Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-22224-20180521161500/@comment-168424-20180521224354

TimmyQuivy wrote: I also want to talk about the amount of communication time given before Monobook’s retirement. For most site changes we aim to give a few weeks of lead time whenever possible, even if the feature is unsupported like Monobook. But given that this is not a normal feature retirement and is based around active development regarding a law that has a firm deadline for compliance (this Friday), it’s a decision that came down to the wire.

While this law’s deadline has been in place for a while, its practical legal implementations and nuances have been debated and refined by companies across the globe over the last few months. As such, industry-wide, most of the legwork has been done in recent weeks because additional clarity has been provided. That’s why web users are continuing to see privacy policy update emails being sent from websites even now, and will continue to throughout this week.

At FANDOM, with our legal and technical questions addressed, we’ve worked in the last few months to ensure that we are compliant. We’ve had a prioritized list of tasks that needed to be done in order to ensure full site compliance. As we’ve gone through those tasks, we’ve tried to find ways to make our instance of Monobook compliant in a way that didn’t require a Herculean effort to begin supporting Monobook as part of our services architecture. As time went on, and more and more tasks were added to ensure that we are compliant and with deadlines fast approaching, it became clear that it was not possible to do that. Once that became clear, we made the decision late last week to retire Monobook as our only realistic path forward.

With the decision being recent, overall GDPR communication being written, and translations needed for internationalization purposes, today was the earliest day we could practically announce this decision to the community as a whole. This is an unusual circumstance, and thus it stands to reason that the communication strategy is a bit out of the norm, but it was announced as soon as we could announce it.

Hinting at contentious internal deliberations does admins no good, unfortunately.

If Fandom knew a possible outcome of deliberations would be removing the Monobook skin, it should have been announced as soon as that was known, which I suspect was at least a month ago. Also, Monobook should have been official deprecated soon after the fork from MediaWiki trunk with a warning that it would be removed for reasons other than GDPR, which there are plenty.