Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-04-29/Technology report

Echo goes live
This week saw the deployment of the Echo extension, also known as "notifications". Deployed by the EE team, the extension adds a "Facebook-style" notifications menu in the top right of a users screen, to let them know about different events. Discussion quickly erupted over the loss of the new messages bar, aka the orange bar of doom. A user script was quickly written to restore it. A RFC to properly restore it is underway on the talk page.

In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
 * Changes to edit section links: Following a 2009 Usability Initiative study about moving the placement of the "[edit]" links, a change was written by developer Matma Rex and recently merged that moves the links next to the section title (screenshot). A simple CSS snippet has been provided for users who wish for links to go back to their original placement.
 * SUL finalization announced: In an [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2013-April/000217.html email] to the wikitech-ambassadors list, staff member James Forrester announced the plans to convert all accounts into global ones, regardless of conflicts. Discussion is underway at the bureaucrats' noticeboard, and on Meta-Wiki.
 * Toolserver/Labs migration: Office hours were held for users to ask questions about migrating their tools to Wikimedia Labs. Questions were raised about whether Labs will be able to provide everything the Toolserver did, with further ones being raised on the [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/2013-May/ mailing list].
 * WikiLove disabled: WikiLove was disabled temporarily this weekend. Firefox users would have experienced issues when navigating to user pages and user talk pages due to underlying issues with mw.loader, which resulted in an emergency decision early Friday, April 25th (UTC, Thursday evening in the US) to disable the WikiLove extension for all wikis that have it enabled. That bug was fixed and WikiLove re-enabled on Monday, April 29th.
 * GSoC submissions closes this week: As the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) deadline draws near, student developers who have an idea on taking part in GSoC this year should make their decision soon and submit their applications by May 3rd at 19:00 UTC directly to the official website. The Wikimedia Foundation will make their decision for selected students shortly after that.