User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/The Future of Gamepedia/@comment-27725594-20201109010923

Will the migrated Gamepedia wikis keep the Hydra skin or be converted to Oasis? The Hydra skin, itself a derivative of Wikipedia's Vector skin, is a strong part of the identity of Gamepedia wikis, like how Oasis is for Wikia, and there is a number of things I feel it does better. I personally find Oasis's screen formatting to be inconvenient for my preferred viewing and editing styles, from the fixed maximum horizontal clearance and prominent left sidebar to the concessions of screen real-estate to subjects other than the wiki's informative content. Having comments at the bottom of a wiki page was also something that struck me as odd, and subsequently hiding the Talk page of an article in a drop-down menu made it difficult to signpost and facilitate comprehensive discussion of an article's content. Whereas, for instance, on SmashWiki of the NIWA or the Minecraft wiki on Gamepedia talk pages are frequently used for both content proposals and sorting out editing disputes, I have yet to find a Wikia article with a non-empty talk page (again exacerbated by the fact that it is hidden in a drop-down), and on a wiki I moderate for the game Death Road to Canada, serious discussions about the wiki's content often end up taking place on an external Discord server rather than anything the Oasis format has to offer.

It would deeply sadden me to lose Hydra, and now having apparently lost the option to convert individual Wikia viewing experiences to Monobook this might put me off even more from editing wikis on the new combined platform.