Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-22224-20180521161500/@comment-22224-20180521211354

After reading all of today’s comments, I want to address some of the questions and concerns being addressed by multiple people with one larger reply.

Skin architecture changes are required as part of GDPR - The way that the site and the default skin were architectured prior to this week were not GDPR-compliant. As a result, we had to make changes specifically relating to analytics tracking systems, ad-related cookies, and username/profile display. This includes the Oasis skin, Mobile skin, Discussions, Apps, etc which are all built using our Service Oriented Architecture and systems that have been significantly modernized since Monobook stopped being supported. Monobook, as it exists on FANDOM, is not maintained within those systems.

The Engineering Cost of Maintaining Monobook Is Subsequently Too High - As such, Monobook’s removal is not because it was the only skin that needed (it wasn’t), but rather the technical cost of updating it now and the maintenance requirements of keeping it updated later were unsupportable given that it is outside the realms of our current Service-Oriented Architecture. Our Engineering team has been working around the clock in recent weeks to update multiple parts of the site to handle the requirements of this new law.

Our Monobook Is Not the Same As Vanilla Monobook - There has been a misperception in this thread that Monobook works fine elsewhere so it should work fine here on FANDOM. While we have tried to keep Monobook close to the vanilla skin found in a basic MediaWiki installation, we have had to do multiple changes to the base format in order to serve our business purposes. This is the same reason we can not offer an alternative skin like Vector. It likewise would need additional work (and long-term support) to make usable on our network.

We Have Made (And Delivered) A Long-Term Improvement To Our Default Skin - Throughout the last year, we've highlighted multiple changes to the default skin to address persistent user concerns over the skin in its previous iterations. On desktop this resulted in a 30% decrease in the advertisements per-page, 46% decrease in page load times, and a redesign in page headers. You can read more about the entire process here. Some of the complaints we've heard about the default skin on this thread are based on perceptions developed years ago in initial rollout of the skin. We are an iterative company - we have Engineering and Product team dedicated specifically to improving the skin. It will continue to improve in certain areas as long as we have feedback and analytics we can use to measure performance.