleaned up soon.
• Wall and Thread pages will no longer show an extra 'History' link on the toolbar.
• After a user is renamed, affected Wall and Forum posts will no longer show ugly edit summary text about the rename.
• On Special:WikiActivity, Wall and Forum post summaries will no longer include plain HTML code.

Other Notable Changes

Recent mobile app updates are listed on Apps Technical Updates, and detailed site CSS-related updates can be found at http://report.wikia.net

• In Discussions, admins and discussions moderators will be able to take action on reported content anywhere that the content is displayed.
• Users in the 'rollback' group will no longer be able to edit other people's Wall and Forum posts, as this was not intended behaviour.
• We recently switched to showing JPEG and PNG images in WebP format in supporting browsers (such as Chrome). This has resulted in a large reduction in bandwidth usage for those images. However, the quality setting was initially set too low - it has been raised significantly, and we are working on refreshing affected images.
  • WebP is a relatively new format, specifically designed for image use on the web. It can reduce file sizes significantly with little difference in image quality.
  • We recently added a 'download' link on JPEG and PNG file pages to ensure that users can still download an original copy (rather than a WebP version).
• We recently finished re-indexing a large amount of content, in order to fix some situations where pages were missing from the local search index.

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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