User blog comment:Ciencia Al Poder/Portable Infoboxes, the first step into Wikia taking control over our content/@comment-27345308-20170501185024

"Portable Infoboxes are a patch for something that's broken in a more general scope, which is the representation of our pages in mobile devices, which are often complex in the content they need to show." I'm not sure I understand what's the problem there. If PIs are fixing a problem with the representation of your pages in mobile devices and they were able to completely convert your old markup to the new markup (without having to remove any content) I don't see a problem there.

"Portable Infoboxes use a Wikia's propietary syntax, subject to their rules about personalization and control, which limits our ability to personalize our templates to a set of styles and functionalities provided by this new system, and also subject to their bugs and eventual degradation and abandon of the system." But if they managed to convert all infoboxes to the new markup without having to change how you use these templates they didn't remove any functionality these templates had, did they? I don't think they would be abandoning the system anytime soon, since they already formed the Vanguard group to convert all those infoboxes.

Is your concern that you won't be able to fork out because of the vendor lock-in Wikia is doing by converting all your infoboxes? I mean, PortableInfobox extension is open-source, so you have the option of converting that extension to MW 1.28 should you ever fork out. You can also revert back to your old templates since portable infobox conversion shouldn't require converting the usage of the template, only the structure.