Board Thread:New on TrainStation Wiki/@comment-5596770-20140217222504/@comment-5596770-20141204002720

I will impart what I know of the magic of page propagation. When you make an edit to a content page, it immediately forces the regeneration of the content displayed on that page. When you edit an image, it uploads the new image data to the wikia database, and at some point, when the upload has finished and verified, the new image will displayed when a user requests the image to be displayed (i.e. their browser doesn't just use a cached image already stored on their machine). Editing templates queues a wikia site for a background updating task which will determine which pages are affected, and queues those pages for idle updating, in which the content for those pages will be regenerated based on the current state of the template/templates and other content.

When the Wikia servers are "idle", they undertake the task of updating any wikia sites which have been queued for background updates. The order in which a wikia site is handled, and even the order in which the pages of a wikia site are handled is in indeterminate order, if at all. Yes, there is a possibility that you will be put in the queue and never handled. Ever. The only way to circumvent this is to do a null edit and force the database to immediately regenerate all page data.

What does this mean for template makers? It means that you better have your template 99.99% done when you release it and start using it, because if you make changes, it may take a long time for those changes to appear on their own. If ever.