Fanlore upgrade on Saturday!

[aethel]

Dear Fanlore editors and readers,

Finally, after months of work, the MediaWiki upgrade is ready to go live! It is scheduled for Saturday, November 24, at 22:00 UTC. (What time is it where I am?) If everything goes according to plan, there should be no downtime, but you will not be able to edit Fanlore for a short time.

Why the upgrade?
MediaWiki is the software Fanlore and many other wikis, including Wikipedia, are built on. Until now Fanlore was using version 1.15, which is woefully out of date, so we are switching to 1.19. Upgrading will allow us to, for example, install new extensions to better fight spam on the site. For more information about different versions of MediaWiki, you can go here.

Why the new skin?
With the new mediawiki version, we decided to switch our default skin from WordPress to Vector. The WordPress skin is no longer under active development and wasn't meant for this MediaWiki version. Continuing to use it would have meant extensive fixes now and in the future, and we decided against it.

Instead, Natalie (from the OTW's Webmasters committee) and Qem (an AO3 tag wrangler) have very kindly volunteered to customize the CSS to recreate an approximation of Fanlore's old WordPress skin. You will see a few differences: the sections in the sidebar are now collapsible, wikilinks are no longer bolded by default, and the talk page link appears on the left side of the screen. Let us know if anything is broken with the new skin.

To save ourselves much effort, we are only supporting our default skin at this time. It's possible to use a different one, but the formatting might be strange.

Other Changes?
We have removed the bugtracker extension (also no longer supported) and OpenID support.

Problems?
If you discover any bugs or issues, please let us know!

Many Thanks
to Emufarmers, the Systems Committee, astirya, Natalie, and Qem

Comments

[aethel]

I'm not sure why infoboxes are displaying that way. I've reported the issue.

The .not-patrolled{background-color:#ffa} looked useful, so I haven't asked anyone to change it yet. Is it very annoying? I see it only when I'm logged in; I'm not sure if users without gardener privileges would see it.

Visited wikilinks still look blue to me. (Though actually they were purple before.) WordPress automatically bolded all wikilinks, but Vector does not, and some people had asked for this to be fixed. However, if it is unreadable, we can revisit. In my completely non-expert opinion, I think font-weight and color should be a relatively simple fix.

[espresso_addict]

[By the way, I sent these comments and some others to the OTW contact e-mail given in the announcement then noticed things were changing under my feet a lot, and gave up!]

The unpatrolled colour is quite dark on my screen; it would be easier to read the new page titles (newly unbolded) with a much lighter shade. There again, that might be invisible on some people's monitors. I'd say if we are planning to use the patrolled feature, it would be worth finding a shade that works for everyone. But if we're not, then it detracts from page readability. I'm happy either way -- I do new page patrol a fair amount, and would be happy to click 'patrolled', as long as that was only taken to mean 'I eyeballed this and found it was broadly ok' rather than the meaning on en-Wiki (article has been reasonably rigorously checked by someone who has a passing familiarity with the area). It might mean that new pages no gardener/admin has eyeballed would be more likely to get clicked, and multiple people don't all descend on a page that doesn't need any attention.

The visited wikilinks still look black to me, unless I turn the brightness on my laptop way up into headache zone, in which case I can just about make out that they are purplish. Given the small text size and the fact that they are no longer bold, more colour differentiation from text would seem useful. Perhaps just make them the same colour as unvisited links?

I'm easy on whether links should be automatically bolded. Coming from Wikipedia (where they are not), the bold links were a bit of a culture shock (especially as bold italics for eg titles really looks hideous), but I did get used to them over time. Readability guidelines for webpages tend to suggest non-bold links for reading, but the bold links do encourage exploring. If they are left unbolded, then it would be useful to publish stylesheet tweaks so that those who much prefer them bold can adjust. There again, probably 99% of our traffic is from Google, so the great majority of readers will be logged out.

Sorry for the tl;dr: web readability is a bit of a personal hobby horse.

[briar_pipe]

The infoboxes were showing up left-aligned without borders at first, but they've since been fixed. I like the centered placement of the navigation links at the top and the collapsed drop-down menus on the left (less clutter is always easier for my eyes to handle).

The coloring/bolding issue is a bit difficult on my end. Like Espresso Addict, the blue shows on my screen as nearly black, and the purple isn't much better (I'm on a 32-bit display on a Mac, if that makes a difference). I had to bump up the font size to see both unvisited and visited links; only uncreated pages (red) appeared clearly. If there are folks who are upset about the bolding from before, can there be some skin system we could choose from? I'm currently running my cursor over the lines of text to find the links. >.<

Kudos to everyone who worked on the upgrade! You guys are amazing. *\o/*

[espresso_addict]

The end result is a bit ugly, but I've just discovered that you can turn on link underlining under preferences, which at least makes them visible without upping the font size or blasting the brightness through the roof. It's under Preferences: Appearance: Advanced options: link underlining.

[briar_pipe]

Oh, thank you! That works wonders. Long lists are not pretty, but the pages themselves are so much easier to work with. <3