Technical Updates: April 5, 2024

Hello hello! The last Technical Update was published 2 weeks ago so it means it’s time for a new one. As always, we remind you this is just a snapshot of the work done during the last weeks. We don’t include all the minor fixes and tweaks because it would convert this blog post into something longer than the list of characters appearing in Disney sagas –12,778–

Recent Fixes[]

• Long usernames that don't line break caused some design issues:
  • They pushed the "edit profile" and “post to wall” buttons to overlap the right rail at some page widths
  • In the list of notifications, the name overflowed to the right, making the whole space scrollable.
• Deleted message wall view was not displaying properly for anon and regular users
• Releasing the QuickAnswers Dashboard to more communities surfaced a duplication of the Quick Answers link in the QuickBar and the UserTool dropdown. The Quick Answers link has been removed from the UserTool.
• Users without additional rights could no longer report a reply on other people’s message wall.
• Link suggest selection via keyboard was broken in both source editors
• Clicking the section edit option with the 2017 VisualEditor source mode loaded the entire page within the editor instead of the selected section. The issue does still persist for the VisualEditor visual mode.
• Saving changes to user profile content (e.g. avatar or bio) initially looked like it worked, but when you refreshed the page, the changes were not visible. This has been remedied, though more work continues to prevent it from recurring.

Fixes in Development[]

• CodeMirror release has been delayed until the end of the month, when we will have a testing period with some wikis before releasing it across the whole platform.
• We are adapting the Wiki Representatives module on Special:Community to meet the new Community Team organization, indicating who is the Community Manager assigned to the wiki instead of a Wiki Representative. Assignments are still being determined, stay tuned!

Development Updates[]

User-Generated Content (UGC) team[]

• [Ongoing Experiment] Welcome messages on Message Walls: targeting 50% of the users making their first edit on the local wiki (the other 50% is the control group), a welcoming message thanking them for their edit will be sent to them by one of three Staff members, inviting them to check out Special:Community for more things to do on the wiki. The experiment was released on March 28th and will run for 3 weeks. For the duration of the experiment, the message cannot be adapted by local moderators, not can the sender of it be changed, though local admins are encouraged to review the content on Special.Community to make sure it’s helpful. You can find more information here.

UX Team[]

• [Tweak] Fan Feed Removal: After showing a small increase in SEO during tests, we will be removing the Fan Feed from pages with less than 200 words of content. We aim for this to go live on April 17 barring unforeseen circumstances.
• [Experiment] Global Nav Bar Redesign:
  • [Concluded] We are finishing analyzing data from our first test with hover and click variants, and preliminary analysis is showing that for our U.S users, the hover variant was winning for the first few days of the experiment then began to slow down along with the click variant. This drop is hypothesized to be caused by the absence/relocation of the ‘Others like you also viewed' module. Neither variant made a difference for users outside the U.S..
  • [Future Experiment] Our second Global Nav Bar Redesign experiment will feature the addition of a top global nav along with moving functionality from the left to the top bar. While previously announced (you can read more details here), the experiment is currently postponed to fix a minor issue.
• [Future Experiment] Collapsed Table of Contents: As mentioned in our previous Technical Updates blog, we will be testing an experience that has the Table of Contents collapsed, allowing for content to show higher in the page. We are looking to begin this experiment sometime in the next two to four weeks.
• [Future Experiment] Hyperlinked Images: Previously known as “Picture Near Paragraph”. We are continuing to create mock designs - the initial designs are completed, and we are moving on the animated mocks for reference.
• [Future Experiment] Mobile Test: Collapsed Content Headers: We are continuing to design the experiment and work on a solution to have the text from the Google Snippet appearing with its related content opened and not collapsed.
• [Future Experiment] Mobile Test: Drawer: We are looking to experiment on a possible “drawer” that would slide up from the bottom, without covering the page, to allow access to widgets and other content. We are conducting interviews on possible designs. We will use the information gained from these interviews to choose which design will be part of the experiment.

Traffic team[]

• Quick Answers: We have begun to scale out the Quicks Answers tool to wikis outside the initial testing communities. Last tech blog we announced that we released the QuickAnswers dashboard to wikis who already had QuickAnswers present on the wiki. Now, we’ll be starting the process of releasing new Quick Answers to wikis. Before the release, a Community Manager will reach out to open the lines of communication and foster collaboration on this feature.

Platform team[]

• As a tip of the iceberg reveal: in a continuous effort of keeping the platform up and running, we’ll be conducting a failover test on three selected wikis. A cache safeguard will be enabled to allow us to review what occurs when the servers are down as well as keep the wiki running while traffic is being redirected to another server.

Thank you for all your support, and as always, if there is anything you think should be fixed, please contact us on our Walls/talk pages or send us a bug report!

Antonio R. Castro

Fandom Staff

Antonio R. Castro is part of Fandom since May 2007. He was helper for 3 years focused on ES community and since 2011 he is a member of the Fandom staff. He is working currently like Product Support Lead. Fan of wikis, videogames, Star Wars, Song of Ice and Fire and any TV series pre or post Breaking Bad.

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