User blog:Mr.LuigiDude/Make Wikia Great Again

Hello, I'm Mr.LuigiDude, an admin and prominent community member of Le Miiverse Resource Wiki. I (and numerous other members of our community) have become fed up with the constant problems here on Wikia. I could not count how many times the topic of "New Wikia Error" has popped up in our chat. For a long time now, I've been pondering whether or not to write a blog like this, where I bring up the many faults in Wikia's system, however I have not had the time to sit down and write it until now.

The first issue I'd like to point out is the constant glitches. Whether it is disappearing avatars, chat not loading, edits not going through, pages not deleting, chat's sidebar disappearing, etc., the overabundance of glitches on the Wikia platform makes it feel like I'm playing Sonic 06. This major flaw makes Wikia almost unusable.

Now, speaking of the chat, it is the glitchiest component on Wikia. On chat, lag is very common. It makes chat nearly unusable with the constant drawn out periods of waiting for messages to display. Sometimes, messages won't even appear on screen, as if they disappeared into the never-ending realm of lag. Many times emoticons don't appear in chat, and avatars of users disappear sometimes.

Moving on to the dreaded Terms of Use, which seem to tailor to the over-sensitive (to put it nicely). This is the area where, personally, I can not stand Wikia. The rule that stands out to me is the "no derogatory terms" one, which, as it says, bans derogatory terms. This rule is apparently largely part of the reason why Le Miiverse Resource was taken down in early 2015, on top of our heaping mounds of hate pages left over from the early days of the wiki. On a platform that wants to be open to everyone, catering to the average nerd, jock, whoever; free speech is apparently one of the topics that Wikia can not be open to. Which perplexes me.

We have a system in our chat that uses the emoticons to this rule's advantage, censoring the derogatory terms with a cat photo. We included the words N***** and F** in the list of words to be censored. However, later on, these words were taken out by Wikia Staff, making it so that now people could say them uncensored. The reason given was that these words "Violated Wikia's ToU". However, we knew that they did, we were trying to censor them in chat using the emoticons. They also did not remove the other derogatory terms we had censored, which left many (me included) confused about the deletion.

To cap off this mini-rant on the derogatory term rule, we have had videos removed from our wiki because they included such derogatory terms. On one of our pages, Moon Man, we had included videos with the word "N*****" in them, since they pertained to the subject of the page (the character is a satirical racist). These were also removed from our wiki with the summary of "Violation of Wikia's Terms of Use". Considering we had videos in the past that included such terms, I was surprised and confused (once again) at the deletion.

The format of Wikia has also changed for the worse. As much of the LMR community was complaining about, I was upfront with my criticism of the ugly top bar. The changes were certainly not small or subtle, with massive unnecessary shifts. Everything vital to using Wikia on a community centered wiki like LMR was thrown to the right (the user page and notification shortcuts), in favor of the "Explore Wikia", "TV", "Movies", and "Games" tabs that are very unnecessary and useless in usual wiki use. Also added is "THE HOME OF FANDOM" title, next to the Wikia logo, which is far too large and just does not look good or fit. Topping all of this off, the "Start a wikia" button is almost hidden, all the way to the far right, shoved into the corner. It should be more prominent, as opposed to the Games, Movies, TV, etc. tabs.

The huge position change in Wikia a few months back has also handicapped LMR and other forum and chat centered Wikias by throwing out the forum mod and mixed mod (what we called forum + chat mods on LMR) positions in favor of the content mod and discussion mod positions. So, in essence, you replaced forum and chat controllers with an admin who can't dish out punishment and a bootleg mixed mod. I did not see the point of shaking up the positions and still don't, as it only made Wikia worse. Our staff all agreed that content moderator was completely useless and kicked it to the side in favor of another admin and changed all forum and mixed mods to discussion moderators, which still does not completely work since a few of our former forum mods turned discussion mods still do not use the chat, rendering half of the position useless.

Finally, the situation with blocking people. I know this from experience: when you block anyone, they can easily come back on an alternate account with a VPN. This infuriates me as an admin, as I have to continually block users who vandalize pages or harrass people on end. Most of the time they give in after a while, but it is still an unnecessary hassle to go through. This problem, however, I do not know how to fix, which is why it isn't one of my main complaints. It's a very large inconvenience.

I would include more issues with Wikia, but unfortunately this is all I could get to come to my mind as of now. How do you think Wikia could be improved upon?