User blog comment:Sannse/Important Updates on Wikia’s New Look/@comment-227331-20100929023755

Dear staff, we've got a problem.

You see, I know you want people to like your new look, you want to make it mandatory so that all-too-common "user apathy" kicks in and we either move on or find something or just deal with it. However blocking the option to edit common.css has a LOAD of problems.

1) Say what you want about the theme creator, but that's a simplistic tool for the people starting out, it does NOT provide in-depth editing features like you can only do in common.css. Right now the only place where I can set up a custom template that replicates features like twitter, google calandar, or any of the other features you plan to remove? Is in common.css. If you're not going to make them available there, make those editing options available in the skin's .css.

2) no really, have you thought this out? I know this is a continuation of 1, but the only way to edit a template's background is also in common.css. Unless your little theme designer can change the background image for the wiki's templates (and individual templates), then you're going to have a glaring problem in any fancy-designed wiki... Which the entire point of a fancy little wiki is to be able to customize everything.

3) this will result in more problems down the line. As the skin ages and becomes dated (which can happen in any time from 6 months to 2 years), it will be a turn off if new users can see that there's no good way to update the skin on their own. These days monaco does look dated, but the things that people did to make the skin was what made me choose this wikifarm in the first place.

4) You're cutting out a main feature. Let's look at the wikifarms shall we? pbworks is aimed towards corporate types, but they don't have ads. Wetpaint doesn't have editable css, but they allow for iframes. Wikispaces allows you to have no ads, add your own features, and customize the css, but the design is terrible and you have to pay to change it. Wikidot looks like it has promise, so I don't know the full list of drawbacks/features. And lastly, google site has many great features, but they disallow you from using css to modify their themes.

See where this is going? The reason I chose this site is BECAUSE of the flexibility of what I can do here. If this wasn't an option I'd choose any of the other sites. The big thing that counters your lack of open-source widgets, prevalent and annoying ads, and spotty customer service, is the fact that we can change our wiki into what we want it to be and that we have a community to learn how to do it.

If you block us from modifying common.css then you've taken away a chunk of our flexibility, and you won't have much of a community any more.