User blog comment:Susanolivia/Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco/@comment-8072-20101001043024

"The truth is, we can’t afford to keep Monaco as a skin option. It’s a complex, sophisticated skin that requires more resources to run correctly, and would multiply the work of the technical and community teams. Having multiple skins also creates an inconsistent experience across Wikia, and we want to help people move around the site and feel comfortable contributing to every wiki."

If you can't afford it, please explain why you invested resources into it earlier this year with theme and speed upgrades. How was that a good use of time and money?

"Veteran wiki editors know how annoying it can be when you discover that the page that you thought was designed so well turns out to have huge empty spaces."

Huge empty spaces? Have you looked at the new skin? It screams huge empty spaces.

"In order to attract advertisers to our site, we need to have a 300x250 ad near the top of the page -- this is a standard ad unit that we can’t do without. Until now, we’ve floated that ad inside the content space -- a compromise that nobody was happy with. That ad interrupts the flow of the content, and it causes unexpected collisions. We needed to solve that problem, too. We investigated a lot of different options -- and in the end, we found that the best choice was to set the sidebar width to 300 pixels."

Susan, 2 years ago it wasn't "near the top of the page." You are trying to rewrite Wikia history. It was "IN THE CONTENT AREA". This was not a "compromise" Wikia made with users, it was forced, much like the skin now. This was something non-negotiable because advertisers demanded it. So I'm really curious as to how all of a sudden, the advertisers are magically a-ok with no ads in their precious content area. Or would they have been ok with that 2 years ago? What is different now?

"We’re taking that even further by adding modules to showcase the latest photos, new pages, and leaving room for even more creativity in the future."

Stop using the buzzword photos. They're not photos. Second, these modules should be optional. Perhaps wikis don't want to "showcase" their images or blog posts. Perhaps wikis don't even make blog posts a large part of their community, and would rather not have them highlighted. And please don't use the word creativity when in the last blog post you announced a new Terms of Service which effectively has destroyed anyone's ability to do something creative on a wiki.