Board Thread:New Features/@comment-20644-20170522203248/@comment-1370845-20170529154255

DEmersonJMFM wrote: I don't like customization being limited. One of the biggest issues I have here is they refused to establish the extent of the ban on CSS/JS. I get prohibiting JS to drastically change the nav's behavior, but CSS seems pretty harmless to me. This has been explained before - the new page headers are supposed to be consistent across the entire site, same with the very top bar and the footer. This helps users move across the different wikis as they become a much more familiar experience to them, and more important, prevents certain wikis from adding bloated CSS that makes the header appear unreadable. Some wikis make decent use of CSS, but others just add fancy fonts and gradients just "because they can" and ruin it, which drives readers away. Fandom also explained that it is because advertisers want a more consistent page header across the site before targeting some ads at wikis - while you may think "boo, advertisers", this actually means pages will have fewer ads overall in favor of a few high quality ads. Keeping the bloated smaller ads which often slow pages down is more likely to drive readers away.

Everything else can still use CSS, and even the top header still allows you to add a picture - so for those who aren't CSS savvy, it's technically more customizable than before. Also, the design of the top nav, which most people agree is infinitely better than the old one, is what most customized top navs looked like anyway. So it's not like this is some evil plot to take away customization from the entire wiki, it's literally just for the page header.

Regardless of the reasons Fandom or other users give, I personally believe wikis should be able to drive away readers if they want to do something they think is necessary, even if others think it's a bad idea. I doubt it hurts Fandom's bottom line considering the vast number of wikis pull in very few views. Then you philosophically disagree with Fandom Staff. I would think both Fandom Staff and most users would want their work to reach the broadest number of people possible (albeit for different reasons - obviously for Fandom there's a monetary incentive and for users it's to feel pride in their work). But after having explored a lot of the wikis and seeing how some of them just follow bad practices when they're allowed to, personally I think that customization should be more limited. I believe that every wiki should be allowed to have its own identity in terms of appearance, and a few nice pieces of functionality, but that beyond that, shouldn't be given so many tools that they can break their own wikis.