Technical Update: June 4, 2013

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.

Major Bugs Fixed

• Our image server thought it was on vacation this weekend. We've had a stern talk and it seems to be back on track now.
• It is no longer possible to create Message Wall and Forum posts with titles that consist of only spaces (which made them difficult to access).
• Categories inherited from templates no longer visually disappear after adding a new category in view mode.
• Images used on Shared Help pages did not work in the media lightbox: we have switched off the lightbox for these images.
• The ImageSizeInfo extension (#imgw), used on some wikis, has been fixed.
• The system that picks images for use in Related Pages and categories galleries will no longer skip over valid images from articles.

Other Notable Changes

• The new file page layout is enabled for all wikis (it was previously enabled only for English wikis)
• The page Special:GameGuidesContent becomes available to admins on all gaming wikis, and is enabled by default on all newly created gaming wikis.

Select Known Issues

• Hitting tab while viewing a page turns links on all inactive local navigation menus into ninjas (they disappear).

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

Update

Sorry for the confusion related to the youtube tag change. It should have been listed in the tech update, but there was a miscommunication and so it was missed. So what has been changed? We are now converting all <youtube> tags to full video [[File:videonames]]. The reasons for this are:

• The video players for videos that are embedded via youtube tags are loaded into the page upon page load - this makes the page slow. However, videos that are added using the video embed tool are embedded as a video thumbnail image and the player is only loaded when the thumbnail is clicked. This helps speed up page load times.
• Tracking of views is difficult and slow to update when the youtube tag is used
• Future video projects (such as special pages to help admins manage videos on their wikis and find video duplicates) use file pages and youtube tag videos can’t be included in these because they do not have file pages.

We will be running a script to convert all current tags to file pages soon. The new file pages will be attributed to the user who added the youtube tag and the edit to the page (doing the conversion) will be done by and attributed to the wikia bot.

tl;dr

Youtube tag is supported but all tags are being converted to file pages. This is being done to:

• Decrease page load time
• Take advantage of upcoming better tools to manage youtube videos
• Allow for more accurate tracking of views

Please let me know if you have any questions, and again sorry for the confusion.

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