Eyo, lovely people! A new two weeks have passed since the May 3rd Technical Update blog. If you've been following our technical staff blogs, you know that this means we will be going over some of what's happened the past 2 weeks in terms of fixes, things being worked on, potential experiments, and other technical updates. If you are new to our tech blogs, well hello there! This is the place to be to get a glimpse of some of the things that have been happening during those weeks in terms of fixes, things being worked on, potential experiments, and other technical updates. So let's get to it!
As we continue working on our Quick Answers feature (more about that below) based on gathered feedback, the Traffic Team recently finished work on a priority user request: a new user role, Quick Answers Editor, which admins can give to users without additional rights to access the Special:QuickAnswers dashboard. Before, only those with additional rights (think bureaucrats, admins, content mods, thread mods, and rollback users) could access the dashboard to review and edit the QAs listed there. Starting next week, any user deemed trustworthy by the admins can receive this access, and just as with other rights, it can also be taken away by them or the user themselves.
Thanks to the hard work of our UGC team, interacting on wikis aimed at children will be restricted to emailconfirmed accounts as an extra safety measure for our younger users. A wiki can be labeled as being "aimed at children" either by the founder upon its creation or afterwards by a Fandom Staff decision. Coming next week, in a phased release, accounts that have no confirmed email address will no longer be able to edit those wikis, leave article comments, discussions posts, and message wall messages. If your account isnāt emailconfirmed, youāll be alerted of this via a notice in the bottom left corner. We will also be adding some explanatory notices on relevant social places to alert people to why they canāt take certain actions anymore and how to remedy that. You can confirm your email via Special:Preferences. This measure will reduce the number of active editors on those wikis, but this feels like an acceptable tradeoff in order to protect our younger audience.
While most of us here think of wikis when we speak about "Fandom", the company also has other sites under its belt. One of them being Metacritic, and it's there where we shut down the display of ads on the "My Profile" page.
Recent Fixes[]
Interacting with at least two embedded maps will no longer break the full screen button functionality.
This security risk was discovered through our bug bounty program with HackerOne. From now on, the existing safeguards against svg files uploaded with malicious content will also cover svg files uploaded in a Message Wall post.
On May 13th, all Fandom urls experienced a timeout for a few minutes due to a cluster overload.
Confirming the email address on your Fandom account no longer results in an error message.
Switching to/from the mobile layout is working smoothly again.
An issue with the date deserializer on the Fandom app caused multiple Fandom App users to be unable to log in.
The language variant menu on FandomDesktop will now also display the current language variant for the various variants of the Chinese language.
Several CodeMirror update fixes were rolled out to ensure smooth testing and a later roll out of the feature (see more about this below):
Users will be able to select multiple things at once via click+ctrl.
All editor buttons work while the syntax highlighting is enabled.
The flashing cursor is no longer visible (or duplicated) when selecting text.
Editing on multiple lines though alt+click will continue to work.
Fixes in Development[]
As our new Community Managers started reaching out to wikis, we continue the preparation of phasing out and replacing the mention of "Wiki Representative" in public (and backend) places.
[Experiment Results] Register to mark Interactive Map progress: The experiment was concluded ahead of schedule for mobile due to some data discrepancies. Despite this, we feel confident in our assessment that users feel compelled to register after successfully interacting with the feature. The team will continue to further analyze the experiment.
A mock-up of a new variant to entice people to register for an account while using the Interactive Maps feature.
We also continue to fine-tune the process to further entice users to interact with the feature and register to save their progress properly. We're currently working on some new designs to hopefully achieve this.
We're also looking into ways to make it visually easier for users to see which markers have been marked as completed.
Maps Full screen: This functionality was released site-wide as a native feature a month ago, so technically it isn't an update, but since data is fun, let us share some numbers with you all: this feature resulted in a 8.52% (about 20k users) increase on desktop for the "Time on Site Estimated Effect". On mobile, this was a 13.9% (about 13.5k users) increase. In addition, about 60% of the wikis with maps have used this feature across nearly 4k of their pages.
Quick Answers: Although the work continues, now that the AI-generator for the answers has been tweaked to be more in line with the encyclopedic voice of the wiki, we have resumed our outreach to communities to start a collaboration for the feature. The default on which we're operating is that every 7 days, 10 new character pages will receive 3 to 5 QuickAnswers per page (thus making for 30 to 50 QAs in total per released batch), for which those with additional rights have 30 days the time to review them. During the review period, the QAs are not visible outside the Special:QuickAnswers dashboard. It's only upon manually publishing or saving an edit to a QA that it will go live before the 30 days have passed. If you don't do anything with the QAs for 30 days, these will be published automatically. However, we want to emphasize that this is the *default* in which the feature is presented. We are very much looking for this to be a collaborative effort with communities, so please reach out to your Community Manager, Jenny, contact Fandom Staff, or leave a comment in the comment section here to raise your concerns and/or request a change to the default if any of the above numbers do not work for your community. We love to hear your feedback and work with you through potential blockers.
To reiterate the above-mentioned change, if a moderator team wants to employ the help of users from the community who do not have any additional rights on the wiki, starting next week, it will be possible to assign them the new quick-answers-editor role in order to give them access to the Special:QuickAnswers dashboard.
[Testing] CodeMirror update: as evidenced by how many times we've referenced this before, this update is a big thing with lots of hidden bugs. To make the release as smooth as possible, we started testing this out on a handful of wikis (big thank you to all those involved!) earlier this week for the 2010 source editor. If all goes well, we'll include the 2017 visual editor in a few weeks before rolling things out platform wide. You can find more details about this in the April 19 Tech Blog.
[Experiment Results] Welcome messages on Message Walls: While it remains a user favorite, the experiment gauging the retention rate for new users on a 7, 14, and 21-day basis resulted in no statistically relevant outcomes. In terms of message interaction, of all the users who received a welcome message, only 37.7% actually saw it and only 8.4% clicked on the link to Special:Community. While it didn't particularly move the needle in terms of engagement and user retention, there were also no notable decreases either, so we continue to discuss what the future of this feature will be.
As noted in our last tech blog, the UX Team is still experimenting with and testing out the best possible method to ensure that our testing method for experiments and the data collection is running smoothly. Once these ongoing tests have been completed, we will resume with the previously noted upcoming experiments.
That's it for the past weeks! Per usual, if you encounter something that feels off about the platform, please report it by sending in a bug report, reach out to your Community Manager, contact the Product Support Owner on their Wall/talk page, as just simply sound off in the comments here. As always, thank you for helping us by continuing to communicate. Happy editing, everyone!
Lostris is a Wiki Team member at Fandom. When not online, she lives to travel, play roller derby, and escape the world by watching anything that has a good plot, good acting, and preferably a ton of sassy one-liners.
