User blog comment:Sannse/Your First Look at the New Wikia/@comment-761251-20100819105954

Load Times are crucial
One of the biggest problems with Monaco and related skins has been end user page load times. If it takes up to a minute to load a page, I'm twiddling my thumbs instead of doing contructive work on my wiki, and am getting frustrated in the process.

I do not use Monaco because it feels bloated to me. Pages take longer to load than on Monobook; sometimes the loads stall; I generally twiddle my thumbs more. Some of the bloat has, unfortunately, leaked onto monobook during the past years. I run a small volunteer wiki that I host myself, and the fast responses to any page action are as if a weight fell off. If you have competent skin designers who understand the impact that their design choices and coding style may make on end user load times, they may achieve making your new skin load almost as fast as any skin off an out-of-the-box MediaWiki install. If they manage that, I can gurantee that (almost) every editor will love the new skin; if you have a sane design that is easy to customize, we can always customize the looks and turn off unwanted features if it is worth it. Please make it so.

I know that you have done everything in your power to ensure that Wikia content is served quickly. However, end user page loads seem to often stall as 3rd party content (ads, javascript etc.) is being loaded, often before the page has displayed. Your technicians won't know about this unless they track the load times of 3rd party content on an ongoing basis.

Please have your skin designers read this document; have them ask your server techs to explain to them what they don't understand, since I know that the server staff have already considered everything this documents asks of them where it is sensible. However, a lot of the delay comes in where on the page content is loaded; preferably, third-party content should be loaded under Javascript control (most of it is Javascript anyway) after the wiki page has loaded and displayed initially.

You do not need beta testers to find out if you have succeeded, since you have offices and helpers around the globe; they should log out, clear their browser caches, and check how long it takes for a page to load at various times during the day.

Side note: is there an easy way to track whether I've received a comment? Unlike a talkpage, the blog comments have no table of contents, so the only way to find a comment and any replies seems to be to load the blog page (with useskin=monaco), allow "all comments" to load, and then use the browser to search for it. On a talkpage, I'd click on "my" topic in the TOC (and that works in monobook as well). This makes comments really unsuited for following any kind of discussion. The lack of a "preview" function and the propensity for important comments to drop from sight quickly doesn't help, either.

-- ◄mendel► 10:59, August 19, 2010 (UTC)

Note: This blog comment is duplicated on Forum:Your First Look at the New Wikia (discussion); feel free to reply there.