Technical Update: August 17, 2016

Here are the latest technical updates at Wikia. Keep in mind that our system updates happen every Tuesday and Thursday - today's notes are for tomorrow's site update. Also note that we change hundreds of tiny details every week, so these are just the highlights.

Update: Due to issues found during final QA, both the Appreciation feature and the Discussions updates are delayed until the our next release (Tuesday, August 23). The August 18 release still occurred, but simply does not include the items listed below.

New Features

• We are launching a 4-week test of a prototype feature, Appreciation. Ever wanted to thank a user for their excellent edit, but don't want to start a whole message wall thread about it? Now you can. The goal of this test is to see if the concept helps communities retain new users and contributors.
  • A 'nice edit!' link appears, for logged-in users only, on diff and history pages. Clicking the link notifies the user that you liked their changes.
  • This prototype is only available for English-language users at this time. We look forward to sharing the results when the test is completed.
  • You can read more about how it works on Help:Appreciation, and let us know what you think via Special:Contact/feedback!

Notable Changes

Recent mobile app updates are listed on Apps Technical Updates, and detailed site CSS-related updates can be found at http://report.wikia.net

• Discussions categories will become available, which are analogous to boards in the Forum.
  • Admins can create and manage categories within Discussions.
  • Users posting a new discussion will be required to choose a category before completing the post.
  • Readers will be able to filter the post list to show only specific categories.
• Admins will be able to manage the square "community avatar" image in the Discussions desktop layout.

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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