Social tools/History

Social tools
about
Social tools Contributing and reporting bugs List of extensions History of social tools
compatibility
Support for Echo notifications MediaWiki compatibility

Social tools originated at ArmchairGM, which was later bought out by Wikia, Inc., and despite Wikia not developing social tools anymore (since 2008), the social tools family of extensions continues to thrive.

2005

• December — ArmchairGM, an American sports-oriented social wiki site, is founded and eventually social tools are being developed, primarily by Aaron Wright and David Pean, with some (FanBoxes) being developed by Rob Lefkowitz and also by Ashish Datta (PictureGame) and Jeffrey Tierney (MarchMadness)

2006

• December — Wikia, Inc. buys ArmchairGM for "more than $2 million [USD]"

2008

• 28 February — First public release of the SocialProfile MediaWiki extension
• 21 June — Wikia opens its SVN to the general public, revealing that many SocialProfile features were taken out before the public release.
• 1 July — Rob Lefkowitz's staff access on Wikia is revoked
• July — slowly more features from Wikia codebase are being added into SocialProfile extension
• 12 August — Aaron Wright (Awrigh01), the co-author of SocialProfile leaves Wikia
• 4 September — release of SocialProfile version 1.2 with merely one big changed thing: special page aliases
• 20 September — release of SocialProfile version 1.3 with SystemGifts and UserGifts features and E_STRICT & E_NOTICE bugfixes
• 8 December — Halopedia is moved back to the standard Wikia codebase

2009

• 22 January — Siebrand adds UserWelcome into core SocialProfile because he sees SocialProfile as an extension package, like the Uniwiki extensions.
• 10 June — UserActivity and UserSystemMessages added into SocialProfile → version 1.4

2010

• 20 January — Jack Phoenix contacts Jimmy Wales (who in turns contacts Gil Penchina, who contacts Jack) about open-sourcing ArmchairGM's skin; in the end, nothing becomes of it
• 8 February — In a private email to Jack Phoenix, Gil Penchina admits that Wikia "dropped support" for social tools
• February — PictureGame, QuizGame, PollNY, FanBoxes and possibly some other related extensions disabled on Halopedia per community consensus
• December — Wikia begins to update their codebase to MediaWiki 1.16 and in the process social tools are removed from their SVN

2011

• Summer — Yevhenii Vlasenko (Zhenya) is working on the UserStatus feature as his Google Summer of Code 2011 project, mentored by Jack Phoenix; Jack Phoenix updates social tools in the so-called "phase II of social tools"
• 1 August — with the kind help of Sean Colombo from Wikia staff, the ArmchairGM codebase finally sees the light of the day
• 6 November — Markus Glaser completes his in-depth code review of the SocialProfile extension

2012

• 14 August — social tools are migrated from Subversion (SVN) to git

2013

• 10 July — contributed patch to work around bug 49280 committed to git
• 22 July — PollNY fixed to be compatible with MediaWiki 1.21.1
• 27 July — QuizGame fixed to be compatible with MediaWiki 1.21.1
• 28 August — ArmchairGM codebase (revision 40097 from Wikia's SVN) committed to GitHub because Wikia's SVN has been shut down
• 29 August — FanBoxes fixed to be compatible with MediaWiki 1.21.1
• 12 September — initial working versions (version 3.0 of both extensions) of the SportsTeams and UserStatus extensions are released

2014

• 3 October — version 2.0 of SiteScout released
• 5 October — Challenge , an old extension used on ArmchairGM from 2006 to early 2007 or so, released, despite not being yet feature-complete
• 10 October — ArmchairGM codebase also duplicated to Gitorious

2015

• 20 January — A dedicated Phabricator project for social tools was created on this day by AKlapper at #Social-Tools.
• 29 July — Initial work on making social tools (currently just SocialProfile ) more responsive and mobile-friendly

2016

• January — ArmchairGM codebase also duplicated to Wikimedia Phabricator
• 10 September – (task T145286) Extensions under the social tools umbrella which didn't already have officially removed their deprecated entry points (any other extensions that weren't listed had already removed their old entry point, besides Challenge and MiniInvite), which are: BlogPage, Comments, FanBoxes, LinkFilter, MediaWikiChat, PollNY, QuizGame, RandomFeaturedUser, RandomUsersWithAvatars, Video, WikiForum, and WikiTextLoggedInOut.
• December — Gerrit change 325133 and version 1.10 (Gerrit change 278868, Gerrit change 325141) of SocialProfile released: SocialProfile now has support for Extension:Echo , the notifications extension (task T64520)

2017

• 22 January — The ImageRating extension was requested to be migrated as a gerrit repo in Special:Diff/2369518.
• 24 January — The ImageRating extension was migrated as a gerrit repo by QChrisNonWMF in Special:Diff/2371164 and officially recognized as an extension under the social tools umbrella.

2020

• Late January — Mandatory actor support in all supported social tools; MediaWiki 1.34 or newer is required for version 1.14 of Extension:SocialProfile ; system administrators should update all affected social tools and run maintenance/update.php afterwards to ensure that the actor columns will be properly populated
• Improved support for using social tools without having JavaScript enabled in browser (task T248390)
• 21 October — All social tools (except for Challenge) are now translatable via translatewiki.net (View translation statistics)

2021

• July — Social tools' MediaWiki compatibility policy changes: all social tools now aim to be compatible with the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release of MediaWiki (1.35 at the time) instead of the latest stable release of MediaWiki.
  This change was necessary because given the limited resources, it's not feasible to anymore try to target the latest stable version of MediaWiki.

2022

• Late May — FanBoxes , PictureGame , PollNY and QuizGame now support using images already uploaded to the wiki instead of requiring the user to upload an image (or images, in the case of PictureGame) when creating a new userbox/picture game/poll/quiz question.