Diff updates for May 2024

Hello readers and writers of Diff. It’s been a while since we updated you all on improvements to Diff. Without further ado, here’s a few things we’ve been working on behind the scenes to make Diff easier use, more reliable, and more secure.

General

• Embedded videos from Wikimedia Commons works again
  • Note: in researching the issue that caused them to stop working we realized that users with the contributor role can’t embed HTML or iframes due to security concerns. Only editors and admins can. If you need to embed video from sites not listed here, please let us know and we can help.
    • Thanks to Theklan for pointing this out. T309101
    • For images, see our documentation.
• We hid some editorial notification settings for folks with the contributor role. Just so we don’t accidentally send notifications to folks that didn’t contribute to an article.
• We updated the Creative Commons license language in the publication workflow to reflect change to CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
• Posts in languages other than English were showing a 404 error in what seemed to be a random pattern. Nope, it wasn’t random. It was WordPress forgetting to update the URL. This is now fixed.
• We also fixed attachment pages returning a 404 and they now show proper attribution. How Creative Commons of us. 
• We disabled the AI Assistant on Diff. We like human, imperfect writing and the AI tool was making blog posts sound the same – and a little too grandiose!
• DiffBlog is now an interwiki prefix for links to Diff from Wikimedia wikis.
  • Thanks to Greg for helping make this happen.

Translations

• The translation workflow is now available for all posts regardless of the language. So you can translate from Spanish to Esperanto and Wayuuunaiki to Kiswahili!
• When using the translation interface the post content would sometimes be blank. This was due to the need for every user to have to click a tiny icon to make sure the content of a post was duplicated. This is now set as a default and translating Diff articles should be less confusing.
  • Translation strings need to be updated for this workflow, but that’s also possible now. We’ll work on updating these over time.

Calendar

• You can label events by region and search by region if the event organizer has added a region.
  • Thanks to Toni Ristovski for the suggestion.
• You can define a secondary language for events. So if the event is available in more than one language folks can be aware.
• Fixed the issue with not being able to filter or navigate the calendar due to security settings.

Upkeep

• Subscription emails should now list the actual author and not whoever published the post. Note: this may not work 100% as you’d expect when posts are published with guest authors.
• We’ve tightened security with some new settings for cross domain loading and embedding.
• We fixed an issue where if you were looking at a post in one language, navigated to the Diff homepage, and tried to view the English version of the site you would be stuck on the language of the last post you visited. The site now listens to you and will switch to English as expected.
  • Thanks to Eugene and others for making us aware of this issue!
• Various small bug fixes and software updates.

If you have any issues with the site, or have ideas for improving Diff, please do get in touch.

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