User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Prototype for a new article layout/@comment-4050367-20150116182105

The community of Ben 10 Fan Fiction has been discussing this for a while, and the users who have actually come to this blog include myself, Nick, Sat90, and Yoponot. To see our discussions on this, click here and here. Oh and pointing this out, I will be using the term "wiki" to describe our community. We are Ben 10 Fan Fiction wiki, not Ben 10 Fan Fiction Wikia, regardless of some creative attempts to convince us to use the term "wikia" for the company's communities.

This is our basic opinion on the layout:

Our community is a fan community not dedicated to providing information, but giving artistic and creative writing and images in order to show off our skills, interact, improve, and to allow us to have experience in a community so that we can use that same experience on other wikis and in life. This said, the layout simply does not work with our community, as it completely goes against our vision, our purpose, and our existence. This is not a layout for our community, it is a layout for some, but not all. We are not that wiki that wants this. This doesn't fit us.

It completely strips us of what makes our wiki so awesome. The templates are ruined, damaged, and enlarged. The "Recent Wiki Activity" covers part of the page sometimes. The Tabber and tabs in general are completly ruined and messed up, destroying the quality of our wiki. Many users believe that the tabbers actually allow a sense of professionalism, and the editor simply removes that. The tag will not work, and many... many pages use this. We understand that there is a need for uniformity, but sometimes the same thing isn't great. Isn't Communism where "All people are the same and therefore classes make no sense. " ? And how well has that worked out?

Then there's advertisements. Okay yes we don't like ads on our main pages and yes, we don't like the videos, but at least they were bearable because they were to the side and you could kind of ignore them. Throwing them into the middle of a page is just wrong.

I know a lot of visitors are on tablets and phones, but websites have a Desktop Mode and a Mobile Mode. If you really need to, make a Tablet mode as well, and allow users to use a different mode (and thus have a different skin/page layout) depending on what device they use. Forcing people on desktops to use a tablet layout is just as wrong as forcing tablet people to use desktop layouts.

Wiki Activity MUST stay. If we have to change our entire look of our wiki, revamp all of our nearly 40,000 pages just to fit this new layout, something's wrong. We shouldn't have to have a tiny wordmark to fit the REALLY REALLY BIG TEXT THAT ARE SHOUTING AT YOU   , and if you didn't get it, we don't like it.

So in other words, while we as a community are welcome to change, we would like GOOD Change, and this... this is not good change.

If you are a Staff Member, please comment below.