User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Followed pages - a new way to stay up-to-date on your favorite wiki pages/@comment-429401-20100516151028

From this one thing springs to mind, in that wikia keeps doing thing to 'help' viewers, but this often alienates the very people who create the content the Editors !!!

If wikia keeps 'annoying' established editors and they leave or stop participation there will be little new useful content and a shortage of active admins to clean up the spam and test edits and the quality of the overall Wikia's offering will go down and no longer be as attractive to casual viewers who drive advertising revenue by visiting pages which funds Wikia's hosting of the individual wikia sites.

What people had been editing was visible anyway if you looked in the right places, but was not thrust on general public view. (the open nature of wikia makes the concept of privacy a complex issue) I note also the senior wikia staff had disabled it which to me says they have issues with viewers publicly following them !! - If it OK for it to be turned on by default for all 'normal users' perhaps Staffs 'Following' lists should be Visible to all - (or Staff & Admin function related edits should not show by default for all Burecrats & Admins on all wikias by default (e.g. the feature should have better filttering of the content displayed)).

The alternative is to edit under multiple accounts, to hide ones activity to a degree. (which 'disruptive' editors tend to do any way') !!!

I would conclude that this 'upgrade/feature' has not been thought through carefully as some of the issues that have been raised and fixes discussed above by KB appear to indicate several of the points raised by users are now considered serious flaws in the feature, as it was originally launched, but wikia has at least acknowledge (some of ) them and is now fixing them retrospectively.