Forum:Sannse's Area of Astonishing Announcements

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Please don't shout here... please make another topic for shouting at me if you don't like anything I say here. -- sann

17 September 2007

The Wikia Humour Blog is a way of getting snippets of articles out into the blogosphere and linked here and there. To add to it, you just edit MediaWiki:Blog snippet. Wikia staff are currently experimenting with adding Uncyc snippets there, but you are welcome to take over of course... -- sannse (talk) 18:50, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

14 September 2007

I've been a bit lax in updating this... but here's one... We have made a new feature that may be useful to you. It's a tab on each article to "report a problem". This leads to a small form that can be used to give information on what's wrong. There is then a special page (Special:ProblemReports) that allows admins to mark each as fixed, not a problem, or to flag it for Wikia staff. The idea is to catch all the people that don't know enough about wikis yet to fix things themselves, or how to find admins to help them. At the moment, we get email from people with problems that would much better be addressed by local admins, and it can be hard for newbies to know how to contact them. Hopefully this will help. So, this will be enabled shortly and is on Inside Wikia now as a preview. Please have a look at it, try it out, and let us know whether it's something you want. If not, we can disable it for Uncyc. As usual, please make a new topic if you have comments, feedback, or complaints. Thanks -- sannse (talk) 21:51, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

10 May 2007

It's coming OK Olipro? Stop hassling me forgoodnesssake. In other news... RandomImage has been installed. This lets you add an image that is randomly chosen from the whole database. Having looked at a lot of images recently, and got a general idea of what's in there, I don't think I'll be using this on my user page. We also have a new special page at Special:Linksearch which allows you to find all pages linking to a particular domain. This is useful for finding spam links, see here for an example. Most of this week has been taken up with upgrading and work on the new skin/search/etc. - none of this affects Uncyclopedia at the moment, although hopefully the upgrade and search improvements will be here soon. I don't guarantee that I won't have strangled Olipro before then though. -- sannse (talk) 15:11, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

29 April 2007

Soo.. lots going on at the moment... we are upgrading to Mediawiki 1.10a at the moment. This time it's a smaller jump, so we are upgrading without downtime. The technical team are working in batches, starting with the smaller wikis first. The hope is that we can knock out some of the bugs before we get to the biggies. These are some feature that we will be rolling out with the upgrade or soon: We are adding a blogging feature that lets you edit a page on this wiki, and have the results show on a blog. The idea is to put out some tempting nuggets of funniness and draw in some more newbies (yes we do want newbies... honest!). There is a demo version at http://fp012.qa.wikia.com/wiki/User:Emil - which blogs to http://blogs.wikia.com/emil/ One complaint we hear about mediawiki is that it's not obvious how to create a new page. So we are introducing a "create a page page". Again there is a demo at http://fp006.qa.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Createpage We are stealing the nifty login box from ArmchairGM. Not a lot of change here, except you are not taken away from the page you are viewing, the login box floats on top. The search is being worked on (yes, again...) this time it's a fancy tabbed search that allows you to search just uncyc, all wikia wikis, wikipedia, or the web. If you don't like it, you can switch back to the old view in preferences (I like it). There is also going to be a "search flickr" page, that allows you to find Creative Commons licensed images and import them directly. There will be a page for admins to enter terms that we want Goggle to associate with this wiki. This is supposed to increase the effectiveness of Goggle searches, and so hopefully improve our ranking. Then there are some that won't affect you: Wikia has a new logo: which is very... orange. There will be a new skin for newbies. This won't be added to Uncyclopedia on the basis that it wouldn't work to have a parody of Wikipedia looking so different from Wikipedia. But, of course, if you think differently and want this then let us know. There is a page about it at wikia:Newskin. We will be adding a structured editing page. This is for wikis that have a very set format for their pages (say, pages on films, with the layout the same for each one). Wikihow has something similar for their pages. It's handy for keeping things consistent, but I can't see it as useful on Uncyclopedia. I think that's it for now. Remember, please start a thread in the dump if you want to comment, complain, suggest, or just whinge about the orangeness of the logo. -- sannse (talk) 10:42, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

29 March 2007

There's not been much here recently, what with the upgrade and following bug fixes, but this one was a bug fix on a new feature - so it's available for the first time. Admins can now see edits to deleted articles of any contributor. This is very handy when all of a vandal's "contributions" have been deleted, giving you the full history of his activity. This feature shows as a new tab on the contributions page, or as a link like: http://uncyclopedia.org/index.php?title=Special:DeletedContributions&target=Sannse

28 Feb 2007

Got a nice one for you this week: you can now make image maps, with different areas clickable. Problem is, there is no help page yet... when I've done writing it, it will be here. On the good side, if you use this tool, it's surprisingly easy. Bureaucrats can now give, and remove, rollback rights. As always, it's a community decision whether you want to use this feature, personally I tend to prefer the idea of people getting full admin rights or not at all. But then that's just me. Wikia now has Oversight. For those that don't know, this is the ability to remove edit completely from view, including out of the view of admins. This will be a staff only feature, and one that we hope will be used very rarely. Mostly it will be used to remove personal information spammed by vandals. If you think there is an edit that needs to be removed in this way, please contact me or any other Wikia staff. Thanks all -- sannse (talk) 09:05, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

23 Feb 2007

There is a new special page, at Special:Editcount, which will show you your edit count (not very surprisingly). There is a help at Wikia:Help:Edit count, but frankly, if you can't work it out yourself you probably have no edits. Update: this now understands the difference between a comma and a decimal point. Clever thing technology -- sannse (talk) 16:12, 27 February 2007 (UTC) It's now possible to add RSS feeds from other sites to Uncyclopedia. The code is simple: <RSS>feed URL</RSS>. I can't think of uses on Uncyclopedia for this... maybe you want to show your blog on your user page? And maybe I want to ignore it. The help page is at Wikia:Help:RSS2Wiki Many of you will have seen Wikipedia's donation notice, and that it could be dismissed with a click. This has now been added to Uncyclopedia. The help page for this is at Wikia:Help:Site notice. The default for the top browser bar as been changed, but doesn't fit Uncyclopedia very well. So I've edited it off the default...you might want to refine that or something. The page is MediaWiki:Pagetitle (admin only) That's it for now -- sannse (talk) 16:34, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

09 Feb 2007

Hi Guys, message from John Q: We received an e-mail from our datacenter in San Jose telling us that they will be doing maintenance on the fiber link connects to Level3 over the next two days. We may experience periods of slowness as they re-route traffic to other channels while doing their work. -- sannse (talk) 20:57, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

23 Jan 2007

All Uncyclopedia interlanguage links were updated today. So all the Uncyclopedia versions we host should be fully linked to all the other versions. Please let me know if you find any missing or misdirected links. We also added a small calendar feature. This allows a sorted list of events in the next three months. I can't think of any use for this here, but it's available if you want to use it. See Wikia:Help:Calendar for more information. News on the upgrade, we plan to start this on Sunday. The technical team are going to make a clean install, to remove some discrepancies between the code we are running on and the core code, and will then need to re-integrate all our customisations. Obviously this isn't going to be an easy job, and it's likely there will be some disruption and possibly downtime. I'll keep you updated as I know more. sannse (talk) 18:20, 23 January 2007 (UTC) Addendum, the mw:Extension:CharInsert extension was also deployed. Also, captchas should be shorter and easier to read now. Enhanced recent changes has been made the default for logged out users and new users. New users (and old users) can change this in their preferences.

9 Jan 2007

Nothing that directly affects Uncyclopedia this week, but there are two changes to the search stystem that are under test. The first uses Google search, and can be seen at w:c:muppets:Special:Search. The second is a lucene search that will be an option in preferences, replacing the google search for the first two tabs. This is currently indexing the wikis, once that's done, you will be able to try it at w:c:creatures:Special:Search. sannse (talk) 20:40, 9 January 2007 (UTC)