User blog comment:Sannse/Your First Look at the New Wikia/@comment-105305-20100825191126/@comment-36762-20100825221135

Jedimca0, I sure hope so. Don't we all?

Ose, that'd be awesome. However, your comment is a bit incorrect. I'm sure everyone and their aunt has heard about my attempts to get the ArmchairGM source code opened up fully. While I certainly am not happy with the end result, I can somewhat understand the reasoning behind it.

Answers wikis on the other hand are certainly not as old as ArmchairGM, yet the source code for those is not available. Bits and pieces are, but I don't think that there's enough code for you to run your own Answers-style wiki. For example, there is a maintenance script called answersEmailQuestionsBot.php that is related to "QuestionEmail" extension. Where is the source code for this extension? If you have a full checkout of Wikia's SVN, try grepping it for "QuestionEmailBot"...and the only references you'll find are in the mentioned file. (For the non-PHP-savvy: a class must be defined in order for a script to use said class. That's like painting your house &mdash; you cannot paint it without paint, obviously.) The new-style Answers skin is also not open source: see Answers.php, lines 23-31 and DefaultSettings.php, lines 421-426. There is a separate, non-public code repository for Answers-related code, at least according to those comments in the source code.

Some commit messages and code changes mention the new skin, which is apparently called "Oasis"...and r25441 also mentions "oasis repo", which suggests that the code for the new skin is stored in a separate, non-public repository. Yet again. There is no Oasis.php file in the skins folder.

And finally the big question: why do I care? There are many reasons as to why I care. First reason, obviously, is wikis: if a wiki where I'm an admin on wants to customize the skin, what do I tell them? "Sorry, no idea how to do that"? Not good enough. Another thing is usability. Some time ago Wikia changed the way how rounded corners in Monaco skin are rendered. There used to be an image, which was used, and thanks to that image, rounded corners were showing properly even in my Internet Explorer 8. Then someone had a bright idea: let's change the way how Monaco renders rounded corners. As a result of this incredibly bright idea, Monaco loads one image less &mdash; and rounded corners render badly for Internet Explorer. Was it worth it? I'd say obviously no, since most people still use Internet Explorer &mdash; offices, schools, and of course, home users who don't know of other browsers or simply don't care about them. Internet Explorer users are, whether you like it or not, a major percentage of the site's users.

So yes, please excuse my skepticism on this matter.

As for the actual skin, it reminds me of Quartz, which is actually a good thing. Maybe there's a bit too much white in the picture, but that can be changed with CSS. Floating toolbar is a major turn-off, it should be something that can be toggled on/off (a toggle in Special:Preferences? JS? Something else?). wikiHow has a similar "meebo" toolbar on every page for anonymous users and I find it very annoying. Well, it certainly motivates you to log in, but...

The skin itself is not actually as bad as most people think it is; what's bad is the decision to force it down the users' throats once again. It was like this two years ago. I guess history repeats itself, eh?