Changes to activity feeds, fonts, etc. Any problems?

Question

Hi WikiTreers,

We just released a number of little improvements and bug fixes.

There is a new filter for activity feeds that enables you to see only the items that announce where a new profile was created. I think this will be really handy, especially in combination with the new activity feeds we added in March. You can use this to view all the new profiles that were created as your ancestors. Or someone's new descendants. Or your new connections within 10 degrees.

The created filter works on any feed. For example, click here to see the new Smith profiles that were created this week. On any feed, select "only profile creation" beneath the row of buttons near the top. To see the feed for your new ancestors, click the Ancestors button first.

There's also a new option on all activity feeds to view the duplicated/paired history items for relationship edits that were introduced a couple weeks ago and are hidden by default. For example, click the "show paired items" link on the Smith feed.

An unrelated change: we switched the font used for all headlines, from Calibri to Open Sans. Calibri has some display problems with certain international characters. It also requires an extra download for your browser, and isn't ideal for mobile users. Open Sans is very close to Calibri so hopefully you won't even notice the difference.

Today we also released the changes that will enable Project Leaders to start setting certain profiles for public figures who are still living as "Private with a Public Bio and Family Tree" instead of "Unlisted." See Living_Notables and the previous discussion here.

Just now, I finally reopened Queen Elizabeth II, who was our connection anchor until our GDPR changes turned out the lights.

There were a handful of other bug fixes and adjustments to background things, but I won't bore you with the details. They shouldn't be noticeable ... unless there is a problem. If you do notice a new problem of any sort -- no matter where it is on WikiTree -- please report it here and we'll check it out.

Also, for you hardcore WikiTreers who have cared enough to read this far, I want to mention that we are tentatively scheduling an upgrade to our database server software this Sunday night, about 11pm EDT. There will be a minute or two of downtime, but other than that, we don't expect any disruptions. Of course, there is always the chance that we missed something during testing. We depend on WikiTreers reporting problems after a big release like this.

Please post an answer if you have questions, suggestions, or spot a problem. Comments at the top may be hidden after they're read once. Thanks!

Onward and upward,

Chris

Comments

Thank you. Great job.

Answer 1

I like the changing of the font. Serbian uses some of the characters Calibri had problems with and it always looked strange to see the surnames of my Serbian family in two different fonts because one letter couldn't be shown. The way it's now it's much better.

Answer 2

This is great! thank you for these changes. IMO they are all great improvmenents!

We should get Kevin Bacon opened up! I want to see my degrees from Kevin Bacon!

But seriously, he has a Wikipedia page in three languages, his mother is named in more than one of those, and I am not aware that he would rather the Wikitree page be private. How hard does that last requirement need to be investigated? Is it, "as long as they haven't contacted WT, we are good to go"?

Will the G2G discussion rule 3 now be modified to account for living notables with public bio/tree?

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Discussion_Rules

Answer 3

Thanks for yet another round of improvements, Chris and the Team!

Answer 4

I don't quite know if I've misread the policy or if this a bug but when I clicked on my (definitely living) mother's WikiTree profile today it gave me the options of making her profile private, private with public biography and public tree, etc.

She's not notable (to the wider world) nor is her profile managed by a project and so I thought I wouldn't (shouldn't) be able to change her privacy status.

Can someone please provide clarification?

Comments

Just try it out. You will get an error: "A living non-member can only be Unlisted."

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Got it, thanks, but I'm going to leave my original post here just in case there's possibly a way to make this easier for users to see without having to risk clicking a button that could compromise someone's privacy.

Answer 5

Thank you for making WikiTree even better!

Answer 6

Thank you for getting the created activity back in the individual contributions feed, too.  Much easier to search for duplicates that way.

Answer 7

I appreciate these changes. However, I am wondering about one thing...

This may be my imagination, but it seems like the new font for headings has made the subheadings in biographies bigger and bolder than before.  This particularly stands out on profiles like https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Robbins-2565 (an old GEDCOM-created profile) where pretty much every bit of information in the biography has its own separate heading.

Comments

I noticed the heading changes as well. The change really jumped out at me when using the enhanced editor. I was glad to see this announcement so that I knew it wasn't my imagination or poor memory (or a change with the browser).

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Glad to know there are at least two of us perceiving this!

I think these headings are too prominent now...

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You know, looking at the specimen sheets for Calibri Bold and Open Sans Bold, it doesn't seem as if the change should be so noticeable on the heading sizes. But I definitely see it, too.

So I looked at a popular profile (Anne Boleyn) now, and from November 19 via the Internet Wayback machine. Then I used the Chrome HTML/CSS tools to inspect the actual codebase. And the stylesheet settings are identical down to the smallest detail for everything but the "font-family": the biography primary headings (indicated by two equal signs) are rendering as the HTML tag h2, and the next-level subheading (three equal signs) as tag h3.

Probably nobody cares, but the CSS settings for both the current and previous headings are identical:

h2 {
    font-size: 1.7143em;
    line-height: 1.75em;
    margin: 0 0 .875em 0;
}

h3 {
    font-size: 1.5714em;
    line-height: 1.909em;
    margin: 0 0 .9545em 0;
    margin-left: 10px;
}

The same all the way down to four significant digits. It's completely the font change. You can do a rough comparison of Calibri Bold at Fonts.com, and of Open Sans Bold at Google Fonts.

I don't think the change is overwhelming; I can get used to it without reducing the size. And I do like the switch to Open Sans.

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Thanks, Edison!

After looking at those pages, I suggest that Open Sans Semi-Bold would be a better choice than Open Sans Bold.

Because Calibri is an exceptionally lightweight font (my adjective for it is gracile), Calibri Bold is less bold than most other bold fonts. I think that Open Sans Semi-Bold is similar in its boldness to Calibri Bold.

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I'd vote for that, Ellen.    A couple of the websites I've done recently use Open Sans Semi-Bold rather than the full 700-weight bold version. All the standard HTML heading tags on the WikiTree profiles, from h1 through h6, use the same CSS font-family and font-weight declarations, so it shouldn't be difficult to change.

That said, the bolded text in profiles' "vitals" section--the part below the "Categories" and "Comments" link buttons but above the profile manager info--doesn't use heading tags. Instead, what's bolded there is done just through the <strong> tag, so without a change that would still display as 700-weight bold rather than 600-weight semi-bold. Easy enough to alter the CSS settings for ".strong" but I don't know if that might have repercussions elsewhere, like maybe table header rows or other stuff. But if there's a switch to semi-bold, I think the profile page would look better if the "vitals" section was similarly adjusted so the presentation is consistent.

Not enough of an issue to mention it in a separate answer/comment, but for me, using Google Chrome, the new Open Sans font is throwing a few--all identical--warnings regarding preloading. I don't think it affects anyone viewing the pages, and probably not even Google's search rankings since they don't require strict W3C standards validation. But just to make note of it, the actual warning is:

The resource https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/opensans/[obfuscated because it might be a subscription service].woff2 was preloaded using link preload but not used within a few seconds from the window's load event. Please make sure it has an appropriate `as` value and it is preloaded intentionally.

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I've been seeing this warning a lot while testing my Chrome extension.  I thought it was just because the extension was slowing the loading down slightly, but maybe not... I'm guessing it's not a big deal as it's just a warning, but still... Is the team aware of this?  (I guess they must be... And if not, I suppose this thread is a good place to mention it.)

Answer 8

Thank You. I'll give it a try.. I'm 85 & find some of this stuff a bit hard to follow.

Answer 9

I love the changes. I did note a problem which may be unrelated. I had a little over 1000 contributions in May (I looked in late May), but only 800 some odd registered by June 1. Did we change the way we count contributions at the end of the month?

Comments

Please see this post for the answer https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1231645/did-you-notice-changes-to-relationship-tracking

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The count on the badges page was including the duplicate items, while the process that awarded the badges was excluding them. We've fixed the count on the badge page, and since the incorrect count messed up a lot of people last month, we re-awarded last month's badges based on the count that was on the badges page.