User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Layout Changes: Breakpoints and Typography/@comment-25408491-20150520145617

Over 1000 comments in and I'm hoping that there are a selection of lessons which have been learned from this situation. As a rough guess, I'd say they're the following :


 * 1) Wikia staff ought to have made attempts to communicate with the moderator teams of as many wikias as possible well in advance of the switch being flipped. Evidently a large number of wikia moderators were not aware of this change until it happened to their wikis. Without warning, very few mod teams had been able to test the effects that the layout changes would have or to engage with the reasons behind making the switch.
 * 2) Upon realising that the release was not having the desired effect, it should have been temporarily rolled back. Evidently what was released yesterday was not functioning "as intended". Rolling back to a previous working version while bug fixes were being worked on would have been the logical thing to do and avoided a certain proportion of the resentment to the changes being made.
 * 3) Explaining clearly why such radical changes were made would have been appreciated. Someone at Wikia HQ has got the stats on the number of users accessing wikia sites from different devices. It probably got presented on powerpoint slides in a meeting somewhere. Putting these numbers up on this page would provide a massive support to arguments made by Kirkburn and others.

As an addition to point 1 : Many wikia editors (including quite a number of mods - myself included) are not skilled web designers or especially tech-savvy. They aren't necessarily following every technical change proposed via the Wikia community wiki and they aren't necessarily skilled enough to know how to fix everything efficiently when the foundations of their wikis are changed. They've learnt by doing, by copying and pasting what works, by tweaking individual values here and there to try their best to provide as much information in as clear a manner as possible.

These dedicated amateurs have created and maintained the content that brings people to wikias for anything and everything. They work for nothing and to share their passions. So if the three points above seem like I'm putting the pressure on Wikia staff to do things better, I ask you to remember this : Wikia makes its money off that work and off those passions. Wikia staff, I ask you all to help these people. Help them to help you. You owe them that.