Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-25330335-20160809222447

Just a small warning to all wiki-editors who are on for the next 5-ish hours. I am planning to run Batch delete on the list of filenames in Special:Unusedimages as soon as the cache updates. For thos of you who have no idea what the means, the cache is a list of names of images that are unused. The List is created so that wikia's servers do not get overloaded by the amount of work constantly checking the wiki and updating the list would be. It only does it once every twentyfour hours. The last time it was cached was 21 hours ago. This means that it will soon run again. I am writing this post to warn those of you who are planning to upload images in the next 5-ish hours that if your image is unused when the list is created, then it will be deleted when I run the script. There are a few ways to prevent having your image deleted. The first is to simply not upload within the next few hours. As I realize that that is an impossibility for many users, there is an alternative. It does require a little knowledge of the source editor. Basically, you must create a redlink to the name of the file you want to upload. You have to save or post the redlink before you follow it. This makes that image is "used" before it even exists, so there is never any way that it will get on the list. Then all you have to do is follow the redlink and use Special:Upload to upload your image. You can find information on how to add a picture using wikitext on our help page.

Note that you only need to take precautions for the next few hours. I will post once I have run the script. This is not permanent, and will not affect anyone in the long term. I will always post whenever I am going to run it in future.

 