User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Prototype for a new article layout/@comment-2194058-20141212200525

There's good and bad things about the new layout.

Content Space The size of the content space is a plus. It has always bothered me how the right-rail was always empty. With improvements, it seems that the page itself will finally focus more on the content.

Recent Wiki Activity box Negavitely, I feel the Recent Wiki Activity box is obstructive. It pushes the Infobox out of the way and away from the first things the reader sees. If the RWA was moved somewhere else or removed, that would be fine. Personally, I never use it as I prefer using Recent Changes or Wiki Activity to tell me all that. It really doesn't serve a purpose in my eyes as it only ever tells what was the last 5 pages recently edited.

Left-side Tools For the tools part on the left side of the content space, it's really confusing. Heck, I didn't even realize the first bubble was supposed to be the table of contents. I don't know how many new users will actually take their first look at the pencil bubble and think "oh that's the editing tool". However, I do admit that this was a nice change, and I'm looking forward to improvements.

Now for the fun part:

Must Watch Videos and ads The placement of the Must Watch Videos and ads [in the middle of the article] need to be moved somewhere else! It really distracts the readers and most importantly the flow of the article. I want my readers to read the article, not get distracted by some dumb videos that aren't about the article itself. The same thing goes for the ads, seeing as how readers may confuse ads and images/videos, though I assume you made that intentional so that more readers will accidentally click on the ad, thinking it was an image only to be betrayed by an ad.

I think that concludes my opinion on this. I'm not one of those "please don't make this change, it's horrible". I agree that some of the new changes are horrible, but there's really nothing the userbase can do to stop it from changing. Considering this change will be a large part of Wikia, it will likely be, and I'm positively sure that it will be mandatory to all wikis, just like the big, giant, humongous, uncustomizable white box up there that's so called the Global Nav. The only thing we can really do is provide feedback and pray that they actually listen and work on that, since Wikia's favorite pasttime is forcing users into the changes and thinking we will grow into it eventually.