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.

• The updated file page design is released on all English wikis.

• Users were not able to login using Facebook on WoWWiki — this fix is already live.
• The weekly digest ("Weekly Update from Wikia") email had lost all linebreaks between links — this fix is already live.
• Switching forum thread highlighting on and off was broken — this fix is already live.
• Forum threads could not be renamed.
• The Preview and Reply buttons stayed disabled after quoting a message on Forum and Message Wall, in…

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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.

• The filename for .ogg files now displays properly on Special:NewFiles.
• On file pages, the file history table will be treated the same as a wide table within an article, and add a button to expand it to its full width if needed.
• On the updated file page layout, links to article talk pages were not being properly displayed.
• Video thumbnails in galleries now display correctly.
• Multiple tweaks to the welcome system to improve performance and user experience.

• In the Monobook skin, the p…

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Greetings! Some time ago, we asked the Wikia Community about their opinions on how wikis currently use and would like to use mapping services such as Google Maps or Open Street Maps.

For some time now, the extension Wikia offers for mapping - Google Maps - has been becoming increasingly deprecated and, at the time of the community discussion, we were looking for a long-term replacement.

I am pleased to announce today the replacement has been selected and we are going full-speed ahead with the new platform. The extension in question is called Maps. It is a well-maintained third-party MediaWiki extension that has a lot of cool features that Google Maps did not have. Even better, we can swap ‘Google Maps’ maps into ‘Maps’ maps (say that ten tim…

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There will be no release this week. The regular release schedule will resume next week.

• Forum threads cannot be renamed.
• Forum post cannot be highlighted at the time they are created, and cannot be un-highlighted.
• We are continuing to work on open issues with the welcome tool, and some fixes are being released outside of the weekly code release. Many fixes are already live.

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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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.

• The layout of file pages on Community Central, the Wikia Video Library, Aion Wiki and wikis in the Lifestyle hub are updated with some of the changes requested by the Wikia community:
  • File information is organized into tabs: About, File History and Metadata (when metadata is present).
  • The tab you last viewed will be remembered via a browser cookie and will remain selected for you on all wikis.
  • The About tab includes a WhatLinksHere link.
• Community Central search will now check for…

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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.

• Searches were failing when the search term contained no Latin-script characters. This fix is already live.
• The source mode link suggestion dropdown will no longer overlap the cursor when near the bottom of the page.
• Additional fixes for instances where the visual editor can incorrectly add linespaces in tables.

• Grunny's script to automatically create your user page on a wiki has been released on the Wikia Developer's Wiki. This script can be added to your personal JS and gives yo…

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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. Note: this release has been delayed to Thursday.

• The Game Guides 2.0 smartphone app and the My Wikia iPad app were released last week.
• In the Video Embed Tool, it is now possible to enter a description when adding a video to a wiki, which can be helpful for search engine optimization. Existing descriptions from the Wikia Video Library or YouTube will be used by default.

• Fixed gallery images sometimes being incorrectly aligned when previewing a page.
• When writing links in source mo…

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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.

• On some wikis, it was not possible to enable/disable the Achievements feature on Special:WikiFeatures.
• The category module was sometimes removing category sort keys.

• Active support for Internet Explorer 8 is officially dropped.
• Admins can remove a video from the right rail Videos module, and can remove the video from the wiki altogether at the same time. (These changes had been noted in previous weeks, but are now fully implemented.)
• Welcome messages linking to Message Wall or For…

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If you’ve been at Wikia for a while, chances are you’ve heard about caching. If you have written into Wikia Support with a bug report, you’ve probably been asked to “clear cache”, or told that something is a “caching issue”. In this blog post I’ll explain what cache is and how it makes your wiki faster on various levels.

Caching is, to put it simply, storing any kind of information close at hand, so that it can be retrieved faster. What does that mean, exactly? Here’s an example:

When you type the address of your wiki into your browser (or click a link), your browser will download the contents of the page, and all related JavaScript files, styling information and images. Now, when you go to a different page on the same wiki, your browser wou…

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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.

• Links to Forum Topic pages were showing as red links.
• When using a tablet, it was not possible to close level 3 navigation menus in the Wikia skin.
• Facebook Connect was not working on the mobile skin's login page.
• Sign up with Facebook was not allowing users to create an account.

• Admins can now remove videos from the wiki when removing them from the Videos module.

• Searches containing the ":" character can sometimes return a blank page.
• The category tool is sometimes removing categor…

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