Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24739709-20151026190758/@comment-452-20151106183911

LordTBT wrote:

Don't you think less than a week is a bit short notice? Especially when they had already made the decision weeks ago:

"However, I'm going to level with you - we are removing Verbatim from our servers in the next few weeks."

As soon as they made the decision, the responsible thing to do would have been to make a public announcement - much like this thread - to give everyone as much time as possible to come up with alternate solutions. Instead of waiting over a month to do so with around a week remaining.

Whenever there is a major change, people always ask for more communication and advanced notice, but apparently that still hasn't gotten through to them.

Luckily, I saw Deadcoder's blog post a month ago, and it gave me enough notice to come up with alternate solutions for all but one of my uses - and that remaining one is impossible. But if I had waited until Wikia's announcement, I would have been screwed: At the time, I could still edit the MediaWiki pages which used verbatim tags - I tried to edit one of those pages yesterday, and it is now locked.

The first time I used verbatim, I immediately recognised that it could be used maliciously, and I thought it was great that Wikia trusted everyone with it, and that everyone was responsible enough not to abuse it. I don't know how many years it has been available, but I've found people talking about it in 2010, which means that there has been the potential for abuse for at least 5 years, but suddenly it's really urgent that it's turned off now.

For the length of time verbatim has been available without issue, or Wikia caring about the potential for abuse, you'd think they would be able to give people a little more time to make changes.