Last spring, we released chat for wikis and so far over 12,000 communities have started using it! With so many active communities using chat on a daily basis, we have gotten a lot of great feedback and requests for improvements.

Starting this Wednesday, we will be releasing an update to chat on all English wikis. It's already live on a couple of select communities as well as Community Test (so feel free to test it out there).

We've changed the way users are banned from chat to make it more like blocking on a wiki. With this release, the "bannedfromchat" user right will no longer exist. The new blocking system will be as follows:

• Kick - We created a new action called "Kick" for admins and chatmods. Kick severs the offending user's connection f…

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Over the past few months our technical team has been busy at work refactoring videos on Wikia. What does that mean exactly? Refactoring is a technical process that changed the underlying code for videos so that it is more MediaWiki friendly. The current way we handle videos was a custom namespace hack which doesn’t work well with MediaWiki. It is not searchable, has bad file history and just all around a bit clunky.

The refactoring has resulted in videos now being seen by MediaWiki as “files”. This means they will be part of the file namespace, and so are now searchable and have more detailed file pages that can be integrated into image display tools (galleries, slideshow, etc). The videos will still automatically receive a videos category …

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Hi all,

Part of my role here at Wikia is to help organize and manage the staff blog. As 2012 is upon us, I have been thinking a lot about what new posts we can bring to the blog that will be fun, interesting and enjoyable for the community. One of the great things about the Wikia blog is that you as readers get to comment, join in and have a larger conversation with us. We want to keep this conversation going.

In 2011 we started a number of blog post series, including featured wikian, weekly technical updates and founder & admin advice. We want to continue with these kinds of features in 2012, as well as add new and interesting content to the blog.

Yesterday our team got together to brainstorm new and interesting topics. Here are some of the …

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It's been an exciting year here at Wikia — with lots of growth, changes and merriment. In order to capture the holiday spirit that's filling the Wikia office we created a short video during Wikia Day for you to check out:

We wish you all a very happy holiday season — and don't forget to check out the awesome holiday themed wikis in the Wikia Holiday Card. Happy editing to all!

About a month ago, the Wikia Community Support team asked for your feedback on our product release process; the response rate was huge, with just under 4,000 users taking the survey! Below are some of our findings as well as some recommendations based on this information.

• Who took the survey?
  • 59% of respondents are between the ages of 13-18
  • The age of account (length of time the respondents have been members of Wikia) is pretty even, though the folks who’ve been here between 1-3 years (27%) nudges the noobs out by one percent (26%)
  • 62% of respondents have never given feedback on one of the Wikia staff blog posts before
• What did we learn?
  • Just over a third of the people who responded want to learn about new features via a sitewide message (36%)
  • 39…

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