User blog comment:Rupert Giles/Prototype for a new article layout/@comment-28736347-20141213164005

Where to start...

Now, reading this, it actually sounded good. Seeing it actually in use... completely the opposite. That does mean this could actually work with a lot of modification.

Anyway, why would you remove the right rail? I never questioned it, but seeing a lack of it, it frankly looks stupid to not have it. You say "There are a lot of different things people can do with content on Wikia, but those features are currently scattered around on the page and sometimes hard to find.", and yet the right rail did exactly this, and did it without sorting through menus. All the things to do are above the content, to the right of it, or below it. Which made sense. There were four clear areas that didn't clash at all. Now you've mixed that into one big area with all the same functions uglily smooshed together.

In general the text size changes are a bit stupid, to. I'm sorry, but when your new features includes the sentence "move away from the fluid layout" it's never a good sign. Now, for small pages this doesn't matter much, heck, they might actually look better. But on small pages you have no room for more stuff - the adds - without messing with the text wrapping, images, and templates. On long pages, the new look is bad, but you at least have the virtue that adds aren't as bad.

How to fix these two issues? For the right rail, I understand why you got rid of it, but I think it would be better to modify it. Instead of getting rid of it, you could make the whole rail colapsable, and when collapsed it would move off to the side and become much thinner. This could fix the problem of obstrusiveness, yet retains it's fluiness and cleanliness. For the adds, simply let us chose where on the page the appear (or, you know, put them back where they were). This will prevent all messing with images and pages, or you could put them all under a header at the bottom if you have an image heavy article.

I understand and respect your motive and want to move forward, but I think compromizes from both sides could be done to make this the best it can be. Oh, and commenters, simply posting hate won't do anything. Try and negotiate with this.