Technical Update: Feb 28, 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

• Our Mobile pages will now include quick links to allow for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and Email.

Also, as we had previously announced, this will go live this week:

• We're updating our Log In and Sign Up forms, and we'll release the changes to Community Central (and a few other wikis) this week for testing (with a release across all English wikis shortly to follow). More info coming soon in a full blog post.

Major Bugs Fixed

• Anonymous users will once again get notifications for messages left on their IP's user talk page.
• Chat Moderator and Wikia Staff icons will display properly again in Chat.
• The "most visited" option will be restored and functional in category galleries.

Other Notable Changes

As we had previously announced, these will go live this week:

• We're adding a new email preferences to Message Wall. Now you'll be able to select from: (A) an email for every message (the previous default), (B) watch-list style emails (one message per thread since the last time you visited -- the new default), or (C) no messages. Option B is new with this release.

• The Welcome Bot is being updated for Message Wall to be more compatible with how it has worked in the past: contributions will appear under User:Wikia and will be hidden in Recent Changes and Wiki Activity. They will still be signed by an active admin.

Select Known Issues

• Anonymous users clicking "Select another photo" button using the Rich Text Editor's image embed tool are seeing a white dialog box.
• We are following up on reports that the Rich Text Editor is not loading intermittently on Safari 5.
• Many Special pages that rely on daily-updated data (such as Special:WantedFiles or Special:UnusedTemplates) are not updating. We're seeing reports that they haven't changed since February 25th
• Starting a new message wall thread and replying to an existing one does not auto-follow the thread. We'll have this fixed soon. In the meantime, you need to manually follow the thread by clicking "Follow."

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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