Technical Updates: February 23, 2024

Hello hello! February is ending and it’s time for a new Technical Update –time flies, March will come in only 6 days…—. You can read our previous update here. And as we always say, this is just a snapshot of the work done during the last weeks, there are more minor fixes and tweaks released during that time, but we don’t include all of them because it would transform this blog post into something longer than the history of How I Met Your Mother –they spent days on that sofa!!–

Recent Fixes[]

• The Cargo extension's Special:Drilldown produced an exception when filtering it by field
• Special:ListFiles was not adapted to dark mode on FandomMobile
• There was no automatic HTTPS redirect from HTTP in place for closed wikis

Changes in Development[]

• CodeMirror upgrade was reverted after the last Tech Update. We received some reports from the Community and reverted the changes in the next few days. The upgrade will continue in minor batches that will be released progressively after checking they don’t have a negative impact on the user experience.
• Fandom is commited with the safety of their wikis. In the next weeks, we will add extra protection to the wikis directed at children (option that can be chosen when you are founding a new wiki or enabled by request later). The edition will be restricted to emailconfirmed accounts. It will reduce the number of active editors in those wikis, but we think this is something acceptable in order to protect the children visiting our platform.

Development Updates[]

News and Ratings (N&R)[]

• [New Experiment] GameFAQs Guides & Walkthroughs: To test if we can drive content discovery between Fandom wikis and GameFAQ, we are adding a right-rail GameFAQs Guides & Walkthroughs Widget to the right rail on desktop on roughly 30 gaming wikis. It'll contain guides and walkthrough content matching up with the wiki it is on. Given that this is the first N&R crosslinking widget experiment focused on engagement, we want to validate our hypothesis that users coming to Fandom gaming wikis find N&R content useful to their gaming experience and that both sites can help readers find the information they need when they need it. This experiment will run for at least 2 weeks.

Platform[]

• We are upgrading the Fandom Authentication process. You shouldn’t notice any change, but it will have a high impact on the platform, improving the security of all our services (including registration, login, and 2-factor authentication). We plan to finish the upgrade at the end of March. If you have to re-login again in the next weeks, it will be due to the upgrade!
• Improving the security of vital tools for the staff. During the last weeks, Platform team improved the security of the tools used for editing user accounts and investigating bugs reported by them. We have limited access to those tools and only some Community employees can access them now.

User-Generated Content (UGC) team[]

• [Experiment Concluded] Visual Editor performance improvement: We found a way to significantly reduce the load time of the 2017 Visual Editor by half. After a successful experiment, we’ll be adding this upgrade by the week of March 11.
• [New Experiment] Progress in Interactive Maps: We will be running an experiment on gaming wiki to allow users to mark their in-game progress in our interactive maps, showing checkboxes to mark or unmark locations. In addition, they can also use a filter to show only the checked or unchecked markers.
• [New Experiment] Welcome messages on Message Wall for first-time editors: New editors on wikis will receive an automated message from Fandomstaff thanking them for their contribution and encouraging them to visit Special:Community. While for the duration of the experiment local moderators cannot change the wording of the welcome message, they can edit the content on Special:Community to make sure the wiki’s to-do list is up to date.

Traffic team[]

• Quick Answers: We continue to invest in making the QuickAnswers Dashboard as useful to editors as possible by taking the feedback of the test communities on board. Since our last update blog, we've added a counter to the available filters on the dashboard that will auto-update as the QAs get processed to give the moderators a better overview. In addition to that, we're working on fine-tuning the vetting period even more by creating what we call a "faucet" system. The idea behind this is that local moderators can -- for now -- ask staff to deviate from the default release schedule to one that accommodates the needs and capabilities of the community better. We hope to have released and tested this with our testing communities by our next Tech Update blog. So stay tuned for more updates!

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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