Technical Update: May 15, 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

• We're adding the ability to zoom in on photos from the lightbox viewer on mobile devices.

Major Bugs Fixed

• Searching for a query that includes a namespace (example: "Template:Character") will now display pages from that namespace in the search results.
• Page titles in search results were being truncated in some languages.
• Special:WhatLinksHere was giving incorrect results, most notably for videos.

Other Notable Changes

• We're adding a preference that enables "go" search (clicking "search" will take you directly to an article instead of to a search results page) for individual use.
• We're completing our transition to the updated version of Chat for all English wikis by removing the "bannedfromchat" user right (now replaced with a full chat ban system).
• We're updating the way we handle Search Suggestions this week: we've made some speed improvements, and added some lightweight support for redirects. This will also result in some changes in our Link Suggest system (which appears when editing), since they use the same engine. We're still refining some of these changes.

Select Known Issues

• Image, wiki background, and avatar reuploads are not properly displaying the new image. We have caught the problem and are currently working through the backlog.
• Videos may not be moved to new page names in all cases.

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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