User blog:Yyp/Vanishing Images & a Solution

Posted: Friday 13th August 2010 I'm sure many of you have noticed over the last week or so that there has been a problem with images not showing up on articles. Though, curiously most of them show up without difficulty when you click on them. This is a Wikia wide problem and Wikia is aware of it, although I have no idea when or if it will be fixed. While we were quite lucky with it initially only affecting a small number of pictures, it is now becoming worse.

It seems, however, that there is a link between the pictures that are having trouble. All the pictures that I have checked so far have a rare(-ish) character in them, such as Ō, ō, ū or an apostrophe. This has never been a problem before, but it would seem that something has changed in the way the Wikia system handles them.

I have moved a number of the "missing" images to new titles using just normal letters and they have reappeared on the articles. I don't know if we're going to have to do this with all such images or if Wikia can sort it out. But in the meantime, please flag any images that are experiencing problems in the Glitches in the Wiki System forum. Since the images won't show up, just add them as a normal link like this Image:Wiki wide.png (note the colon before the word image). Hopefully we can get an idea if it is just an issue with these characters, or if it affects images that use normal letters only. Don't know what to do if the latter is the case... guess we'll have to move them to a different name and see if that helps.

Anyway, in future, it may be best to avoid using symbols in image titles. Just stick to normal letters. Any thoughts/suggestions etc on this are welcome.