Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-22224-20180521161500/@comment-22224-20180521164612

ShakespeareFan00 wrote: What's the EXACT technical reason for ditching Monobook, because based on what it does I am not immediately seeing where it's doing something that 'non-compliant' (Question is prompted by potentially filing a ticket on the WMF phabricator in relation to the core Mediawiki package.)?

In any case Monobook is ancient (with a number of WMF based Mediawiki installs using the Vector skin instead.)

There are two primary ways in which Monobook could not be made compliant:

1. The data tracking used in Monobook is not compliant with the GDPR regulations.

2. The technical systems that were set up to make FANDOM GDPR-compliant are based on the default skin, and we would have to build duplicate versions of those systems specific to Monobook and then run those systems in parallel with one another.

Please keep in mind that FANDOM forked from MediaWiki in summer 2016, meaning that while MediaWiki remains a core component of our site's architecture, our code is constantly evolving and diverging from "vanilla" MediaWiki. We have additional needs - advertising partners, additional features, caching requirements - that are drastically different than a basic MediaWiki site. As such, we could not simply adopt whatever changes the Wikimedia Foundation will do to support their skins. We would have had to build the framework to fit our own needs.

This same rationale means that no alternative will be offered to replace Monobook. Any other MediaWiki skin, such as Vector, would have had the same GDPR issues on our network.

JustLeafy wrote: My question: What will happen to styles and scripts applied to MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Common.js???

We are looking at consolidating the custom CSS/JS files now that we will only have the default FANDOM (Oasis) skin. We will update the community when that happens, but we do not anticipate communities needing to do any changes manually at this time.

Pedyjczyk wrote: You will also remove Monobook from Uncyclopedia-related projects?

Monobook will be removed as the default skin from the small number of communities that were using that skin as such. It will be removed on May 25th, the same date as it will be removed as a personal preference.