User blog comment:Susanolivia/Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco/@comment-76.116.8.166-20101005063458/@comment-1066636-20101005111656

Spot on. In my eyes, Wikia is moving from simply being a host for wikis to directly telling people how to run their wikis and limiting their options to what Wikia considers best. I can see why that is tempting from a staff perspective, but it certainly is not for the editors who are basically degraded to text-generating minions.

Navigation which can be customized to suit your wiki? Nah, you don't need that - an arbitrary number of links in an arbitrary number of categories is enough. You want to remove image attribution because it's misleading and ugly-looking? Nah, you're not allowed to do that. Have a link to RecentChanges at the top of the page because it is (according to one of Wikia's own blogs) one of the most-used links? Nah, we're placing a link to a renamed MyHome there - if you want the actually useful page, you can put it in yet another pop-up menu.

Instead, we're renaming images to photos although next to no images on your wiki are photos and showcase all the off-topic images people uploaded for their userpages - that'll sure help, you just don't know it yet. As a bonus, we'll scatter useful links all around the page instead of having them in one place. Oh, and for you to enjoy we put the date for mandatory switching right after a new game covered by your wiki is released, because you'll sure love to suffer from skin transition woes in the middle of a massive influx of new content.

I've been away for a few weeks, and the minimal amount of actual reaction to user feedback regarding the new skin is very disheartening. It basically still looks like it did when it was first revealed. Sure, you changed the font and made the Wikia bar a tiny bit smaller, but that's it.