User blog comment:Daniel Baran/Search Developments: Big Picture/@comment-2017750-20120515035927

Changes like this are showing the continuous downspiral Wikia is in while trying to scrape up as much money from their ads as they can. It doesn't take a political analyst to know the real reason you wanted to add an extra page inbetween every search result: you can increase the number of ads seen by a sizeable amount. As if the existing ads weren't already bad enough. Turning off adblock and logging out, I was immediately assaulted by a popup flashing ad in the bottom corner of the window which obstructed part of the page. You complain about any change we, the editors and life of the wikis, make, yet have no qualms with covering up our content yourselves.

Concerning your latest power abuse of pulling out the ToS on wikis which redirected search results directly to the page -- the reason that I came here -- is just frankly quite sad. I started editing in the "golden days" of Monaco (remember that?), when wikis seemed to have a lot more customization and each had their own perks. You claim the reasoning behind your "don't change anything" clause of the ToS is for consistency, keeping the various wikis more alike each other. Yet, we can change the themes, the page layouts, the very community... Wikis aren't supposed to be alike! The RuneScape wiki is nothing like the Roman Churches wiki or the Music wiki. What works for one wiki doesn't necessarily work for every wiki.

Firstly, let's look at the REAL bigger picture here. You implemented a change to a critical feature of the wiki (your words) with apparently zero community testing and for the wrong reasons. If you genuinely believed that users wanted to view search results every time, then you would have had a "go" button, which should be the default form submit button, from day one. But no, out of the blue one day, all our searches are suddenly no longer taking us to the right page. Even now, having seen the general community discontent, you want to put that "go" button in the preferences, where your largest audience, the anonymous IPs, can't utilize it.

Sure, you might get some more cash out of it, but you're also scaring away your main source of revenue. To prove that the anonymous IPs dislike this change, behold exhibit one. This secure poll shows that, at the time of writing, 96% of polled viewers preferred the "go" functionality over the new "search page". Also at the time of writing, the (slightly less secure) poll we have set up on the RuneScape wiki, created only three days ago and has over a thousand votes, shows a 90% majority in favour of the "go" functionality, versus less than 2% supporting the current method.

In the case of the RuneScape wiki, the audience is gamers. They aren't the kind to be be wasting time navigating search results to find the article they were looking for; they want their page now. The RuneScape wiki makes heavy use of redirects, to the point of which even the less common abbreviations and slang for pages can find its way to the intended page, while your search feature falls flat on its face. If you really must, make it a toggleable wiki feature, don't force it onto everyone without any practical testing.

I think it's high time that Wikia started listening to their editors (where would you be without us?) and less to the alluring advertising income.

“It is greed to do all the talking but not to want to listen at all” -- Democritus