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Blogs, sharing and email improvements!

Kirkburn September 30, 2009

Good morning,

Today we are improving three aspects of Wikia: blog articles, emails and article sharing.

Blog comments and the watchlist
The main change for blog articles is to improve the connection between the watchlist and blog comments.
If you have "Add pages I edit to my watchlist" switched on, commenting will add the blog post to your watchlist.
If you have "Add pages I create to my watchlist" set on, creating a new blog post will add it to your watchlist.
This all leads up to: if you have a blog post watched, and you have watchlist emails on, new comments will send you an email! Find out immediately when people are discussing your post :)
We have also condensed all blog comments into a single group on the enhanced recent changes list.
HTML emails
We have also been hard at work improving our systems to allow us to send HTML emails. While the user preference has been available for some time, we will only start sending the first HTML versions of emails out over the next couple of weeks. But don't worry - we don't plan to create all-singing all-dancing emails with flashy gifs and iffy Flash - we'll be using it to make the emails clearer and easier to use.
Sharing articles
Finally, we've been working on a feature to make it simpler than ever to share articles with your friends. You will find the link "Share this article" in the top bar of content pages - clicking this will pop up a selection of pre-made links for the top sharing websites.
For logged-in users, the sites you use the most will float to the top of the list (based on your choices), while for anon users it'll order itself based on combined clicks across all Wikia.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Kirkburn  talk  contr  @Wikia  18:05, September 30, 2009 (UTC)

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29 comments


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  • User_blog:Najevi/My_wish_list_for_blogs_at_Wikia

  • I think it encourages registration...don't why your IP to appear for the comments? Sign up! Also, maybe a quick way of blocking commenters too?

  • Post comment should be back to being a button now.

    As for displaying IPs instead of "anon user", it's something we've considered, but avoided due to how ugly it can look. You can get the IP via the tooltip text at the moment, but I agree that it's fairly important info and should be presented better.

  • Had an idea. Instead of using "anonymous user" for anon comments, could it just display the anon IP? More than one anonymous user can comment on posts and it can be confusing as to who is who.

  • What happened to the Post Comment button? Why is it a link now?

  • So I guess I figured it out:

    1. I don't have any watchlist automatics set in my prefs, but the commented blog gets added anyway.
    2. Unwatching doesn't suffice, I additionally have to edit my comment.

    Yup, seems like it.

  • Just letting the powers-that-be know that I noticed another minor watchlist bug earlier today (at least which appears to be one), while I was deleting various spam blogs and comments. When you delete these, the deleted redlinks show up in your watchlist and you have to go to the redlink for the blog article and click "unwatch" to remove it from the watchlist. Once that's done, it does remove itself, unlike the other watchlist bug.

    Correction: the first watchlist bug seems to have been fixed, but some times reappears depending on what the magical cache hamsters have been fed that day. I'm sure it will smooth itself out eventually.
  • Thanks for the blog improvements, especially the grouping for comments :)

  • Nice job with this update. I am real happy!

  • We plan to have the sharing link in both locations now :)

  • The icon bug seems to be resolved now actually.

    Also, if it wasn't noted, I'm much happier with "sharing" up top than down below where it was almost invisible.

  • Kirkburn:

    This has probably been brought up before, but I just noticed this — when you make a blog comment and it is auto-added to your watchlist, and then you "unwatch" the page, it still shows up in Special:Watchlist; at least it does on my end.

  • Good point about the comment history - we'll get that fixed (redirect is being too aggressive). We'll also look into the icon and flash bugs - is the icon issue happening everywhere for you?

    For the location of the share button, feedback noted :)

  • @Kirkburn:

    The comment history doesn't seem to be working for me...I clicked the earliest version of my comment and it displays the comment just as it is now.

    Also, I've control+F5'ed in 2 browsers, and the 'Watch' binoculars are still next to the Share link.

    And, this little bug is precisely why I preferred the menu used in testing versus the popup window: http://img21.imageshack.us/i/sharethisadproblem.jpg/

  • Could anyone tell me how many websites have a "share this" link at the top, instead of at the bottom?

    When I want to share something, I do that because I read it, and I read it when I reach the bottom of the article. So the "share this" link should be at the bottom. People expecting it o be at the bottom would probably miss it, since you are not supposed to use the top links, since you can't edit the blog post.

    Maybe, add a green-button for sharing next to the "leave a comment" would make it more noticeable and would be in an excellent position.

  • Thanks for the feedback!

    1. If you're seeing the wrong icon, it's likely a cache issue. Try Ctrl+F5 to force a full refresh. Let me know if you're still seeing odd icons, and where :)

    2. For showing a timestamp for comment edits - it's something we're considering. Note, the "history" link shows up next to comments which have been edited, and comment edits still show up in the RC list, so you can't be too ninja about it :P

    3. Regarding the placement of the tool: yes, we don't want to overload the 'page bar'. However, just too few people noticed the link at the bottom of the page, and link sharing is a major part of the web these days. We'll be watching how it gets used in this position. Note, if you want to shorten the link title on your own wiki to, say, "Share", it should be MediaWiki:Sf-link

  • YES, LordTBT! I get that too, ^"I'm blaming the update on a Wikia error that won't go away"^ Do you mind filing the ticket through the RT?

  • Trying to delete a comment and getting this error:

    PHP fatal error in /usr/wikia/source/releases_200909.5/extensions/wikia/Blogs/BlogComments.php line 854: Call to a member function getBlogTitle() on a non-object

  • Ditto for sharing at the footer, the header should always be inline with the traditional links that affect the article and it's history revisions.

  • I like the editing option to blog comments returning once more from back in the day, but I'm blaming the update on a Wikia error that won't go away. Also, I'd prefer the 'Share this article' button to be on the footer once again as it's taking up valuable space on the top, and I think the majority of websites on the great Interwebs have those links on the bottom. <rant />

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