Board Thread:New Features/@comment-24739709-20150518230347/@comment-24473195-20150821090100

EternalLocket wrote: @Dessamator It's not weird, wikis are communities, meant for everyone to contribute to. Not every wiki has the same level of vandalism or destruction that others may have, that would justifiably warrant locking part of a feature away so the average "vandal Joe" can't get to it. This template draws a deeper and darker line between regular user and admin. Effectively keeping regular users from being more than just editors. Because even if the new template is easy for them to pick up, without a higher status on their wiki or the okay from an admin, all they've created is a box. The fact of the matter is that the mediawiki namespace is strange in itself. It is odd for a software to allow the user to change the user interface. A select few admins dictate how everybody should see their wiki. If you look above, you'll see that I agree with your point on css. It doesn't seem logical to rely on entirely on admins for the potboxes.

The current templates aren't perfect, but neither is this. The current template has everything I need/want right when I need/want it. I don't have to wait, I don't have to purge anything. I can just build a template, style it, if it doesn't look good in preview then I can keep tweaking it until it does.

One can easily change anything in a site using the browser's inspector and console and see the results immediately. The only true issue is that the regular joe doesn't understand how having inline css may affect performance of a wiki. When a couple of parser functions were originally introduced they were so abused that they brought down wikipedia's servers and they had to add limits[1].

The point of evolving is to be better than before. But how are you better than before if you have to take several more steps than what you used to do just to do the exact same thing?

The problem seems to be that people are only looking at the current potBoxes. Evolution doesn't happen overnight, wikia has been slowly releasing small parts of the feature, getting feedback iterating and improving. It may eventually take far less steps than it did previously.

If I'm understanding correctly, other than having imported the styling from an outside source before hand. There's no way around it, should CSS get locked again. Are the new templates immune to any changes Wikia makes, in case something they add affects wikis' CSS?

Yes, this is a drawback. Ultimately, wikia can block anything they want, even if it is an old core feature in a wiki. Hopefully, they will eventually introduce a better way to store the css away from interface messages.

I've updated the link to the previous post (here).