User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/The first migrations to the Unified Community Platform/@comment-27058814-20201207050442

Reason no. 156 on why I now realize why moving Malware Wiki to MediaWiki was a great idea.

When I joined Wikia about 5 years ago, it was a great and chill website. Everything about it was pretty great, but the more and more I started looking at some MediaWikis like Wiibrew, I realized just how flawed Wikia as a platform is. However, it just degraded further and further in quality over the years, first, was the idiotic move of Wikia to "Fandom", which, I still refuse to call it such. It was literally just an idiotic ploy to advertise a clickbait "news" site, which is barely even that. Then began the stupid domain name changes, because apparantly everything is a fandom right? I saw the Malware Wiki more as a library, an encyclopedia. Not a fandom, so, at least malware wiki was able to dodge going to "fandom.com" and just stayed as wikia.org. Yet, it still felt like the walls were closing in on Wikia. I really started to hate the general layout of the site and how much customization we lacked, and the idiotic ad placements and blog placements nobody cared about. As soon as I got word from the owner of VXUG that he would host our Wiki onto Mediawiki, I jumped the shark and never looked back.

Looking here, you guys seem to only have two things in mind: Pissing off people who actually like the design and don't want stupid changes to it, those who like it the way it is, and money. So many websites have barely changed their looks throughout the years, and really, this is only evidence that the modern web is becoming bloated. For crying out loud, at least be like Reddit and allow people to go to something like "old.fandom.com" or something for the old design. I also can't wait until each Wikia article has to use up more than 200MB of RAM. Discussions are hard to moderate, and there is literally none, if any, true control over them. Shit can just get posted to discussions whenever, the moderation in Discussions is non-existant. Forums were absolutely fine the way they were, why change them to some idiotic thing known as "Discussions"? So that you can siphon poor people with 4GB of RAM or less? So that you can implement more buggy javascript for means of invasion of privacy?

All in all, this is making Wikia what it's not supposed to be: a social media site. But we have literally gotten to the point where it is less about being an encyclopedia of encyclopedias and more of social media but in specific fandoms. That is what Wikia was never really about, and this is just purely stupid.

In short, the only reasonable choice is to A: accept Wikia's idiotic handling of design and such or B: just move to MediaWiki like a lot of Wikis have. And I am calling for every Wiki owner to just move to MediaWiki. Sure there's upkeep costs, but it's a helluva lot better than having to deal with Wikia and facing strict enforcements of modifying their crappy design or freedom of speech issues.