As Dan discussed yesterday in a post about the big picture of search development, we are now investing in improvements to search at Wikia. Search is more than just a way to navigate to a specific page -- it’s also a way to discover new content, browse related articles, and explore a wiki.

Our goal with improving search over the next couple of months is to bring Wikia’s search not only up to industry standards, but also to a place where our communities get the most benefit out of it on both a local and global scale. Today’s update is still part of the early stages, and we have more in the works coming soon.

Here’s what’s new right now:

We now have a global search with grouped results. Previously, if you searched for a wiki on the Wikia.com hom…

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Hi everyone,

My name is Dan Baran, and I’m the Director of what we call the “Platform Team” here at Wikia. We focus on systems that support multiple front end features -- one of which is search. The recent improvements we’ve made represent many months of hard work and careful decision making. As with many foundational systems, it was necessary to weigh the options of integrating an external search service, versus developing our own (based on a Solr/Lucene core, for you tech types). It was not an easy decision, but in the end, we decided that having fine-grained control over our search tool outweighed all other factors. Wikis, as documents, do things a little differently than other content systems, and the only way we’re going to be able to …

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Last spring, we released chat for wikis and so far over 12,000 communities have started using it! With so many active communities using chat on a daily basis, we have gotten a lot of great feedback and requests for improvements.

Starting this Wednesday, we will be releasing an update to chat on all English wikis. It's already live on a couple of select communities as well as Community Test (so feel free to test it out there).

We've changed the way users are banned from chat to make it more like blocking on a wiki. With this release, the "bannedfromchat" user right will no longer exist. The new blocking system will be as follows:

• Kick - We created a new action called "Kick" for admins and chatmods. Kick severs the offending user's connection f…

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If you have an iPhone or Android mobile device, you may have noticed that the mobile version of Wikia has been getting a lot more attractive and interesting lately. Since we released our new mobile site back in December, we’ve been rolling out improvements to it nearly every week! Our mobile traffic has doubled in the last year (with some wikis getting nearly 20% of their traffic from mobile devices), and we’re working hard to keep up with that growth! Here are some of the changes you might have noticed since our last update.

Wiki Nav. Our mobile skin now includes your wiki’s full navigation menus at the top, accessible via the navigation icon. Since we currently have two styles of navigation in use across Wikia (the original two-level nav …

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Have you ever wished you could add styling, links, and photos with the click of a button when you post a new comment? Well, as a result of many requests for editing options in comments, we’re excited to announce that now you can! Meet the new mini editor, which is now available on Message Wall, article comments, and blog comments.

The mini editor is lightweight, and features the most common formatting and content input needs. It includes formatting tools for bold, italic, and links, along with quick buttons that let you add photos and videos.

The toolbar also includes a toggle for source mode (wikitext) and visual mode (rich text). If you usually see visual mode in the main editor, you’ll see visual mode here, too. If visual mode is disabled in the …

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We've made some new changes to our Log in and Sign up process and we wanted to share them with you!

You'll now see a redesigned look and flow for both Log in and Sign up features on all English wikis. We've made these changes for a few reasons, but mainly because we felt the features were not as smooth or streamlined as they could be, nor did they fit with our site's overall look and feel.

Let's walk through what we've changed:

Log in will now appear as a link in the global nav as a drop down module. This will make logging in quicker, easier and with less clutter. It's a single action, making it less obtrusive and keeping you on the original page you logged into. It also syncs up with the site's overall design and feel.

Like Log in, we've made…

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As many of you know, we’ve been working on Message Wall — a new alternative to User Talk Pages that lets you have a public conversation in a fast, powerful, and organized way. During the early testing phase, you gave us boatloads of feedback that influenced our development process. Today, we’re excited to announce that thanks to you, we’ve made many improvements to Message Wall, and it’s now available in Labs. Your admins can enable it on your wiki whenever they wish!

Admins can enable or disable it. Message Wall is now a Labs product, which admins can turn it on or off via Special:WikiFeatures. “Labs” means that it’s still in beta, and we’re looking forward to improving it as we learn more about how it’s used. It might not be in Labs forev…

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Hi there! As promised in our last blog post, the Mobile Team has a holiday present for you. Close your eyes and...open! It's a new version of our mobile skin! Now go ahead and act surprised like the blog title didn't give it away.

Our mobile skin was long overdue for an update, and this version lays the foundation for more improvements in the future. It's optimized for both iPhone and Android (which covers 95% of our users), and we think you'll like the changes we've made.

The size of phone screens makes it difficult to read multiple column layouts. To combat this, the new mobile skin now has single-column layouts, which solves common problems such as content overlap (which you can see in the "before" photo below). You will notice that the s…

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Many of you have asked if Message Wall can be optional. My quick and short answer is that we don’t know yet. But, we are taking an important interim step.

The next stop for Message Wall is Wikia Labs. Putting Message Wall in Labs will give you the chance to try the feature out for a while and see how it works for your community. It also gives you a place to share insights about testing the product with other users and Wikia staff.

During the Labs phase, we’ll be tracking usage and your feedback; we'll also be working on any bugs present. We’ll be asking and answering the following types of questions:

• Are communities that are using Message Wall talking more?
• Are those communities seeing an increase in edits?
• Are communities seeing a growth in ne…

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What a week it’s been over here on Community Central!

I wanted to reach out, first and foremost, to thank you for your passionate feedback regarding Message Wall. We’ve read, shared, and quantified every single one of your comments and have replied to a good number of them as well. I know we’ve taken a bit of heat for not replying to every comment, but we have to make judgment calls or else we would have to work around the clock and other important tasks wouldn’t get completed. Here are a few things we’ve learned this week:

Posting screenshots to a Staff Blog without a working prototype is less than optimal.

• We didn’t give you much to react to other than a few static images and a bunch of text. Having a major product like Message Wall up and …

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