MediaWiki:Community-corner/Archive

Final archive: December 2012
Follow our Twitter feed: @TardisWiki We finally decided to officially join the 2010s by opening our own Twitter feed today. Please follow us, as there's coming a day soon when we'll probably stop updating the Tales from the Tardis/Community-corner area. Follow us by clicking here. Game of Rassilon math does add up

13:48, November 28, 2012 (UTC) This seems to have been fixed now. Game of Rassilon badges fixed 14:10, November 6, 2012 (UTC) Well, it's taken a little bit more time than we originally anticipated, but the Game of Rassilon has finally been totally fixed in the wake of the MediaWiki 1.19 upgrades. Administrators are now free to begin adding new ways for you to earn Rassilon points! There have been a couple of tracks on hold as we've waited for Wikia to fix things, so the playing field should be expanded relatively quickly. (No idea what we're talking about? Read more.) Prefixes getting simpler Please prefix by medium, not by series. We're massively simplifying the prefix system so as to make it more understandable for casual users of the site. The big things that are being changed right now are: Keep your eyes on our list of prefixes and forum:prefix simplification for more details.
 * all TV shows are prefixed with TV (no more DW, SJA, TW, etc.)
 * all short stories and novels are just PROSE (no more ST, NSA, QR, etc.
 * all audios are just AUDIO (no more BFA, CC, etc.).
 * all comics are just COMIC

Reminder about images When adding uploading new images to our site, you must:
 * select an accurate copyright/licensing tag
 * use only the .jpg format, if the image is a screenshot of an episode
 * keep your pic size under 100kb
 * crop images consistently with our standards, as explained at our image guide
 * make sure your pic obeys our simple, one-page list of instructions
 * choose a name that actually describes the picture in a meaningful way: ElevenFightsDaleks.jpg not 23432424.234324.323432234.snap.jpg
 * add appropriate image categories, identifying the story from which it was drawn (i.e. Category:Blink TV story images) and any major characters or species seen in the image (such as Category:Eleventh Doctor images or Category:Dalek images)

New to editing the wiki? Thanks for helping us out! We're glad you're here. We've recently made it a bit easier to understand how we do things.

If you're wondering why your recently-uploaded image might have been deleted, you might want to read our image cheat card. It lists the major points of image policy in an easy-to-read chart, and will help you ensure that your image remains a part of our database.

You'll also want to peruse a few of our policies about basic editing, such as: Help:Bypass your cache
 * why it's important articles have leads
 * why and when you should embolden the page title
 * what kind of sources you can use for your article
 * why writing in the past tense is vital for in-universe articles
 * how to use the wiki markup "language"

Review the archive of recent changes to the wiki here. Refresh your cache often The wiki continues to undergo a complete facelift. As the new style sheet is being implemented, you may see some untidy signs of construction. Thanks for your patience as we remodel. If you want to see the latest changes, you'll probably have to bypass your browser's cache. Safari users merely need to reload pages. Firefox users just have to hold down SHIFT, then press the reload button. Chrome users can press Ctrl + F5. Those using other browsers should check their help files for specific instructions.

Alternately, you can now just pull down the "edit" menu to refresh, and that should perform an automatic purge for you.

July - October 2012
New navigation bar gets its first live test The new top-of-page navigational bar mandated by Wikia is now in beta. Several changes, mostly small ones, will be made on it in the coming days. If you'd like to give feedback as it continues to be sculpted, you can certainly do so at this forum thread. Related Videos Module closed The Related Videos Module is in beta testing on this wiki. Only those actively providing beta-testing reports to Wikia — which is to say administrators — may use it to upload videos. All other users should not use the RVM to upload videos. Wikia will soon implement a revision that will radically alter the way the module works, which may invalidate whatever work you put into uploading videos. Check the tech notes forum for more details of this feature's development. Monobook has been reopened After a brief interruption following the MW 1.19 update, the Monobook skin has been fixed and is now re-opened for users. If you encounter any oddities in Monobook, please send a message to. Mac users should avoid using Firefox to edit this site Due to the fact that Safari's British spell checking abilities are significantly and demonstrably better than those of Firefox, we now strongly recommend that Mac users should only edit in Safari. Why is this important? Because British spelling isn't just a good idea — it's the law around these parts. (Windows and Linux users are affected by the crappiness of the Firefox British dictionary, but they don't have any better options.) Read more about how to get the best British spell checking environment on a Mac. MediaWiki 1.19 is here! Sometime just after Sir Chris Hoy won his sixth gold medal, Wikia finally upgraded us to MediaWiki 1.19. A lot of little differences can already be seen, as well as a few problem areas that need fixing. I've already fixed a problem with regards to tables, but if you notice anything that isn't quite working correctly, please send me a message. 19:07: Wed 08 Aug 2012 Spoilers aren't cool The series 7 page is the only page where spoilers are allowed. On this wiki, a "spoiler" is any video, image, in-universe factoid, casting info, or crewing detail — read: anything — from any episode which has not been officially released in its entirety. Thus — even though they are released by the BBC — trailers and Radio Times listings are amongst the things considered spoilers here. Note too that any advance screenings you might be lucky enough to attend do not count as an "official release".

Once we have exact air dates for the various episodes, we will, as last year, prevent these pages from being edited until the top of the hour following the global premiere broadcast. Use variable for most characters When using infoboxes for characters or even species and objects, please remember to use the variable when something has only appeared in one story. The variable is plural, and therefore anticipates plural responses. As always, with the new series, a "story" is the same thing as an "episode". So people like Nancy from The Empty Child still uses, because she's also in The Doctor Dances — but others like Timothy Lloyd use because he's only in The Doctor Dances. Most of the pre-existing instances of have now been changed to.

May/June 2012
A word about Star Trek and Assimilation Want to help us cover the upcoming Star Trek/Doctor Who comic crossover? Great! We need your help! However, note that our spoiler policy won't allow us to start editing until 30 May 2012. In the meantime, please read this important technical announcement. Namespace color coding We've recently color-coded namespaces to make it easier for you to tell which namespace you're in. This'll help you instantly recognise the difference between writer, property:writer and talk:writer, amongst other things. There are also some technical advantages to making certain namespaces render primarily with certain fonts. This will also allow us to help people avoid spoilers, since Forum:River Song, if it existed, would be even more obviously a different place to Howling:River Song. Read all about it. What happened to the brackets, man? Have you've noticed that some infobox variables, like and  suddenly don't have brackets around them any more? This isn't a mistake. This is because they are being automatically linked by the template, so that we can create a truly powerful database. Please do not link these variables, or it will create an error that looks like this:. Read more about powerful new tools that are being built. See what's hidden! After a few months of being away, the option to see hidden categories has returned to Special:Preferences.  Read the whole story!  How are your table-making skills? All editors: please take two minutes to read this bit of advice about proper creation of tables. What's up with the search bar? Are you confused by the behavior of the search bar lately? Do you wish it would just settle down and work like it used to? If so, read this message. Performance fixes A number of subtle changes have been made to the wiki which should improve performance of those on slightly older browsers. You should be finiding that scrolling down pages will be a bit less laggy — if you ever noticed there was lag at all. People on the very latest browsers will probably not experience any noticeable performance boosts, unless they're running a lot of programs at once. If you're still experiencing any issues with the site being laggy versus other wikia sites, please clear your cache, try again, then let CzechOut know if the problem persists. Dates of Big Finish releases If you're a digital subscriber to Big Finish, we need your help! As was recently confirmed in the Big Finish podcast, their website always falsely lists the date of release of every CD as the last day of the month. But the actual release is not the end of the month. Digital subscribers receive the product on something we can accept as the "actual" release date. This date should be added to the infobox as the. Since the actual release date is both irregular and unknown, admin cannot reliably unprotect the articles without your help. Please give one of us a nudge to unblock the page on the date you receive it. Monobook finally finished By and large, the multi-month project to style the monobook skin is now complete. If you've never looked at the wiki in the monobook skin, go to Special:Preferences, and scroll down to the skin option on the first page. Why are we so late styling a skin from half a decade ago? Um, because. Skin change button All editors are enouraged to install the new skin change button so that they can easily check out the way the site looks in all three skins — monobook, wikia, and the new wikiamobile. No matter what skin you normally use to edit, it's particually important to make sure that our edits look great in wikia and wikiamobile, since these are by far the skins with which most readers see the site.

April 2012
New infoboxes At long last, the final major part of the wiki's great design makeover has begun. New infoboxes are speeding to every page that currently uses infoboxes. Some errors will be temporarily be found on pages as this process continues. Please resist the urge to make manual changes to infobox errors until further notice.. This could disrupt one of the many ongoing robotic processes. A message will appear here when the process is completed — which should be in about a week or so following 21:24, March 11, 2012 (UTC). You can usefully participate in the process by reading and posting to this forum thread. Visual editor disabled Following a long period of debate, the visual editor has been disabled. Those wishing instruction on how to use source editing should consult T:MARK. If you're truly a source-editor virgin, we'd also suggest, which contains a good video. If you're really stumped, please do leave a message on the talk pages of our administrators. Read more.

Use or , not DEFAULTSORT We want articles about stories to alphabetise according to the first non-article in the title. So, not. To make this happen automatically, just throw TitleSort on the page. Likewise, we want people to alphabetise:   Now, you can use NameSort in basically every instance. This template has been greatly enhanced, which means you should almost never need to use DEFAULTSORT or a manual sortkey on the category name. Read more. Quote of the week now automatic Because we've often fallen behind in 2011 with changing the Quote of the Week on the main page, it's now been converted to an automated process. We have quotes programmed through 2013. A lot of those quotes came from the previous nominations process, so most of the work you did hasn't been lost. We'll be letting you know in the coming months how you can participate in the process in the future. Read more. Simplifying interwiki linkage As many editors will know, sometimes it's better to link to another Wikia wiki than to wikipedia, especially when it comes to behind the scenes articles. For instance, muppet:Roger Langridge provides a perspective that neither tardis:Roger Langridge nor Roger Langridge do. Likewise, we'd obviously have an interest in lining to jamesbond:Timothy Dalton. But a lot of editors don't bother to link to other wikis, because the syntax can be a little foreign. We're actively trying to simplify that. Read more. Announcing two time-saving new templates If you find that you're constantly making links to Wikipedia, here are two great new templates that'll save you time. Instead of typing   you can now just type   and the link's made instantly. If you need that link italicised so that you can follow T:ITAL, just use  and it'll be italicised instantly. Read more at template:w and template:wi! Preloads are working again Preloadable formats are now working again! They'll save you plenty of time if you're starting an article from scratch. Just click on a red-link and then look underneath the edit summary box. You can either pull down a list of article skeletons, or you can enter an existing article to copy into your new one. If anyone wants to have a new preloadable format made, please just let CzechOut know.

December 2011
Species categories To combat inconsistency in the way categories about species are named, the bot is enforcing a standard nomenclature. Although this isn't actually a change for most categories, it does affect the way category:humans is used. More details are available at Categories dealing with species and individuals of a species.

Prefix changes Pursuant to a couple of forum discussions, a number of prefixes have recently changed. They include:
 * Doctor Who Unbound --> NOTDWU (DWU is now redirect to Doctor Who universe)
 * Doctor Who Adventures --> COMIC
 * Doctor Who annual --> DWAN
 * Doctor Who Storybook --> DWS
 * Doctor Who Yearbook --> DWY
 * Dalek annual --> DAN
 * K9 Annual 1983 --> PROSE
 * Quick Reads --> PROSE
 * Brief Encounter --> PROSE (not actually a change, but for some reason people were using the incorrect prefix DWM)

Existing links were changed by bot. It's believed that all stories in these ranges are now referenced by the appropriate prefix.

October and early November 2011
Please don't capitalise "human" The bot's just finished its quarterly run enforcing T:HUMAN and found a surprisingly high number of necessary edits. Please remember that, contrary to the practise at w:c:starwars and other wikis, we do not capitalise human, near-human, humanoid, humans, human-anything.

Preloadable formats and italic titles down for a bit The Preloadable formats system and italic page titles (operated by use of title) are both down for a bit. There seems to be an issue of interactivity with some some recent Wikia changes to the new editor. Hopefully, both features will return in under a week. Firefox fixed; tinkering continues Errors that had been popping up in Firefox have now been resolved. However, tinkering will be continuing throughout for the next several days which could make certain elements display oddly. If you see anything really major change in the way your browser sees this site, please leave a note with me. Thanks :) Should you wish to keep abreast of changes in this situation, please go to Forum:Firefox: Temporary display issues.

Setptember and early October 2011
Monobook closed We are experiencing extreme sloth in the cache. This couldn't have happened at a worse time, since the Monobook skin was finally being constructed on this site. Because of the slowness of the cache, however, there's a multi-hour delay in seeing changes to the skin. Different page loads can suddenly make the skin appear completely different. Right now, I estimate that we are approximately 8 hours behind the current state of the code. Thus, the skin is simply too unpredictable for use.

For that reason, I have to declare that skin closed for use until further notice. If you can't see Amy Pond in your page background, you're using the wrong skin. NOTE TO ADMINS: Please don't make any changes to monobook.css or common.css until I sound the all-clear. Such changes will only extend the amount of time required to return Monobook to some kind of stability.

Please make a change to your personal CSS The administrative staff strongly encourages you to make an easy, five-second fix to your personal settings. Please go to Forum:ALL EDITORS: please install this in your personal settings for more information. It'll seriously take you just an instant, and it'll be time well spent. Torchwood now at Torchwood (TV series) When linking to the Torchwood television series, please use Torchwood (TV series). The name Torchwood is now reserved for use with the in-universe concept, as our disambiguation policy makes clear. You may wish to participate in a discussion about how best to proceed with the term "Torchwood". Unlicensed images subject to immediate deletion Please note that it has long been a policy that images must be licensed. That is they must have one of our copyright templates affixed, which gives readers the copyright status of the image. Because of a recent explosion of unlicensed images, we're now going to be taking a very hard line on this. Your image will be deleted, without warning, and by automatic process, if it doesn't have a copyright template. Please note that this process is automated by a bot which has no ability to assess whether your image is "good" or "appropriate". It deletes solely on the basis of whether there's a license present.

You are encouraged to only upload pictures using Special:Upload or Special:MultipleUpload. These special pages are linked to your tool bar at the bottom of every page. They're also in the right-hand column of most every page except for the editor page.

'Please do not'' use the "add features and media" buttons in the new editor to add images to this wiki. These buttons bypass the licensing drop-down menu, and therefore give you no opportunity to add a license. Wikia's new editor is online You will have noticed that when you click "edit" now, everything looks a little different. That's because Wikia have rolled out their new edit page, across the whole of wikia.com. It is not something turned on by the local administrative staff here at tardis.wikia.com. Individual users cannot opt out of it, despite the implication of some checkboxes in Special:Preferences. It is simply the way editing looks now. More information about the new edit page can be had by clicking the info link at the top right of the edit page.

Note that the new edit page is java-intensive. Those with older computers/browsers may need to switch to the MonoBook skin in their preferences if they want a less resource-heavy editing environment. (Note that moving to MonoBook will make certain features, like the Game of Rassilon, inaccessible — but it is a much quicker environment.) The Game of Rassilon is here! To celebrate the re-launch of Doctor Who we're unleashing a fun new game. We call it the Game of Rassilon. It gives you rewards for editing particular aspects of the wiki. We're taking the time, however, to really customise the game. You'll eventually find hundreds of different badges you can earn, all of them with a Doctor Who theme. So, check your user page and see what you can win!

''Please note that it will take up to a couple of days to completely load in the customised game. You may find that pictures and titles will change rapidly in the next several hours. Part of the fun of being here from the start is that you get to see the game being built!''

August 2011
New stuff on the wiki as of 05:39, August 30, 2011 (UTC) Because some users have complained about the new user page masthead is way too big for the page, we've implemented a slimmer design that's only about 60% of the vertical width of the default Wikia masthead. Users wishing to keep their masthead completely under control should remember to keep their avatars to a strict 150px X 150 px size. In addition to other recently added templates, we now have disputed to highlight potentially incorrect statements. If you find a statement that goes against what you know, this template can be used to flag it for other users to check over. The effort to restore the edit button drop downs to their former glory continues. You will likely experience odd behavior with the button for the next 24 hours at least. Users are encouraged to use their "MyTools" footer instead of the edit/leave a message/edit profile buttons at the tops of pages. If you are an IP user — that is, you don't have a registered account — your edit count is currently reading zero. This is a known bug in the new user page profile masthead. If having an accurate edit count is important to you, please consider registering today.

For those who don't wish to register, but do wish to have their IP user page to accurately reflect their edits, rest assured that the Wikia staff are working on it. Users may be unaware that Wednesdays are typically the days chosen by Wikia to upload the latest bug corrections. For this reason, they are affectionately known as "Wacky Wednesdays", because strange behaviour most often occurs on Wednesdays. Today, the problem has been made a little worse because we're also having issues with the Wiki servers themselves. Recent edits are not showing up on the Wiki Activity, Recent Changes, Page History and User Contribution pages. The problem has been corrected. Users will also note that all edit buttons and drop-down menus are behaving differently than they used to. This is a Wikia-related change, and not one that we are making. It is related to the loss of functionality we experienced last week on user pages. On the up side, however, user and user talk page edit button drop-downs now have the default number of options again. They had lost several Wikia-standard admin-related options from late last week. These have all been restored.

Unfortunately, we've completely lost the archive tool, as well as the ability to edit just article intros and to perform purges. A fix for this loss will hopefully be made available soon. Now that Wikia seem to have taken care of their end of the problem, we can return our customised programming to action. There are a couple of minor, but useful, new templates to announce today. what? helps you mark individual sentences that are so confusing they make you scratch your head and say, "What?" Thus, the sentence can be highlighted for further revision and clarification. imdb? lets you flag an imdb link at the bottom of a page that you think is linking to the wrong person. Both templates automatically categorise the pages that use them, allowing easier maintenance. As we've alerted you before, non-existing categories now create blue links, indicating that they exist. In every other instance on the wiki, linking to an un-created page creates a red link, just like that one. This change to categories is not a bug, but Wikia intent. (Those new to editing here at Tardis may not realise that there is an organisation called Wikia that has jurisdiction over this wiki. They can make changes to the software that runs the site, and are not obliged to consult us when they do so.) All users unhappy with this move are encouraged to register their displeasure at a petition over on the Community Central forums. We are experiencing a temporary alteration of the edit menu that appears on user and user talk pages. This issue appears to be the result of the changeover that Wikia recently made to the format of user pages. Amongst the things now missing from the user talk edit menus are the "refresh", "archive", and "edit intro" features. We are working with Wikia to resolve this matter. No other namespaces are affected by this. As we work to restore these menus to their former utility, you are encouraged to temporarily switch to the monobook skin if you need to perform an easy archive of your user talk page. This issue only affects the "new look" Wikia skin. As you've probably noticed, user pages now look slightly different. You're encouraged to read the message about it that's popped up in the bottom left-hand corner of your screens. Our own unique styling has been quickly applied to the new user page masthead, in order to make it better blend with the rest of our site. If you want to see an example of a user page that has their profile filled in more completely, but don't want to leave our wiki, please take a look at user:Ausir. Just to emphasise a point that Wikia Central are making, whatever you fill in to this new masthead goes with you across all Wikia wikis, so do consider carefully how you fill in those blanks. We're still looking for a new background, to be implemented on 27th August — the date of the debut of Let's Kill Hitler. New designs will retain the Rex Matheson that we currently have on the right side, but replace the image of Jack with a character from the current series of Doctor Who. Please submit your proposals at background image submissions Please note that wales crew is undergoing major surgery in order to accommodate the totally different credit style used by Torchwood: Miracle Day. Crew listings on TV story pages will be "glitchy" over the course of the next 24-48 hours. Listings will possibly look different on a momentary, or per-page-load, basis. This template is easier to change "live" — as opposed to using a sandbox — because each change needs to be viewed across several different shows' episode pages at the same time.

July 2011
There are a several simultaneous bot processes ongoing as of 14:36, July 17, 2011 (UTC) which will continue for at least the next day. All of the pages in category:real world people (and all the subcategories thereunder) are being worked on. One process is ensuring that imdb name is bulleted. In intermediate stages, you may see some pages temporarily having two asterisks in front of the template. The other process is stripping every page of real world, and then replacing it at the very top of the page. This solves the problem of real world colliding with infoboxen.

Editors should make sure in future that a) imdb name is always preceded by a single assterisk and b) templates meant to display at the top of a page go before infoboxes, not after. Preloadable formats for magazine issues have finally been updated so that they work automatically again. Check out Magazine issue preloadable templates fixed for more details. Local administrators and key Wikia staff members' names are now different colors and fonts so that you can find them more easily. Find out more at Why do some user names look different? New categories now create as blue-links. If you start a new category (say, the nonsense category of category:oiojdsfdieww it will show up as a blue-link. See?  Here's another one: category:sdlkjcxlj;k32023908dfj;xj,.zmpfsdf09i.  This is a Wikia change, not a Tardis one.  We are looking into ways of reverting this, but for the moment, understand that the official word from Uberfuzzy at wikia is: "It is not a bug."  You are urged to register your protests with Special:Contact.  It's plainly stupid for un-created categories to register as blue-links, so please take the time to protest this decision today. Wikia's new chat extension has now been enabled!  Generally, you can use it to talk live about whatever you want.  But do check our our chat policy so that you don't fall foul of the one or two inappropriate uses of the technology.  A new background has just been added. Please note that it is not necessarily the final design for the next quarter, but was added hastily so as to create some amount of harmony with the new advertisements that are appearing on Wikia for our site. (Thanks for those, Ausir!) If you want to submit a more permanent design, please do so at background image submissions. Last week, we had a bit of a wobble when opening up the page for The New World to general editing. The fact that Torchwood: Miracle Day episodes are originating late Friday night in the US had some unexpected results for the admin staff. It's just not a great time for most of us to be here to open pages up. Remember, the global premiere of an episode of Torchwood now ends at 11pm Eastern on Fridays. That's 3am London time/1pm Sydney time Saturday. As a result, some editors were left frustrated on July 9 waiting around for the page to be opened, to be helped only by the fact that not all our admin are in those three locations. (See Talk:The New World)

From here on out we're going to do things differently. The remaining episodes will now be opened for editing automatically by the system at 2259 Friday EST/0259 Saturday UTC/1259 Saturday NSW). If you experience any problems over the rest of this series, please send a message to CzechOut, cause it's his fault if it doesn't work.    We're looking for your help!  We need a new background image to go along with the current series of Torchwood.  See Help:Background images and then submit your artwork at Tardis:Background image submissions. Please note that Miracle Day is an in-universe event, but Torchwood: Miracle Day is the out-of-universe name of the current series. of Torchwood. There are a variety of little design changes that Wikia have made which we're trying to fix.  Amongst the things to be fixed lately were: sectional editing buttons being forced back to the right; the elimination of the double graphic on external links, specifying borders around thumbnail images to prevent random, weird white space around images.

If you see any other little oddities, please post them in forum:panopticon. An error was fixed at The Howling which was preventing template:forumheader from being automatically added to the top of new topics. If you've wondered what's happened to a topic you've started there, please read the message at Howling:Has your thread gone missing recently?.

June 2011
If you're having problems with drop-down menus, please read this thread at Wikia central. There is an issue affecting IE 9, a browser that's not particularly recommended for viewing this site. The problems are affecting all of Wikia, not just the Tardis wiki. A new button has started appearing alongside forum listings and bottom-of-page template boxes. It "pops" the area out, extending it across the whole width of your screen. It seems very useful for forum listings, but it makes the show/hide functionality of navigation boxes (like Companions of the First Doctor) completely inoperable — at least in some browsers. This feature has been added by Wikia, not by our admin staff. Users should now find that their Edit/Leave message dropdown on their talk pages no longer "collides" with the top of the main text area on the page. If you're still experiencing a problem with accessing the bottom elements of that dtopdown menu, please clear your cache and look again. A much-requested list of stub templates is now online to help people see what options are available to them. Though simple, the list has the virtue of being dynamic. Thus, when new stub templates are added, the list will automatically update. Work continues on getting the forum archives into some kind of useful order, and on getting the forums to be a little bit more than just a list of topics. You may notice some strange behavior in the way that topics are listed as modifications are made. Users may be aware that we have recently moved The Howling into its own namespace in order to protect users who didn't want to be exposed to its content. One of the advantages of this is that it allows for the whole Howling namespace to be turned off while performing advanced searches. An earlier "glitch" in the system that affected advanced searches has now been corrected. (Thank you, Uberfuzzy for your quick response!) The default condition of searches is to completely ignore the content of The Howling. We are now back to the Wikia default for advanced searches, which is to automatically check only main and blogs by default. If you want to search the Howling, you have to choose to do it. The possibility of accidental exposure to spoilers in The Howling has now been greatly reduced.

Still, the best way to make sure you're searching only the namespaces you want, is to override the defaults with your own personal preferences. Change your personal search preferences here. Don't know what a "namespace" is? Go here. The discontinuity discussions have been moved out of The Howling and into a new forum of their own. You will, however, see inuse tags up on those fora as some tweaking continues. If you see link problems or any issues resulting from this move, please contact our tech admin with your concerns.

Wikia Central have recently removed the "page history" drop down that once resided directly underneath page titles. They returned it to the "edit" drop down, where it had traditionally been. Because we had implemented a javascript workaround that placed the "history" key back into the "edit" menu, you may have noticed two "history" keys in the menu. The extraneous "history" has now been removed. Oddly, however, Wikia have still not put a "history" key on user: and user talk: pages, making it difficult to discover who's written you a note if they don't sign it. Therefore, you will now find a "history" button beside the "edit" menu on those two types of pages. Those users who prefer to use the "history" key found by customizing their tools at the bottom of the page will still be able to do so. We are investigating possible improvement to the discussion software that is used on forum and talk pages. These changes require the permission and help of Wikia central. Keep abreast of this ongoing effort by occasionally checking the Panopticon. In the meantime, you may notice a re-styling of the Panopticon's thread list, which is pretty much the limit of how "fancy" we can make the current messaging system. You will experience a shifting of backgrounds over the next couple of days as a tutorial is developed for the precise creation of future backgrounds. Background and colours have been returned to their default state. Details will be forthcoming over the next few days of exactly how backgrounds should be built. I thank whoever provided the intervening backgrounds for trying to keep the backgrounds current. Weekly changes to the background, however, are probably not the most efficient use of our editing time. An announcement will be made here when the background template is ready. It's very important that the backgrounds are in a very particular place and are a particular colour, in order for the background effect not to interfere with the reading of pages. Just to give one rule of thumb, the background images themselves should be simple, monochromatic line drawings, and they should be place on a background colour of #B0B0B0. More to come. . .  spoiler now replaces pre-broadcast spoiler and pre-release spoiler, as there's really no need for two separate templates. Especially since both the older templates slapped exactly the same category on pages. The two older templates will remain as redirects until this summer. NameSort, discussed below, is being implemented by bot. It is temporarily causing a warning message to appear on pages that already have a DEFAULTSORT key. This problem will be cleared up shortly, but must be addressed by a second run of the bot. A cool little sorting template has been added which will automatically sort articles about people by their last name. It's called NameSort. Be sure to go to the template page to read the documentation. A new range of stub templates has been steadily growing over the weekend. This greater specification of stubs should make it easier for people looking for ways to improve the wiki to find a subject in which they're interested. A new help page on these stubs is forthcoming once they're all implemented, but for now, you're invited to look at category:stubs and category:stub templates for an idea of the way in which this project is progressing. If you have additional ideas for stub templates, please send them to CzechOut. Top-of-page templates, like delete and update have all been switched over to the same glowy, pictorial style of real world and notdwu. Again, the goal here is a uniform look. One message box, conjecture, still doesn't have a picture yet because I can't quite think of a single image that iconically represents conjectural titles. If you have any suggestions for a pictorial representation of this concept, please send your idea to CzechOut. Image licenses have been switched over to a single style, controllable by a single CSS element. Since there was no genuine "colour-coding" going on — but just people choosing random colours for different licenses, it's all been switched over to a design that's in harmony with other message boxes. Following on magazine issue nomenclature changes from last week, the bot's been incredibly busy this weekend linking references to magazine issues to the new names. So, there's been a transfer of links from DWM Issue 1 to DWM 1. Random samples of various issues has allowed for the complete elimination of redirects that included the word "issue". People interested in this topic are directed to the page Magfix, which chronicles this project in greater detail. If you regularly edit magazine issues, please note Tardis:Manual of Style, the result of closing two forum discussions, Forum:DWM Issue 000/DWM and Forum:DWBIT: Odd man out. The short version: issue names should now be styled, [Acronym + number]. So DWM 1 or DWA 123 or DWBIT 34. No "issue", no long-form magazine name. When you're editing articles, and putting in new pictures, please use the format NOT. It'll really help out! For the reasons why, please see Forum:Tech note: Image nomenclature. Thanks :) Check under the edit pull-down menu for some new features that weren't there before! One of the coolest:  edit intro.  Now you can specifically edit just the lead of an article! Looking for a way to help do some much needed cleaning?  Go to Tardis:Duplicate images.  Look at any of the duplicate series and then add delete to the duplicates that currently aren't being used. reflist has been updated to the latest version at Wikipedia.  This means that it is now possible to define more than just two columns, and to define the widths of those columns. This feature still does not work in IE and (probably) Chrome, but it does work in all Mozilla browsers, like Firefox.  It's been improved, however, to now include Safari for the first time on this wiki! Timeline pages have finally gotten their navboxes styled. We've implemented a new navbox for the day pages, like 1st January. This means that all timeline pages now have new, elegant navboxes. It also means that these pages are now practically bare — since most of their previous content was just a list of days in a month or years in a decade. You can help by starting to write in-universe entries for these pages, such as the ones at January, September and April. In order to avoid clutter, some templates that used to go somewhere around infoboxes now are tags which appear just slightly outside page boundaries. Chief amongst these are wikipediainfo, protect and lock. All these tags are clickable, but they're fortunately not adding to the clutter of "template stack", that sometimes gets really out of hand, especially on shorter pages. navbox, an import from Wikipedia that allows for much more flexibility and uniformity amongst navboxes. I haven't gotten around to re-writing the documentation so it makes more sense for our particular wiki, but the code is fully installed and appears to be working perfectly. In fact, most navboxes have been switched over to the new format. There's only one major category of navboxes yet to be switched, and that's just because of a policy question that needs to be settled in the forum. If you haven't voted yet, please go to Forum:Aliens and enemies templates: the final battle and vote today! If you'd like instructions on how to submit a new background image, send a message to CzechOut. See something wacky on the wiki today that you didn't yesterday? Worried that, to paraphrase the Fifth Doctor, the site regeneration is failing? If you're nervous about the daily changes around this joint, you may want to follow our progress more closely, by reading the wiki's tech diary. We'll try to make daily posts to explain what's happened in that day's round of changes, and to note anything that's not quite working as expected. Page histories are now available under the "edit page" menus. This adds another convenient location for checking the history of a page, in addition to the history drop-down on the top left of most pages, and the tool under MyTools. This re-adds a history link to user pages in particular, which had theirs removed when Wikia radically redsigned their base skin. This new feature may not work in all browsers, but it does in Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers. It does not appear to work in Safari. Editors, please be sure to read our Manual of Style's section on article leads, which has recently been expanded. Now there are more examples and suggestions to help you improve your article-writing skills. The terms "First Doctor", "Second Doctor", and the like, 'are now specifically encouraged by our Manual of Style. The word "human" 'should no longer be capitalised. big toc} is now no longer necessary, because its functionality is now hard-coded into the site. All tables of content, on every page where one is automatically generated, are now on the right.