Technical Update: March 20, 2012

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. Keep in mind that our system updates happen every Wednesday, so we’re posting this on a Tuesday to give you advance notice. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

New Features

• The mobile version of our site will now support logging in. At the moment, all you can do while logged in is leave comments under your username (well, that and log out...), but more exciting features are coming soon!
• We're adding our new Mini Editor (which we also released last week for Message Wall) to Article Comments and Blog Comments. It will be available on Community Test and a few other wikis on Wednesday, and we'll roll it out to all English wikis soon after. The Mini Editor includes both a Visual Mode and a Source Mode, and matches whichever mode you see for article editing.

Major Bugs Fixed

• The Popular pages module for Oasis navigation should once more properly populate with pages. (In other words: "Popular pages are populating properly." Say it three times fast!)
• Anon user talk page notification bubbles should once again appear, although they may still have some delays because of page caches.
• The image license preview for Special:Upload will work in Internet Explorer 9.
• The <youtube> extension will recognize new YouTube width and height ratios.

Other Notable Changes

• We're making a few light modifications to our logo, which you'll start seeing around Wikia this week. We're also replacing the word "Gaming" with "Video Games" in our global header. We'll talk about these changes in more detail in an upcoming blog post.
• Wikia is converting all of our URLs to pretty URLs. While we usually see a simple URL structure (like /wiki/PageName) when viewing an article page, editing a page or viewing its history would use a complex structure (like /index.php?title=PageName&action=edit) instead. Now, simple URL structures will also apply to editing, history, and similar URLs (so you'll now see /wiki/Pagename?action=edit). The old URL style will still work.
• We're removing special characters from our Video file names this week as the first step in our refactoring process. See our blog post about these changes for more info.

Select Known Issues

• Sharing a Top 10 List on Facebook currently generates an unhelpful page description.
• Moving an image file to a previously-used image name produces an error.

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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