User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: January 25, 2016/@comment-11733175-20160127085948/@comment-20644-20160127161954

ΜΖD is correct regarding the low traffic. That's why we removed the hub dropdown menus too. The traffic and clicks just weren't there, so there was no sense taking up that much real estate for something that wasn't being used. So if a community, such as a Comics community, felt alienated by the change, what I'd say to them, frankly, is that they weren't benefiting from all of those links anyway. That's not how readers and new contributors were discovering communities. Those communities are better served by strong Wikia SEO and by the ability to perform a global search. That's how people find communities, and there are always ways to make your SEO stronger too. Discoverability can be very organic and community-driven in that way.

With the new nav, we'll be looking to see how people interact with the hubs display so we can continue to make informed decisions about how hubs should be displayed on the nav. We'll also be working on the Explore Wikia page so it can show a broad range of communities.

In regards to the search bar placement - individual feelings about aesthetics aside, we're monitoring search usage to see how people continue to interact with Wikia Search. If we see a meaningful drop in its usage then obviously that's something to think about as we continue to work on the navigation. But Search is still very prominent on the nav, so I don't foresee any negative impacts to it.