User blog comment:Susanolivia/Experience the new Wikia/@comment-227331-20100924001942

Oh. Joy. Let me tell you how enthused I am about this.

I'm so happy that I have an footer bar that floats with my page, annoying the crap out of me and providing little functionality. I'm so happy that the side bar is so huge that it crams the information to the left with a infobox. I'm so happy that the sidebar will only have support for limited widgets and even then ones I'm not likely to use. I'm so happy that all images will tell me if sasunarufan382948 uploaded the picture because apparently I don't have the brains to click on the image and see that myself. I'm ever so happy that if I try to edit a page where I'm not allowed, I now have an additional annoying floating black box telling me this... and it doesn't go away. Nope, there's no way to x it out, reloading the page doesn't do anything, even if I copypaste the address into another tab the result is the same. I can't tell you how happy I am about that, effervescent even.

Listen, in the end you can say "you can style this with css to change things back to a way you like it" but that's defeating the entire point, isn't it? One of the reasons for this new change was to simplify things and make it more accessible for the casual user. That's why the theme maker was implemented on the new look, to make it simpler for people to customize things without css. So now you're falling back on the "design your own widgets/modify the undesirable elements of the page with css!" argument? Why? If the entire point of the thing is to draw in people and make it easier, then why not make these options in the first place.

Why not foster a community where user-made widgets are shared? Why not allow more flexibility in what goes in and out of the sidebar (and it's size)? Why not have the footer have a minimize feature or be able to be turned off and on? These are all things that would make the new skin better. If I can request that I have talk pages only instead of comment pages, I can (and I never, ever want comment pages on my wiki), So why not those other options?