User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Prototype for a new article layout/@comment-1295676-20150115012936

So I have given myself a few days to play around with it, and here is what I think. The new Venus skin is not bad. There. That is my opinion in short. However, at this time, I do not think it is markedly superior to the Oasis skin; rather, it just has different problems.

The right rail is gone. Great! I like this. Almost a third of any article in the Oasis is skin is blank white space. I am glad to see that area is now being used for article content. That said, the “Recent Wiki Activity” block is unattractive and looks out of place. As others have noted before me, the new skin also does not play well with infoboxes. Either they get pushed into the center of the page (which looks ugly), or they get pushed further down the page (which looks less unattractive, but still moves important information that really should be at an article’s top with the introductory blurb). Don’t even get me started on the pages with lists: http://bakemonogatari.wikia.com/wiki/Episode_List?useskin=venus.

The new font size is too large. We have all this extra space now for content, so why waste it? I also notice that the content area in the Venus skin is slightly (but noticeably) skinnier than that of the Oasis skin. Again, why?

The Left-side Tools are brilliant. All the important things are in one place, unobtrusive, and move with me as I scroll through an article. That said, please let there be more than one sub-level in the table of contents. For the really long articles, those extra sub-headings are very important for quick and painless navigation. Also (and this is an issue with the altered navigation bar as well), when moving to a sub-level in the table of contents, the level appears at the top of the list, rather than next to where ever the header was. You have to move the cursor up to reach the links, but you have to do so outside of the table of contents, otherwise the sub-level will disappear. This becomes very frustrating, very quickly.

The increase in Content Recommendations I do not mind too much, as they at the bottom of the page, but I do agree with others here that it is a lot.

And the advertisements. I get it, I really do. They are a necessary evil to pay for a service that I very much enjoy. And I do appreciate that Wikia is trying to make them as unobtrusive as possible. I do not see them much because I have them turned off in my preferences. But then I will go on as an anonymous user on a public computer, and there they will be. Like warts. The Venus skin has yet to make them any better.