User blog comment:Toughpigs/My Home -- new feature launches on Wednesday/@comment-1066636-20091006174839

Sorry for being a bit harsh, but it started to feel like we're just being ignored.

I'm aware of the difference between user preferences and community choices. However - to use your example - whether you choose Monaco or Monobook does not affect the content of the pages themselves and especially not a page as central as the starting page. Hence I'd class it as a community choice first and an individual one second. Of course everyone is free to use whatever (s)he likes as a personal starting page; enabling the redirect by default however makes that decision for the user without even asking.

While every wiki can customize its homepage completely to suit its needs, the same is simply not possible with MyHome; 80% of its content is stuff we cannot change. The only thing we can actually customize is the lower right portion of the screen which on lower resolutions doesn't even show up unless the user scrolls down; and even that can only be customized to a limited extent.

As an example, take my home wiki: we use the blog functionality for news posting; this helps keeping people come back to the site. We have integrated it into our main page; as far as I can see, there is no way to integrate it into My Home. Hence I'm a bit miffed at people getting redirected to a page which we largely have no influence over; it hurts our community building efforts.

Of course, that's not the only reason why I dislike the redirect being enabled by default - I already mentioned the other points higher up.