KyleH's blog

Malware warnings on Wikia

2010-02-05T19:33:30Z

Hi everyone,

Yesterday, a number of users encountered warnings indicating that an ad provider we use was attempting to load malware on their computers. These warnings were triggered because the ad network was listed as suspicious by Google Safe Browsing. When Google lists a site, it causes certain browsers (especially Chrome) to show a big red warning message that the site is trying to load malware.

While we do have reports from users of Chrome, Firefox, or Kaspersky Antivirus that some ads were trying to load content from a potentially unscrupulous source, we have no reports of actual virus infection. For this reason, we believe that very few, if any, users were actually exposed to malware.

Upon receiving the first reports of these problems, our "Bad Ad Find and Remove" process was triggered and automatically paged our head of ad operations and me. He and I were able to find and quickly remove the ad network from most of the site. Due to caching, Monobook users may continue to see warnings for a little longer. Monaco users should no longer see warnings for this event.

Malware in advertising is a growing problem that we take very seriously. We do background checks on any advertiser who purchases ads with us directly and we only deal with ad networks we believe are trustworthy. Unfortunately, problems occasionally slip through the filters that are in place.

We are sorry that some users encountered malware warnings (and possibly actual malware) while browsing Wikia. We are working hard to improve our ability to detect and prevent these problems entirely.

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The future of Central Wikia

2010-01-23T01:00:44Z

Hi everyone,

Last month, Sannse posted on the forum to ask what you thought the future of Central should look like. It's a subject that we've been thinking about a lot at Wikia because we don't believe the current system supports the community in the best way possible. Today, I'd like to share some plans for the future of Central.

First of all, the current Central will be split in to two different sites: 1) a corporate site, with information such as Wikia's "About Us" page and Terms of Use, and 2) a community site, designed to help Wikia community members find each other and find help. The corporate site will be entirely new, live at www.wikia.com and have a custom skin and homepage designed to show off "what's hot" on Wikia and make it easier for visitors to find the content they are interested in.

The community site will move to community.wikia.com and undergo a bit of a transformation:

The homepage of community.wikia.com will be the "Community Portal" for all of Wikia. We will prominently feature forums, a revised help and FAQ, staff blog posts, and other areas important to the editing community. In response to Sannse's forum post, some expressed frustration about having to refer certain types of questions to Special:Contact. Community.wikia.com should make it easier for people to find information and get help from both staff and users.
The new homepage will prominently feature cross-wiki search. The current directory pages (also known as "blue box pages") will be removed. Our research shows that these pages often rank higher in Google than actual wikis and that readers who encounter them tend to leave Wikia rather than clicking once more to visit any of the wikis on the blue box page. So they are frustrating visitors and confusing Google.
The community site will receive a face-lift. We'll be applying a skin which will closely resemble the new homepage skin and provide a more consistent user experience. We'll also be freshening the pages on community.wikia.com to make them as helpful as possible.

All these changes will take a while - so we're targeting to have everything done by the end of February. Please bear with us as we create some dust -- we'll work hard to make sure the core functions of Central, such as the forums, are not interrupted.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions!

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Fall 2009 Update

2009-12-02T23:39:58Z

Quantcast Traffic

Added by KyleH

Hi everyone! With the Fall season about to wrap-up, it's time for another update!

In October, a record 54,000 editors made a record 1.6 million edits to a record 3.1 million content articles! Do you sense a record breaking theme?! More than 26 million people visited Wikia, making it the 75th most popular website in the United States. Furthermore, Wikianswers skyrocketed from 50,000 questions in the last update to over 400,000 questions today. Wikianswers is now one of the five most-visited sites on Wikia. Have you seen it?

To make sure you know what's going on at Wikia, we created the Wikia Staff Blog and invited staff members from various positions to post updates. More to come, so be sure to check back on a regular basis. While we are working on better ways for you to track blogs and blog comments, you can add the Wikia Staff Blog to your RSS reader using this feed.

Changes this Fall Edit

MyHome

Added by KyleH

As you may know, there have been some exciting enhancements recently to both the user interface and the back-end of the site. A few examples:

MyHome: In September, we launched MyHome, which provides registered editors with a new way of viewing information on the wikis they frequent. We're very happy with the results! The data shows us that new editors are now 67% more likely to return to Wikia after making their first edits than prior to MyHome's launch. In fact, the total number of edits made by new editors has increased 50% since launch! We have more MyHome enhancements planned, so be on the lookout.
Blog Enhancements: In September, we made a number of enhancements to blogs based on your feedback. Blog comments are now added to the same group within Enhanced Recent Changes and you can now watchlist blog articles and be notified of any new comments. Plus, we added a new "Share this article" feature on all pages to make it easy to tell friends about the great stuff you're creating.
Lucene Search: In October, we rolled out Lucene Search, which powers Wikipedia's search and provides dramatically better results than the old MediaWiki search engine. With Lucene in place, we've seen a 12% increase in search result quality (determined by whether a user clicks on a search result).
Mobile Skin: When we saw that iPhone users were responsible for over 1% of our total pageviews, we scrambled to turn on a new mobile skin to improve the browsing experience for all mobile users. The current version is based on MediaWiki's "Chick" skin, but there are a bunch of tweaks coming.

In the Pipeline … Edit

New Rich Text Editor

Added by KyleH

We also have a number of new things we're preparing. Here's a quick preview:

Rich Text Editor upgrades: We are working on a major upgrade to Wikia's Rich Text Editor. The new version will load faster and resolve many of the bugs pointed out by Wikia active editors.
Cross-Wiki Search: The next improvement for search is to enable searching for articles across all wikis at once. We'll start by adding this functionality to the search on Wikia's homepage (www.wikia.com).
Stability Enhancements: A few weeks ago, Wikia had an unplanned outage which affected users on the West coast. As a result, we've accelerated hardware purchase plans and have been conducting failover tests.
New Homepage and Central: We've recently kicked off a project to redesign the look and feel of Wikia's homepage and the rest of Central (www.wikia.com). As part of this, you'll see more community focused areas, a better search, and a more helpful Wikia Help. It's all aimed at simplifying wikis for new founders, editors and readers so they can write and read about stuff the love.

Thanks for all of your hard work and the tremendously helpful feedback you've given us over the past few months. There's some neat stuff coming out this winter and we looking forward to showing it to you.

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Introducing: Magazine Creator

2009-10-14T22:15:46Z

Magazine Creator

Make your own magazine!

Today we are launching a product unlike all others – Magazine Creator, a tool that lets you effortlessly transform your favorite wiki pages into high-gloss, professional looking, printed magazines. With just a couple of clicks, you can publish your own subscription-based magazine - covering characters, lore or your favorite quotes. The choice is yours.

So, how do you get started?

Use the magazine creator widget on the left to access the MagCloud toolbar. Just browse the wiki and add any articles you'd like in your magazine by clicking the “add” button.
Rearrange your articles in the perfect order - Klingon weapons, favorite NASCAR drivers, best COD weapons or whatever you like!
Design a cover, either by using our easy cover generator or uploading an image of your own.
Then, publish your magazine directly to MagCloud. From there you can order as many copies as you like for you and your friends!

Magazine Creator is live for most English-language wikis that use the Monaco skin. As always, if you have any thoughts / questions, please leave a comment below!

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Lucene Search launching soon

2009-10-05T20:36:09Z

Hi everyone,

This Wednesday, we are tentatively planning to release a new search for Wikia called Lucene Search. This is the search engine that Wikipedia has been using for quite some time, and provides a number of significant advantages:

Short words are properly indexed (the old search ignored words with fewer than 4 letters).
Numbers are indexed.
"Common words" are indexed (words such as "from", "with", and "what" were previously ignored).
Search is no longer case sensitive.
Relevance should be dramatically improved--results are ranked by how the search terms are used within the page, number of incoming links to the page, and a number of other factors to provide the best possible results.
Results display the rendered text of the pages rather than the raw source with MediaWiki markup, which should make them significantly more readable.

You can try out Lucene Search at Fallout and FFXI. If you have any questions or comments, please reply to this blog post.

Thanks! --KyleH (talk) 20:36, October 5, 2009 (UTC)

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Changes to Wikia's Privacy Policy

2009-09-22T22:20:08Z

Hi everyone,

Today we are making a small change to our privacy policy, and wanted to take a moment to explain the changes.

Wikia, along with several of the ad networks that Wikia uses, uses cookies that are left on your computer to:

Track how many times you have seen a given ad: Many advertisers specify that they only want you to see a given ad one or two times per 24 hours. Sometimes Wikia sets similar restrictions to improve user experience as well.
Provide better-targeted ads: Some advertisers collect anonymous data to provide you with ads that might be more relevant to your interests. For example, I recently did a search on Google for "toshiba battery", and now I'm seeing more Google ads on Wikia for toshiba.com.

Neither Wikia nor any of its advertising networks transfer this information to third parties. This type of behavioral advertising has been live on Wikia for as long as it has had advertisements; however, we wanted to be more clear about it, and also provide a way for our users to opt-out of behavioral advertisements if they would like to.

As mentioned in the new version of our Privacy Policy, if you would like to opt-out of behavioral advertisements, you can request to do so here.

Thanks! --KyleH (talk) 22:21, September 22, 2009 (UTC)

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MediaWiki 1.15.1 upgrade

2009-08-24T23:22:09Z

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know that we will be upgrading most of Wikia to MediaWiki 1.15.1 on Wednesday morning. Most users shouldn't see any significant changes with this upgrade, as most of the changes are bug-fixes or tweaks to existing features. You can view a full list of all of the changes here.

On Wednesday, August 26th, we plan to roll out MediaWiki 1.15.1 to every wiki on Wikia except for the following wikis, which will instead be upgraded to the new version on Monday, August 31st:

answers.wikia.com
aoc.wikia.com
fallout.wikia.com
gta.wikia.com
guildwars.wikia.com
lostpedia.wikia.com
naruto.wikia.com
runescape.wikia.com
starwars.wikia.com
starcraft.wikia.com
tibia.wikia.com
unanswers.wikia.com
uncyclopedia.wikia.com
wiki.ffxiclopedia.org
wowwiki.com

As always, we don't anticipate any significant problems or downtime; however, if you notice any problems, please report them here.

Thanks! --KyleH (talk) 23:22, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

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Summer 2009 Update

2009-08-19T22:41:28Z

Hi everyone! We're now more than half-way through summer, so I want to give you an update on everything Wikia has been working on lately and what we have coming up over the next few months. You can check out our last update here.

In July, Wikia had over 19,000 active editors, 1.3 million total edits and has accumulated a total of 2.6 million content article pages in 180 languages. Wikianswers has also seen tremendous growth, with over 50,000 answered questions on everything from Fallout 3 to health. This growth, combined with recent ad experiments, has brought us closer to being a sustainable business (where ad revenues exceed the cost of operating 40,000+ wikis), and we hope to continue to close the gap the rest of the year.

Enhancements this Summer Edit

For the past few months, we've had two objectives: making it easier for new visitors to make their first edit and improving the site speed. A lot of progress has been made on both fronts! Here's a quick review:

Added by KyleH

Rich Text Editor: We released the Rich Text Editor site wide in June for anyone with the Rich Text Editor enabled in preferences. By July, successful edits increased 5% to over 90% for logged-in users. This 5% increase is on top of the dramatic increase that we saw after the release of the edit page changes in January.
Blog articles: Blog articles also saw a site-wide release in June, and have been tremendously successful on sites like Lostpedia, Avatar Wiki and Redwall Wiki. Blogs are an easy and familiar way to contribute, and in many cases, they have helped new editors take their first wiki-steps.
Instant Wiki Creation: In May we introduced functionality to allow anyone to instantly create a new wiki within seconds. This has resulted in some very cool new communities showing up, such as the Brawl Hacks and Kingdom Hearts Fanon wikis, with over 250 new wikis being created each day!
New Wiki Wizard: We just launched a new wizard which simplifies and guides new wiki founders through the first few steps in building and customizing a new wiki.
Lean Monaco: Much of the past three months was spent refactoring the javascript behind the Monaco skin. We moved from YUI to jQuery and rewrote and slimmed most of the skin resulting in a 50% decrease in the required javascript download. Improved page performance is noticeable during and after the javascript is downloaded.
DNS Improvements: We decreased initial page load times by 100 milliseconds by moving our DNS to Dynect's global platform.

What's coming next? Edit

There are a number of cool things coming up. We will remain focused on enabling users to do more and do it more easily. Here's what's in the pipeline:

Lucene Search

Added by KyleH

MediaWiki 1.15.1: Last quarter we upgraded to MediaWiki 1.14. We'll be upgrading to the latest version (1.15.1) in the next few weeks, and preparing for 1.16, which is just on the horizon.
Lucene Search: A Lucene-based search engine is in the works which will provide more accurate and relevant search results.
MyHome: We are working on a new special page which will include a wiki activity feed, your recent contributions, and important community information all in one centralized location.

All in all, it's been a really exciting quarter. We'll be hard at work to keep good things on the way in the next few months. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know!

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Announcing: Blog articles

2009-06-29T23:16:19Z

Wednesday we will be launching two new features: Wiki Blogs and the User Masthead.

Wiki blogs are a new way for you and your community to contribute to your wiki. Wiki blogs are similar to normal blogs in that posts are attributed to a single author, are time stamped, and have a comment section. The wiki twist is that all posts are combined together into a central community blog or multiple blogs defined by category. Blog posts and comments are recorded in the Blog namespace and are logged in Recent Changes.

Blogs can be used to write personal opinion articles, community announcements, Top 10 Lists and fan fiction, just to name a few. We encourage each community to develop their own blog policies to encourage proper usage.

A default Blog Listing Page will be created for your wiki, with a navigation element added to the Sidebar. You may also want to add the Blog Listing Widget to your main page (see Lostpedia for example) to showcase the latest blog posts written.

You can see blogs live now on Lostpedia, Avatar Wiki and Redwall, and you can try them out yourself on Community Test Wiki

User Masthead is new section appended to the top every user page which displays user specific links including link to the new User Blog. This masthead also has a place for each user to have their own avatar. Avatars can be added/changed in Special:Preferences.

We realize that some communities may not be ready for these new features, so if you would prefer that we not enable blog articles on your wiki, please let us know here.

Thanks!

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