User talk:Anno1404

Welcome
Welcome to Central Wikia, Anno1404!

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Finally, please keep an eye on the recent changes to see what the community is up to here.

Enjoy! -- CatherineMunro (Talk) 20:06, 2009 October 30

Slight correction
When I banned Karensarahrocks, Ash Crimson actually changed the ban to unblocked saying I had no authority on the wiki. Wikiar 19:06, June 20, 2010 (UTC)
 * edit diffs please. Thanks.
 * See: http://deadrising.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=block&user=ash+Crimson&page=User%3AKarensarahrocks&year=&month=-1
 * Anno1404 19:11, June 20, 2010 (UTC)

Re: New Gallery problems
Hi and thanks for your message. I posted on the blog as well. Kind regards, Waitingforspring 16:31, July 19, 2010 (UTC)

This is it-- Ken zen   Elev  en!  20:54, July 19, 2010 (UTC)

aw man :( Reddy!! :) :( :D xD DX &gt;:D ;Reddy loves emotioncons. 13:41, July 20, 2010 (UTC)

Backing off
The short answer is, No, I am not aware of a time when Wikia has backed off from a change such as this current change even in the face of significant negative feedback. Also, I am not "involved in the bureaucracy" at community.wikia.com ... I am not shy about sharing my opinion but in the final analysis it is just one person's opinion and whether it influences Wikia staff or not is just as much a mystery to me as it is to you.

I can recall some smaller features that were offered and then withdrawn perhaps as a result of negative feedback but more likely as a result of increasingly complicated technical support required to make the feature truly useful. (Those yellow post-it style notes that used to be a feature of the MyHome page comes to mind. Widgets are about to be phased out with the current change.)

The apparent pattern is:
 * 1) Wikia promotes something new and rolls it out to all but "the select few" wikis with an opt-out flag available within each user's preferences.
 * 2) One staff member solicits feedback and responds to a subset of feedback left by users.
 * 3) Wikia staff gather statistics on the change in peoples clicking or editing or opting out or whatever and sometimes publish data that makes the change appear to have been for the greater good.
 * 4) After some time has passed the alternative/legacy feature is deprecated. Usually citing "low usage" or "high support cost" or similar data.

Keep in mind that I have only been on this Wikia scene since April 2008 and so there are many other users who have been around much longer than me and may have seen more evidence of Wikia's ability to take negative feedback on the chin and then graciously back down.


 * As far as this current change is concerned - I think it is a fait accompli ... so resistance is futile and you will assimilate your favorite wiki(s) to the new skin.

Alternatives
This does create an opportunity for migration away from Wikia for some communities. However, the truth of the matter is that Wikia does a very good job of lowering the overhead involved in creating and administering a wiki; they also manage to advance the significance of Wikia hosted wikis within such search engine result pages as Google, Yahoo, Bing and so on and so forth. For so long as Wikia hosting is free it is difficult to find a comparable free "wiki farm" to migrate to.


 * The free-hosting alternative that I am evaluating is wikkii.com - their "Advanced hosting" product would appear to offer all of the flexibility that Wikia has offered in the past but goes further to allow each wiki founder to add any available MediaWiki extension. The burden of technical support rests with each community - so this is going to be a deterrent for many would-be founders until such time as the community-based self-help forums and help pages have matured.

Happy hacking! -- najevi 03:27, September 14, 2010 (UTC)