Technical Update: August 3, 2011
This week's code release will be on Thursday instead of Wednesday of this week, due to some work we needed to handle on our servers. Below are some of the highlights of what will be included in the release.
New Features
Edit
- The Admin Dashboard will be going live to all existing English wikis this week, as announced here. The Wiki Progress Bar will also appear on wikis that have less than 250 edits total. (Since it's a just-getting-started tool, it won't be added to more established wikis.) This release will also come with an easier way of viewing your wiki's statistics.
Major Bugs FixedEdit
- Some users were displaying incorrect Member Since dates on their profiles. This should now be fixed, so please let us know if it's not for you (and be sure to include a link).
- Blog lists experienced some design issues with bullets appearing and icons overlapping text.
- Wikia technicians have been investigating some occasional white pages and database load spikes. This week's delayed code release was to allow more investigation of what might be causing this. We've found and resolved some relevant issues, so we hope there will be fewer problems from now on.
Select Known IssuesEdit
- We have located the source of some image reuploading issues the last few days but are still looking into the cause. Simply put, images weren't being purged correctly on reupload and some pages may still be showing older versions. The images are on the server, they just aren't displaying correctly immediately. If you see an image that still hasn't updated, a purge is likely to fix it.
- A number of special pages, most notably Special:ListUsers are not updating.
- Page specific logs (such as deletions and protection changes) are not displaying for a number of pages (though not all). We believe the error is that the MediaWiki engine is not recognizing the log database data correctly.
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 8/4/11: Image slider sizes have also been updated to fit the content areas better. Images have been positioned to fit the new sizes as best as possible. If your images don't look fantastic in the new setup, it may be time to recrop and reupload them.
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103 comments
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I don't have time to report this to Special:Contact (comment blog is faster!) I had many problems about the numbered list in editing When I placed a numbered list beside an image, the numbers merged into the image, which is annoying. I have fixed it by manually typing the numbers instead. When I was editing a numbered list, all numbers appeared as one number (instead of 1,2,3, it was 1,1,1) Again, I edited the numbers manually to fix them.
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Can you give a link?
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Sorry but as what I said, "I already fixed them manually" So there is no need to add a link, but it's true, it happened on Wanted Wiki (Melee Kill page) - www.wanted.wikia.com/Melee Kill - notice the image beside the numbering
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Here’s a link for KevzMarz:
http://wanted.wikia.com/index.php?title=Melee_Kill&oldid=3902 -
Sorry, but chat still doesnt work on Mozilla OR Internet Explorer for me..
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Also, it works slightly on my IE, but for some reason every second message is ignored....
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Still no documentation about how images should be sized to fit the slider? Shame on you, staff.
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@CAP - the size is 660x360 pixels, but I only know this because I'm currently on the content team approved list. I agree with your sentiment about staff communication on this issue
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For some reason the Page Layout builder won't work on my wiki? It just comes up with error...
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It probably hasn't been installed. You can request it at Special:Contact.
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I'm not sure when this happened, but why is contentSub being showed twice with one now in place as a H2 under WikiaPageHeader (see a redirect or a subpage)?
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Someone said that it was the addition of breadcrumbs. But, I do not see any breadcrumbs extension activated in Special:Version.
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I should read older posts more often than not.
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I uploaded a new version of File:ShiftshaftInBTMT.png on my wiki. The width/height changed, but the image itself didn't update. It just stretched to fit the new parameters. And I tried purging, and it didn't work.
As for the Admin Dashboard, it is displaying in a black-on-white color scheme, yet my wiki is different. Click here for an example. But it changes the whole page to fit the color scheme (which is better than the new editor).
---****--- Roads
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The issue with the image re-uploads is a known bug and has been there for quite a while. Unfortunately, there's nothing that can be done about it other than report it (again) and waiting it out.
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Also your link for "Click here" is only for admins, staff, helpers, and VSTF.
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Um, no. Only Staff and Admins/Bureaucrats can use admin dashboard.
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how bout helpers?
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So it confirms my worst thoughs. Wikia forced us to change the already uploaded images and then it won't display correctly anyway because of the reupload bug.
And I'm still waiting for a clarification about the logic of the size of images. Come on, assume your responsibility for this changes.
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This bug is still around, but it is not as bad as it used to be. Now it should only take a few hours at most to update, whereas it used to take days or more.
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If the image does not update, an admin can move it do a different title to force-clear the cache.
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It works now!
---****--- Roads
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I wish the Admin Dashboard would be polished more before being released Wikia wide. It uses it's own CSS styles which makes it difficult to use or unreadable on wikis with darker color themes. Is there a way to see to the 'old' Recent Changes or do I need to desysop myself?
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At the moment, no :( Hopefully some changes will be made to it soon.
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You can log out and see the old recent changes. Wikia seems to be doomed to repeat its mistakes a bunch of times before learning. Or, they don't mind that much when they get a firestorm of complaints. I'm not sure which.
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The admin dashboard is really getting annoying on Songpedia. I meant, it displays even if I don't want it to, is there a css code to disable it for myself?
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Log out, but then you can't do admin-only tasks.
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I was looking for a css code.
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I don't think there's a pure CSS solution since .WikiHeader is replaced by .AdminDashboardHeader, but if you really don't like it showing everywhere, putting this in personal CSS hides everything admin-dashboard related and makes Special:RecentChanges as wide as it used to be.
/* Hide AdminDashboard */ .WikiaArticle.AdminDashboardChromedArticle, .WikiaArticle.expanded { width: 982px; } .AdminDashboard, .AdminDashboardDrawer, .AdminDashboardGeneralHeader.AdminDashboardArticleHeader, .AdminDashboardNavigation, .AdminDashboardHeader, .AdminDashboardRail, .AdminDashboardTabs { display: none; } .WikiaArticle { background: transparent; }I think you can use JS to add back the missing .WikiHeader but I don't know anything about that code :/ so maybe someone else can help you with that.
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Changtau: Is the missing
.WikiaHeaderwhere the search bar and the Ajax check-box are located? Thanks! -
<form method="get" action="index.php?title=Special:Search" class="WikiaSearch" id="WikiaSearch"><input type="text" accesskey="f" autocomplete="off" placeholder="Search the wiki" name="search"><input type="hidden" value="0" name="fulltext"><input type="submit"><button class="secondary"><img width="21" height="17" class="sprite search" src="
"></button></form>
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That looks great Ryan! Where do I put it?! Thanks!
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Yeah, Ryan! Where do we put it? User:Nobody Cares/common.js?
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Sorry for the late reply. .WikiHeader is the bar where your wiki's wordmark / logo appears - on here, it the one that says Wikia Community Central and the part with the Random Page and Wiki Activity buttons. .WikiaHeader (with an extra A) is the top bar with the Wikia company's wordmark, where users access their profiles.
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The JS syntaxt that goes to your personal wikia.js if you want to re-add the old header is the following:
if (wgNamespaceNumber == '-1') { addOnloadHook( addOldSpecials ); } function addOldSpecials () { $('<header code goes here>').insertAfter('.AdminDashboardHeader'); $('<search box etc.>').insertAfter('.WikiHeader');
Hope it helps!
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Any updates on PlayQuiz? Really excited for it!
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Quizzes have been here for years, it's not a new feature, Wikia stopped supporting it. then, they unexpectedly came back supporting it on July 2011.
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Wow, do you know the coding?
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You have to request it on Special:Contact. But you can make quizzes without the feature, it'll just look a bit cranky.
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For the past few days, wiki was loading /very/ slowly and Community Central wasn't loading at all. If/when this happens again and I can't come here to see news/fixes about it, where would be a good place to go?
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I know, I had the same issue. Your best bet would be to wait a little for the site to load and ask what's happening through Special:Contact.
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"it may be time to recrop and reupload them"? What a face-saving, blame-shifting way of wording the fact you are causing loads of work for us. Not 6 days ago a wikia staff member from the content team told me my images had to be exactly 673x410 pixels to work on the slider, but now perhaps it's time for me to deal with my own images and make them work? I think you could've shown a little more humility in this area
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Let's hope that at least the problem with the cache on image reupload has been solved.
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Why cannot the pictures just be semi-automatically resized by the slider the way they are when inserted in an article? You know, the way we specify thumbnail, 100px, 200px, etc.?
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Search boxes are now back on user pages!
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It hasn't come back on the "difference between revisions" page of a userpage
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I would love to have a search bar on diffs pages and on page revision histories! It would increase the navigability of our wikis.
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No matter what computer I use, everytime I try to create a blog, something titled "DummyPrefixedText" appears and then the page suddenly uploads and reuploads itself until I get an "error" sign. I think this is weird since everything else works fine, except for the blogs. :(
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I am pretty sure unregistered users cannot make blogs. Actually, I know they can't.
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Whoops, I was logged out. I'm talking about when I'm on and try to create blogs this happens. Everything was fine early last month.
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Can you give me a link to where this happens?
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Specifically http://icarly.wikia.com/_ . :)
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Is it possible that this update affected the sliding galleries. The images in the ones on the Uncharted Wiki are having the tops cut off them.
Examples:
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Same thing is happening this wiki
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Yes -- I just got an update on that. This was an intentional change to make the sliders fit the content area better. Images have been positioned to fit the change as best as possible. If your images don't look great, you can upload new versions of them. Sorry for the hassle.
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So what exactly changed? Did the size of the images change, or are the images positioned up a little bit, so you would have to leave some "air" at the top?
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Dopp, I miss some documentation about how sizes or aspect ratio should be. I see the images cropped, but how could I know where to cut them down?
Please, provide details about the logic it uses now. That's an important change. I couldn't believe you missed it when writting this blog post.
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Wow. Just wow.
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Will Wikia integrate Editor/Dashboard/Special Pages with Theme Designer? Blue doesn't work on all wikis, and not everyone can use css.
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Partly. It will have the same background as your wiki. The rest of the styling will match what you're currently seeing in the Redesigned Editor.
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You should really make some of the colors customisable, the light blue header section and the blue wikia buttons especially.
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One of the most painful customisations I've ever done (it also includes full customisation of the edit page). It might even still have errors... :P
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@The 888th Avatar: These customizations look like they modify a lot of classes used outside the Dashboard - didn't this disrupt content pages?
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Yes, they do, because the separate stylesheets used for these features overwrite Theme Designer but use many of the same classes. What I've effectively done is regurgitate the same CSS that's already in use on content pages and simply dump whatever was needed into Wikia.css. There are no disruptions to content pages that I know of.
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The 888th Avatar: It’s amazing! Would you do that for us on my home wiki? ;) It uses the standard Oasis theme from the ThemeDesigner.
… if you should have the time …
Seriously, though, it looks like so much work. Because we just use the the colors from the theme designer, I don’t know any of the shades to plug in as CSS.
Anyway, good job! -
Sure, and thanks. Admin Tools' colours don't clash too much with the Admin Dashboard but if you have some rough shades in mind, I'd be happy to help out. :)
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UPDATE: Admin Dashboard has been released to some wikis, but not all yet. It's having some design glitches, so we'll be working today to resolve them. Thanks for your patience.
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scratch that. it's not launched yet. :)
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There seriously needs to be a way to turn it off. It hasn't had enough testing or refinement at all. It also lacks many useful features.
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We had some issues with the Source Mode inserting lots and lots of HTML code on the edit screen for users with the Visual Editor this morning. We have put forth a fix but if you are still seeing issues, please clear your browser cache. If you still see it after that, please contact us.
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Users can also eliminate the problem altogether by unticking Enable Rich Text Editor on the Editing tab in their Preferences.
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The new breadcrumbs (as seen at the top of this blog) mean that there are two 'redirected from' messages at the top of the page in Oasis.
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Our tech team is on it as that is a bug.
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Thanks Eladkse, we're looking at that one
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There's also two "view logs for this page" sentences when looking at a page's history, which I think is new
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Yeah, looking at the code, it's the same issue Acer. I assume it's all to do with the new profiles.
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If it helps the tech team any, the first redirect has no brackets while the second one does:
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I do not see breadcrumbs at the top of this blog. Have they been turned off for debugging?
I thought that the breadcrumbs I was supposed to be seeing were the Extension:BreadCrumbs2 type. I understand now that they are the Extension:BreadCrumbs type. -
The search bar is now gone on userpages - did this just happen with this update, or earlier and I just noticed it now? It's pretty annoying when trying to navigate
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Also, I didn't mean for that last line to go italics, no idea why that's happened
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I think they are preparing for the new profiles
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Yes and no. Yes, it's an upcoming change. No, you should not have seen this change yet. It's ben ticketed.
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Well, just so's you know, I'm against it as an upcoming change. Please don't sacrifice the ease of navigating content in order to fit in the new user profiles. I see it's been removed on the new editing screen too, what's wrong with having it on every page?
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Search *will* be on the new profiles layout. This was a mistake.
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Thanks for that Dopp! It’s good to know. Search is a very useful tool that is nice to have on as many pages as possible.
Could you add it to the Admin Dashboard? And, put it back on the RecentChanges page? Thanks!
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When is the dashboard supposed to be released?
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hopefully this week
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Today! :)
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weeeeeeeee!!...me/waits!
