User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Prototype for a new article layout/@comment-25653892-20141222221903

Are you people kidding me.

I'm fine with streamlining the appearance and usability of Wikia. But at the same time these "amazing web developers" are creating new problems! The main thing is that unrelated media is interrupting the actual article content. The Activity pane (which really doesn't need to bet there anyway) will completely ruin the layout of every single page with an infobox! Look how far the thing is pushed down! And for whatever reason, templates don't seem to be able to flow across sections anymore, because there's a metric butt-ton of white space between the small introductory paragraph and the bottom of the infobox.

In addition, the sections are interrupted by Wikia trying to push extraneous media onto us without the communities' consent! Who cares about the "must-watch" videos? And I bet if I turn off AdBlock, the entire page will fill with advertisements, whose frames will load in new advertisements every thirty seconds. It's like you said, most people enter wikias through articles, and they expect to see content relevant to the subject of an article, not stupid unrelated stuff.

And then there's formatting. I was kind of pissed off already by Wikia's insistence on spacing out paragraphs as far as possible. I guess it's sorta fine in articles, but it extends to messaging stuff, too! If I want to put in a new paragraph without having the paragraph spacing, I have to wait for Source mode to load, reinsert the cursor where I want it, type  , and go back into Visual mode, and wait for that to load. It's impractical already, and now the articles are making things worse! Look how much space is between paragraphs now! Also, look how big the font size is! How young, or old, or outright stupid do you think we are? *sees posts from anons* OK, but the majority of users who actually contribute are nowhere near that stupid, and most users are the people who actually care about the community and its wikia.

Also your changes are completely screwing up the formatting of other stuff in general. I've looked at TDC before, and it had some cool CSS stuff going on that I really wanted to replicate (even if I knew that I couldn't).

The table of contents and editing buttons and stuff got shoved aside. Fine, I'll adjust to that. At least the toolbar isn't hogging up the bottom of the page anymore (or it would be if I wanted to use the thing. It's just too clunky and unusable). Although can you make it so that submenus of the table of contents load to the right of where you're hovering. How are you supposed to click a subsection when it's floating at the top of the pane, rather than to the right of its parent button? (Move the cursor across an invisible hitbox, of course! durr~)

At least the god-awful skeuomorphism is gone, but it leaves everything else seeming lonely and empty. And I don't know whether that's the design change, or TDC's CSS page trying to cram whatever parts of itself possible into the design change.

Also gone is the right rail. That crap was useless, I would have moved it away or used an [expand] in a heartbeat if it wasn't against the ToU. I wondered for a split second how one would get to chat, but then common sense kicked in and I looked under the navigation bar. And that's exactly why you don't need the Recent Wiki Activity pane anymore! If people want to see what's going on in the community, they use the awful Wikia bar, hover over their icon, and peek under the Notifications section as they breathe a sigh of slight discomfort due to how big and intrusive the global-nav bar is. If they want to know what's going on in the wiki, they can use the wikia's top-nav to see the recent changes! Actually, that gives me an idea! Keep Wikia's global navigation bar at the top of the page, instead of making it float at the top of the window. Then, take the Recent Wiki Activity pane, and make it a subsection of the user menu, like "All Notifications"! You just hover over text reading "Wiki Activity" or something, and a submenu pops out to the left so you can see the activity without it being intrusive to page content.

And try to make it so that as few CSS changes are lost as possible after this next big change that everyone will, of course, hate. Or better yet, don't introduce the change! EVERYONE HATES IT! We keep having to adjust to these stupid modifications that everyone starts yelling about, and yet you don't change anything back, and keep making more stupid modifications that we have to work around even more.

@BattleshipMan When do we put together the petition?