Forum:The Wikias from the Past

I have a question: I asked a question on a non-wikia wiki about their move, and I got this answer: 

"About a year and a half ago, Wikia wikis everywhere were appalled when the Wikia higher-ups forced this restrictive new "Oasis" skin on them all. The skin very narrowly limited the article content on the page and stuffed lots of ads and cumbersome "features" into every page every user would see, and it was done strictly for money reasons. Not only that, the Terms of Use on Wikia was updated to no longer allow Admins to use custom CSS or JavaScript to completely remove these "core features" for all users. Several high-profile Wikia communities copied their Wiki contents onto their own servers and moved, most notably Wowwiki into Wowpedia. We weren't necessarily all up in arms over the Oasis thing and would've likely stayed at Wikia had nothing else come up, but the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, which is a collection of Nintendo-related wikis that were either not on Wikia to begin with or had also made the move from Wikia, invited us to move over to one of their servers, and they offered to pay the cost for a domain for us. It was an excellent offer because it allows us to have a custom-designed skin with minimal ads and junk, like the golden skin that's active nowadays."

I have an account, so I know about the pure white layout in monobook. Why was the ability to have a custom skin in monobook removed for such transaction? It hardly seems like anything that needs to be removed. --96.242.163.228 18:02, April 29, 2012 (UTC)

On the link, it says about a money cut, though I don't understand why a money cut would cause Community Central to be the only wikia that has a colored skin in Monobook. However, I do know that this situation of where people complain to the ones running the site is indeed recurring. Why? Because that incident 1.5 years ago was this: A site will always add features that cannot compare to the original, nostalgic features (in this case, the different monobook skins).

Neopets is a very good example of this. It has been hitting this concept for about the past 7 years, ever since they became associated with Nickolodeon (by the way, I self-froze my account 8-10 months ago due to my security concerns, so don't try to find me there). However, they originally said that neopets would always be the same; this promise was not kept, as neopets is now Nickolodeon Virtual Worlds. In addition, the changes The Neopets Team (the people who run the site) were very frustating to old-timers: the new layout introduced in 2007, the updating of maps and shopkeepers, and other changes truly took the whole theme out, and were replaced with flash maps, tons of ads, sudden changes, and more. While some people approved of this, many were appalled, resulting in useless complaints and petitions. Despite all of these complaints, the Staff still to anger the majority of their users, and say, "We'll look into it," but never give it much thought!

The incident with wikia 1.5 years is this neopets incident on a much smaller scale. The only difference is that Wikia apparently made the changes because of money problems, while neopets had nickolodeon to back them up. But really, the point of this story is the technology advancement and these sites lacking moral, republic policies. Also, Wikia asks people if they want to test these features first so they know if it's going to be positive with the people. However, there's no denying that there will be a couple of more of these changes on Wikia (like the ones 1.5 years ago), even if someone like Brandon Rhea or Dopp was to come on this board and say otherwise.

NOTE: This is not meant to be a complaint, but to tell users that such changes are normal due to these over-advancements in technology. --Thenewguy34 23:03, April 29, 2012 (UTC)


 * Regarding the op's question: "Why was the ability to have a custom skin in monobook removed for such transaction?"
 * Administrators of Wikia hosted wikis can still create a custom Monobook skin, they just don't have the ability to make that skin the default for all viewers. --Gardimuer { ʈalk } 02:45, April 30, 2012 (UTC)