User:Fandyllic/ucp explainer

Based on:
 * https://community.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000001773701/r/4400000000006442358
 * https://community.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000001905775/r/4400000000006714319

We need to keep in mind much of UCP was driven by making things easier on FANDOM dev with very little priority on making things better or easier to use for admins, moderators, editors, and users.

The carrot that was used to justify UCP was MediaWiki engine update and possibly a better mobile experience.

It is possible more of their customization could have been kept with UCP if they had updated the MediaWiki engine over time and updated their customizations to work with the trunk of MediaWiki on some kind of schedule. Merging fork customizations back to main isn't so hard if you do it say, every 6 months to a year or quicker. Wikia/FANDOM never merged back... ever... in like 8 years. They also apparently maintained very little MediaWiki expertise and likely had to buy Gamepedia partly to get some of that expertise back. Unless the truth leaks we will never know.

However, no company with paying customers would ever get away with the quality of UCP. The biggest problem we have at FANDOM is that FANDOM doesn't have any real competition to make it want to do better for its users. It has also gotten big enough that unless the competitor is bigger, they might just buy them.

All that said, the best way to make FANDOM feel your pain is to submit your bugs and complaints to "Contact us".

Customer support still costs FANDOM money and they keep metrics on support ratings and responses. You can both make them spend money on support and make their metrics look bad (you don't even have to be dishonest, if you just use their system as much as you can).