Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5076341-20141124191243/@comment-89.240.241.243-20141125221901

Tupka217 wrote:

89.240.241.243 wrote:

Tupka217 wrote:

Kerry Stapleton wrote: The forum is too social: althogh it is fine on Community Central, there is too much social networking site- like stuff on wikia, and it is getting sort of ridiculus. I shall, when I can be bothered, write a longer post explaining it n detail. There are wikis that rely heavily on the forums, and used off-site message boards like ProBoards before Wikia came up with the new format. A lot of wikis are social communities, where, other than creating a database on the topic, they also engage in vibrant discussions, games and other social aspects. As has been said before, if you don't like it, don't use it.

The old forums are essentially talk pages, and add little more (if anything) that a talk or project page. Like monobook, source mode and the galleries, it's a product of the early days of Mediawiki. Change happens. The problem with Wikia's changes to MediaWiki is that they are propietry. No matter how good these social features are (a matter of opinion, I think they're crap), content created using the new talk pages, forums and blogs cannot be exported easily. I moved a wiki from Wikia a while back and while the blogs were included in the database dump, they were unusuable and thus I deleted them. The argument of "leave if you don't like it" falls apart when Wikia makes it impossible to do so. Let's be honest, is it really Wikia's fault that other wiki farms and/or your own MediaWiki site don't host those features? If they justify adding awful skins and features by saying "don't like it then leave" rather than giving communities the choice then I would say yes, it is their fault. They could have made them open extensions to the MediaWiki software rather than traps forcing communities into staying with Wikia or loosing half their content when they leave.