User blog comment:KyleH/The future of Central Wikia/@comment-167456-20100209120207

Hi. I have some concerns regarding the loss of blue boxes. I have already contacted Wikia staff, but I thought I'd mention it here too.

Blue box pages allowed users to search for wikis by name, regardless of the wikis' size or activity. The new cross-wiki search bar no longer allows this, instead searching by Wikia content, and thus is predisposed to produce results from larger and active wikis. Small and inactive wikis are likely to fall through the cracks. I suggest the creation of some sort of search function that looks for wikis by name and subject, rather than wiki content, and will list wikis regardless of size or activity.

This problem is made worse by the simplicity of the Create a New Wiki function (which, don't get me wrong, is itself a very good thing). A lot of people make new wikis and, from experience, many of them don't think to check whether there's a wiki already in their subject area. I suggest adding a comment to the top of the Create a New Wiki, suggesting that users search for wikis before making one (perhaps linking to the search function, above).

Perhaps it would also be sensible to provide guidelines of what users should do if they want to change the name of their wiki. I have seen situations in which two wikis are created on the same day by the same user, for no other reason than that the first had a typo in it.