Technical Update: December 6, 2011

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.

New Features

• We'll be releasing a new version of our mobile skin later this week, which will include your wiki's wordmark and navigation, as well as improved image placement and viewing tools. This will be the first in a series of improvements to our mobile interface.

Major Bugs Fixed

• The right rail in the editor was displaying below the content editing area for some versions of Firefox.
• The transparency slider in Theme Designer was dislaying by default at 50%, instead of its actual default value of full opacity.
• The edit button on past versions of some pages was linking to the editor for the current version.
• One of our servers was generating intermittent errors -- in particular errors in displaying newly saved articles and comments, and in viewing some special pages. This was the cause of recent double blog posts, edit and deletion conflicts and other oddities. The responsible server has had a severe talking to and now seems to be behaving.

Other Notable Changes

• We're releasing a handful of updates to Message Wall, including better email notifications, a working Welcome Bot, cross-wiki notifications, the ability to view source on any message, and the ability to sort threads by various criteria. As a reminder, Message Wall is still in development, and you can try it out at our Community Test wiki.
• We've increased the maximum background image size from 100kb to 150kb in Theme Designer.

Select Known Issues

• Some users are having issues accessing chat.
• Some blog posts are displaying a date of 1970. While we'd like to take credit for scientific advances in time travel, this is just a bug.

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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