There have been several mandatory changes from wikia lately, with several more on the way. This forum post is to notify MA users of these changes as well as address any MA specific questions that there may be. Overall questions, complaints, and feedback should be placed on the individual wikia blogs or by using Special:Contact.
Uncreated categories
- See the forum post and blog post at wikia central.
All previously red linked categories will now appear blue. This means if you misspell a category nothing will seem wrong, so please take the extra time to do more work because wikia has said this is here to stay. Feel free to let them know what you think about it by using Special:Contact. - Archduk3 10:46, August 10, 2011 (UTC)
Concealer now includes CSS to re-add red links, but problem remains for all other users. - Archduk3 21:13, August 18, 2011 (UTC)
- Do I have to add that to my concealer? I'm still seeing blue links for "red" categories in Monobook.--31dot 23:28, August 18, 2011 (UTC)
.newcategory { color: #C20; }
You only have the concealer called on your wikia.css, so it won't work in monobook. Just add the above CSS to your monobook.css file. Some poeple have been adding an !important to it, but it seems to be working fine on my end without it. - Archduk3 23:38, August 18, 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks. I think I've got it now.--31dot 23:57, August 18, 2011 (UTC)
Admin dashboard
If you're an administrator and using the Oasis skin, you already know about this "feature". There is no turning this off, but wikia says it will be addressing some the major bugs and problems this caused. This includes:
- Restoring navigation links and the search bar
- Removing the sidebar on special pages
- Fixing broken formatting to special pages
- etc
Several changes have already been made to the CSS files to make this look like the rest of MA, and more will be required as wikia updates it use the sites theme, which it didn't do at release. - Archduk3 10:46, August 10, 2011 (UTC)
New user page headers
Another compulsory change will be a new user page format. Some adjustment of the current CSS for user pages will be required for this most likely. - Archduk3 10:46, August 10, 2011 (UTC)
CSS adjusted. Concealer moves the talk page edit button to reduce the amount of wasted space. - Archduk3 21:13, August 18, 2011 (UTC)
New default editor
A change to the editing window that should be live here "in a couple of weeks". I strongly suggest we start contacting wikia on this now, not after it replaces the current version. I also suggest that editors not using monobook go to community central and try this out, or switch to monobook now. - Archduk3 10:46, August 10, 2011 (UTC)
- Aside: The RTE is supposed to be disabled on MA, so I'm not sure how this will change will affect things. -- sulfur 11:32, August 10, 2011 (UTC)
The way staff have been putting it is that "visual mode" will remain disabled, but you will have to use the new format, and the new format blows ass in my humble opinion. This is why I was suggesting we get on top of this issue now. - Archduk3 14:19, August 10, 2011 (UTC)
- Well, the "visual" editor is disabled on MA still, and will stay that way. The new "source" editor is still pretty irritating though. Alas. -- sulfur 13:50, September 8, 2011 (UTC)
Now live, report editor bugs here
This is now live, and still buggy as hell, so report any problems here. Also, the CSS for this still seems to be in flux, so further updates to our CSS may be required. - Archduk3 00:37, September 8, 2011 (UTC)
The copyright link located in the editing rail, where it can be hidden I might add, links to wikia's copyright information, not ours. This needs to be changed, since the only other place the copyright info is located on editing pages now is hidden in the notifications popup, which is neither conspicuous or helpful to new editors. The copyright info should never be able to be hidden anyway, but all links to that information should be to the correct ones. - Archduk3 07:01, September 8, 2011 (UTC)
- Reported. -- sulfur 13:50, September 8, 2011 (UTC)
"External Sponsor Links"
Can we get rid of the completely impractical "External Sponsor Links" sections? Except for the majority of episode articles, they mess up the formatting of caps in headings (other than being completely unrelated to the content of each article, and totally unencyclopedic). Is wikia just trying to be a pain in the ass?! --Defiant 09:12, September 9, 2011 (UTC)
New user talk pages
Wikia thought hard, and now thinks that user talk pages don't work as they should. Their answer is "more speech bubbles!" (apparently, that's their answer to everything nowadays): information about the "message wall".
If you archived older discussions from your talk page, please think about moving these archive pages from User_talk: to the User: namespace, and make sure that those archives are as up-to-date as possible shortly before the switch - I guess that User_talk: pages could become inaccessible once "walls" are activated. -- Cid Highwind 17:03, September 29, 2011 (UTC)
- An update on the project so far- apparently it may be possible to disable this feature when it is released, at least during the test. --31dot 03:24, October 1, 2011 (UTC)
- Unfortunately, Wikia "throttles" page moves so that once you have done three, you have to wait to do more. For people like me with talk page archives going back to 2006, this is annoying. --OuroborosCobra talk 04:33, October 1, 2011 (UTC)
According to [1], we're getting a new navigation menu soon. The menu actually doesn't look too bad on the available test wiki, with some exceptions:
- "Level 3" menu items are sometimes formatted wrong (text escapes box) and especially hard to navigate (if hitting another "level 2" entry while moving the mouse, the previous menu will close without delay). For these reasons, I suggest that we not use any "level 3" menu items.
- Apparently, the current "Wiki Activity" button will be removed. For that reason, I suggest that we make the rightmost "level 1" menu item a link to Special:RecentChanges.
-- Cid Highwind 17:39, October 5, 2011 (UTC)
- That seems unnecessary, and would waste a slot, since the "On the Wiki" tab will contain it...and will open by default when the pages loads...and we can't change the contents of that tab which will be determined by wikia. So yay! Can we have a serious conversation about changing "hosts" now, since wikia clearly isn't hosting MA anymore. So we lose the address until 2013, it's not like we don't have alternatives, and wikia can't keep a copy, or "spin us off" as they like to call it, since it violates the copyright, which is held by us. - Archduk3 11:16, October 6, 2011 (UTC)