explain xkcd:Community portal/Technical

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Technical Technical issues about the explain xkcd wiki, including bug reports, site stability, or requests for new gadgets or features. Create a new topic!

This page has archives. Discussions are usually archived after they have remained inactive for a long time or they are no longer relevant. Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4

Blue on blue links

RationalWiki links have a light blue background for some reason. Example: xkcd Artem (talk) 16:34, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

That's to distinguish them from non–RationalWiki links. FaviFake (talk) 16:35, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Does anyone know why RationalWiki (and TvTrope, apparently) need a separate background to distinguish them? Celene (talk) 04:47, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

When it comes to TVTropes, I believe that it's supposed to be a little extra precaution to warn the unsuspecting impending clickee that TVTropes Will Ruin Your Life. (Right now, I can see four TVTropes tabs showing upon my browser's header, in amongst other things, and I now there are more of them if I scroll the tab-bar sideways.) It's a particularly strong generator of extended (and branching!) wikiwalking sessions.

I'll have to admit that I'm not quite so familiar with RationalWiki, but I could imagine a similar feeling about that. 78.151.45.228 19:11, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Another option would be to use favicons next to the links – I've contacted the staff of both websites to get permission to use their logos for their links, as TVTropes's logo is under the same license as the rest of the site, and RationalWiki's logo isn't licensed at all. Chaotic Enby (talk) 19:46, 21 September 2026 (UTC)

I sort of get the "use an icon marker" idea for various external sites. But text-based icons embedded in text can cause their own potential confusion, as can be currently seen in a link to C which could arguably be mixed up with a link to something like The CW. Except that "CW", itself, will now look like "CW^W", of course!

The request to get the "W-letter in a jigsaw piece" picture rendered as the 'hint' might be better but... consider how small the icon is, and thus how few pixels you have available.

I presume the TVTropes logo will be just the "TV-letters with a lampshade hanging", if you go ahead with that. Maybe slightly easier to rough out a version of. I'm not sure that the "Brain within doubled square brackets. The brain is difficult enough, even if the four distinct brackets can be reduced to the minimum pixels.

• Edge (zero pixels padding?),
• Just 1 pixel for first riser,
• 1 more pixel for the 'hooks',
• 1 more pixel for gap between brackets,
• 1 pixel for next riser,
• 1 pixel for hooks,
• 1 pixel for space (if not kerned away thanks to the curved Brain edge?),
• enough pixels for a brain (less overlap as immediately above/below),
• (Maybe) 1 more pixel each for space,
• Then 1 more pixel each for closing hooks/riser/space/hooks/riser.

That's a minimum of 10 pixels. As rendered on this particular machine (YMMV), the current "W" for Wikipedia takes up 14 pixels (antialiased, but a viable non-antialiased version may be no different, to get the same look just rougher looking). To look a similar size, the [[Brain]] would have room for no more than four pixels of width for the 'Brain matter', I expect, even with the kerning in mind.

Of course, the true icon being used is likely not 14 pixels wide. In fact, as I easily discovered, it's non-raster .svg image that is apparently being officially rendered as 12px wide. Despite how it appears to be 14 for my default view (which I screenshotted and examined in detail within an image editor). Automatic antialiasing as well as designed-in shading/colouring in strategic edges can probably create a better image than a harsh monochrome image with a single bitplane of display depth. But it's not exactly going to be easy to artfully create a comprehensible glyph that represents a W-JigsawPiece, the lampshaded-TV or the brain-in-the-[[]]s. The best you can probably hope for is a half-decent clump of pixels that mark out something special in a vaguely recognisable way, and that people will learn to recognise as "Oh, that's a <foo>-type link!" from sufficient hovering/following and discovering the details. And I'm not sure it's worth all that bother to try to do that for every possible example, or even every well-used destination.

(For starters, archive.org might deserve its own, due to the number of times old and dead (or older versions of live) pages are now linked to through that. A four-columned Greek acropolis-like frontage... actually far easier to artify, I think, just had a private go at a 12px-wide conversion (of the logo without its lettering) and I think it's recognisable. At least once you know it's supposed to be archive.org in some other way.)

But, despite having found you a better example to try for, I'm still not sure it's a necessary development. Anybody who cares about where they're going are going to keep an eye on the bit of the browser where the link you're about to go to pops up (as defined by the particular browser). Any random link like http://www.example.com (or as alternate embedded text) gives a generic "this is going off this wiki page" glyph. Cross-wikiproject links have generally been treated the same as links internal to the wiki and so have been unglyphed (perhaps depending upon how linked!), while those wiki-style places like 'tvtropes' and RationalWiki that have honorary wiki status have been made marginally different looking in an unglyphed way.

About the only good reason to insist upon glyphing each and every link is to make a sea of blue text a bit more obvious as not one long link that's a sea of blue text. But, as just discovered, perhaps you need a suitably-simplified Wiktionary logo too, if you're going down that route?

Just pondering aloud, though. I'm not particularly arty myself (I'm not particularly skilled in creating it, I just more know it when I see it), and perhaps have too much of a technical approach to this issue to be taken seriously in this regard. But the few immediate thoughts I had, unfortunately not easy for me to express succinctly in word, seemed perhaps worth mentioning? Maybe not, in which case ignore me. 81.179.193.245 13:40, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

Are there too many W symbols? Now it looks like hiccup when reading articles 799571388 (talk) 07:59, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Agree. Can we please get rid of it again? It disturbs the reading flow massively. Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 07:59, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

@Elektrizikekswerk We are planning to replace it with a better icon developed by @AltaKarl, which you can view in User talk:AltaKarl. It should disrupt the flow of the text less as it's not just a "W" letter. FaviFake (talk) 13:34, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Just replaced the icons! Of course I'm ready to remove them entirely if consensus goes that way, by the way. Chaotic Enby (talk) 21:43, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, this looks much better and isn't as disruptive as a letter. Thanks! Personally I'd prefer having no icon at all but I can understand the demand to see where a link leads to at a glimpse. Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 09:00, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Mobile version of this website

This site does not appear to have a mobile version when I access it on my phone, so I have to zoom in to see text. Is this something others experience the same? And if so, has there been discussion around introducing support for mobile browsing (which is likely nearly half of visitors at this point)? Sdkb (talk) 18:59, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

I agree, I think we should try to improve the mobile experience, similar to Wikipedia's mobile skin. FaviFake (talk) 09:40, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

Random button broken?

last year, i pressed "Random" on ExplainXKCD, and got 3105: Interoperability 3 times in a row. this year it seems to only show me comics i have already seen.
i think it should be an RNG 1 to <insert current highest comic number here>. would that be too complicated? 2605:59C0:450B:3410:CD7A:EFE8:A9E1:E727 16:47, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

'𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘐𝘧?'

Moved from EX:CPP#'𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘐𝘧?'

Why does the sidebar's What If? link use the mathematical sans-serif unicode characters, instead of just italicising the normal ascii letters? 2A00:23EE:1070:279D:F5E4:A5AF:8839:E006 11:14, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

Because Waldir, the editor who tried to make it italicised, was unable to do it using standard wikiformatting. Maybe @Chaotic Enby will be able to save us??? FaviFake (talk) 21:51, 1 October 2026 (UTC)