Technical Update: February 7, 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.
Major Bugs Fixed
Edit
- Vimeo videos can once again be uploaded using the Video Embed Tool. An API change on Vimeo's end had prevented our uploader from properly grabbing the necessary data.
- Patrolled edits preferences seemed out of place in their previous placement under our new Special:Preferences system, so they will now have their own section in the "Under the Hood" tab.
- Special:BookSources was highly outdated with 404 errors and malformed links being constructed by clicking on some of the links. We've refreshed the appropriate links and code to make this page useful again.
Other Notable ChangesEdit
- We've stabilized the footer ad spot on Mobile so it stays put at the bottom of the screen (it's been jumping around a bit when you scroll), and we're adding a "Close" button to it so you can clear it from your view.
- We're updating the default style for new tables created from Visual Mode for a more attractive look and feel. This will not affect any existing tables, and it will not impact editors who work in source mode. These new defaults (class="WikiaTable") can be easily changed in source mode or overridden with custom CSS.
Select Known IssuesEdit
- Search continues to operate slowly on a number of wikis. Our engineering team has been hard at work on long-term solutions to fix this issue.
- Thumbnail generation has also been a bit buggy of late on fresh images. We are aware of the issues behind this and are working on a solid patch.
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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79 comments
Anonymous User-
No technical update this week?
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Chat shut down again. :L
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This is not where you should report chat outages. Use Special:Contact instead.
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Hi there, we are aware that chat is down and are looking into it. No need to send into Special:Contact — but in the future, please do send all bug reports there. Sometimes comments can get lost in the shuffle. Thanks for letting us know regardless!
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This is happening again...
I apparently logged into the WikiaBot Account when moving something
Full Image
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Good thing WikiaBot is no longer staff.
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Hack?
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Did you use Special:Random, by chance?
February 14 by Dser -
Yeah Jeff. Totally a hack. That's why they said "apparently logged into" instead of "I hacked Wikia and wanted to put it here so I could get permanently banned." Makes total sense.
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Thanks for the report Tama, we're looking in to it.
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"We're updating the default style for new tables created from Visual Mode for a more attractive look and feel. This will not affect any existing tables, and it will not impact editors who work in source mode. These new defaults (class="WikiaTable") can be easily changed in source mode or overridden with custom CSS. "
This statement is incorrect. It is actually
class="article-table"that is added to tables created with the table button in visual mode.class="WikiaTable"is also affected by the code change, but is not the class added when using the button in the module. -
Yes, you're right -- apologies for the mis-information.
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In the under the hood prefs page, could you divide the namespaces checkboxes in the search section into two columns?
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We had to retreat to IRC on Halo Nation. :( Chat's broken, it won't even load.
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The Chats I mean.
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You can edit comments...
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It won't work for me
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Chats are broken.
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Aye, chats are broken D:
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Yep, sorry for the inconvenience there -- we're working on it!
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Could you add amazon.co.jp to the Special:BookSources search list.
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BookSources was updated to meet current MediaWiki (to be honest, really Wikipedia) standards. We are willing to customize it later but at this time we simply wanted to bring it to a stable state and evaluate more pressing needs first.
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Another issue with the wiki search engine is that when you type in the search bar it often suggests pages that are redirects, even old ones.
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Sad.
But true :(
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Just to note: although redirects shouldn't appear in the search bar, it would be useful if there was a magic word or something alike that let you choose to make a redirect appear in the search bar suggestions. That's because some names "redirects" are more known than the actual titles, but this is just a thought...
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I have problems editing on this page, source mode cannot be switched, and the current version cannot be loaded properly. I've tried purging but this won't work! ...P.S. I once read that the editor saves unsaved edits in case the browser crashed for that page for 3 days, but why is the message still appearing up to its 5th day!
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Visual loads fine for me on that page. What browser are you using? If you are still not seeing an improvement, could you please report it through S:C please?
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When previewing edits I'm seeing inactive links as active links, anyone else having this problem?
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I'm sorry, you've lost me with "inactive" versus "active". Are you referring to red links versus blue links. Could you point me to a wiki where this is an issue?
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I think what JayLR means is that while editing, in preview, one cannot see redlinks actually being red - all links are the same color. This is an inconvenience if one wants to make sure he/she formatted the links properly.
February 9 by Sovq -
About preview, when the JS support will be available? It's pretty annoying to not be able to see the actual result... that's not a preview! Think about pages with a show/hide code.
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Yes, I mean red links (inactive) showing up as blue links (active) when you view a preview of an edit. It's happening on all the wikis I have visited, including right here.
February 9 by JayLR -
I've seen it too. Brought it up in the Forums.
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We can now confirm an issue with preview red links and have filed a high-prio ticket to get it fixed.
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Looking fine to me in FF10, Win 7. Have any custom JS on the wiki or being inserted into your Firefox by an add-on? Is the Error Console reporting anything breaking on page load?
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Ok, my bad... I found out the culprit here. Have adblock plus on all the time, and it blocked the content on this page as well. Sorry for reporting it.
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Why must the wordmarks on all wikis now be 250x65 pixels? It has made the wordmark on a very large number of wikis look bad, so please remove this restriction.
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That would require a complete revamp of the WikiHeader element if you wanted it look larger. Otherwise, it's just a bug as reported below.
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I think what he is saying is to go back to how it was so that there is not stretching. In which case staff are working on it
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This was not intentional. The bug was patched and released today.
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This weeks code change also forced the wordmark graphic on all wikis to a fixed width and height of 250x65. On some wikis, this has distorted the image. If your wiki is affected, please contact Wikia about it.
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Patched and the fix is live.
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Wanted to touch on another bug at the moment. QuickStats on the AdminDashboard are reporting traffic ten times more than expected. This is because of a configuration change for another product we made on our end that is unfortunately tied to the QuickStats numbers. We are looking into an optimal solution right now.
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I reported a bug report last week of something, and nothing has been updated, fixed, or even mentioned.
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That's typical. Either report it again or wait.
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Did you Special:Contact this bug? Where did you report it?
Remember that Dopp and I can't watch this blog very closely every week since we have loads of other stuff to do. The best way to ensure that it is seen is if you S:C it.
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I did use S:C.
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Hey there - Sorry if we weren't able to mention the bug you reported in this weekly update - we just mention the highlights. Also, depending on the bug, we may not be able to fix it right away. Sorry you're feeling like we missed your report.
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Wikia has grown so fast, it's support group may now be understaffed. In the past, Wikia claimed they had an average response time of 24 hours. I disputed that in the past, but now I think they aren't so bold as to claim that is still true. I'm now happy if I get any response.
As Rappy said, report it again or wait. I recommend reporting it again. Squeaky wheel and all...
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Ok, that's what I'll do. I see a bug with S:C, as my report isn't showing up in my Zendesk account. I'll send one in directly through zendesk, try that. You guys are always helpful, so I appreciate it very much. Sorry about that!
PS: I honestly think wikia staff support is very fast. I get responses in minutes sometimes, and they are always very helpful.
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Fandy, I looked into support reactions In so far as I can tell, we are replying to everything you've sent us lately. If there are certain things you think we missing replying to, let me know.
And yes, we are actually very proud to say still that we do have an average response time of (under) 24 hours. A little longer if you email on the weekends of course :)
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I'd agree with that as well DaNASCAT! :)
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Also, I am sorry for mis-reading your first post earlier Head of Ravenclaw. But to echo what Jen said, if there's nothing to update on a bug, we can't really update it here.
As someone who was a regular user on Wikia for a number of years, I totally understand how frustrating it is to not feel like a bug is being worked on.
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It's no problem DaNASCAT. :)
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Although I still can't agree with the 24 hour average turnaround, Wikia has been close to the 24 hour figure about 60% of the time with me which is not bad, since I don't generally submit the easy ones.
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About the search, after you fix the bugs it would be nice if you think a way to improve it as well... it was never so smart to begin with, google finds a lot of more of results in comparison
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That's not surprising since Google is a SEARCH engine.
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Wikia needs to do alot of work on wiki search. In theory, it should work roughly on par with Wikipedia, but I think they have diverged the MediaWiki codebase in places they didn't expect to affect search so badly, but it has. They're still untangling it. I have hope that they'll figure it out, but as someone who's followed the topic for years, I don't think it is in the top 5 of their priorities yet.
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We make no bones about it: the search experience on Wikia has not been exemplary for a while, this bug aside. We are aware of some of the issues but unfortunately most of the engineering work in the last few years has simply been to keep up with growth of the number of pages we have to index. It's not an unwillingness to fix it, it's a resource problem. As long as people keep adding awesome content, we have to keep scaling the indexing instead of tweaking other important things.
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That's why Wikia Search was a complete fail. You can expect to be compared to google and be a total fail on your own site search
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...meaning search has not been made a high priority. If Wikia decides to make search a priority, please tell us and then we'll see if it is any good. Until that happens, I will just avoid it and have generally given up on wiki search. It might be better just to embed Google search by default until it gets fixed.
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Can you make templates work in chat?
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Any specific kind?
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That's a good question. I don't believe you can display templates in chat at this time.
