User blog comment:Susanolivia/Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco/@comment-761251-20101001015405

"The truth is, we can’t afford to keep Monaco as a skin option." It doesn't follow that you have to completely redesign the skin. You could just have re-coded Monaco to keep much of the same look and much of the features into a cleaner package. You gave the easy answer "we wanted to redo Monaco anyway, so it was time for a new skin" and fail to explain why you need to do such a total overhaul.

"Veteran wiki editors know how annoying it can be" -- no, veteran editors design their pages with flexibility in mind, and know that users on unusual resolutions will have somethingthat may not look ideal, but works. With Oasis, veteran editors are annoyed that it won't look good on any skin; that the small content area makes it harder than before to balance out floating boxes etc., not easier; and that users with smallish screens (or windows!) and resolutions will see something neigh unusable. It's not an improvement!

You've seen that wikis have come up with different ways to use the sidebar to help visitors around the site. But instead of helping us do that better in the future, you are taking control over the sidebar away from us and hide the navigation that we made for our users behind few dropdowns and threaten to terminate our accounts if we try to adapt the interface to our wiki community.

How can even hope to have us accept your reasoning as being in our best interests is beyond me. The arguments I'm raising are not new - they've been posted over and over. Your blog post isn't addressing them adequately, so I still feel that you're "ignoring negative comments about the change" and "dodging questions that don’t have easy answers." Sorry.