Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-1370845-20150116164639

For a preview; here.

Wikia are launching a new skin, known as Venus. This skin is targeted mostly at mobile viewers, meaning those of you with smartphones and tablets will ideally have a much simpler time browsing SporeWiki among other Wikis. See here for details. It does seem highly detrimental. I personally detest the skin with such a burning passion that I thing I've finally found something I hate worse than blogs. Yes, it's that bad.

Before you panic, it's not quite as bad as blogs. Unlike blogs, we can fix it, it's still work in progress and subject to change, and we do have much more control over it. Also unlike blogs, I oppose it on a philosophical level, not a technical one. A lot of stuff can be changed and adapted, and I've wanted to redesign our site for a long while now (hopefully now I have another CSS user around such a thing will be easier), meaning this is not final. We can discuss potentially having a much brighter skin, one that's more characteristic and pretty, all sorts.

There does not seem to be much broken compared to when they changed from Monaco to Oasis years back. Our community are mostly editors of the creature and fiction namespaces, and as such, have mostly avoided the Rail issue of Oasis - the issue that reduced width by shoving stuff to the right. That community will, too, be able to dodge most of these changes too if we work together. If there are any changes that ruin our sites' articles, then these probably will not be fixed as a) no one cares about the wiki's mainspace and b) no one cares about the game Spore either. Really, as I've been saying for years, unless Spore 2 is released, no one will ever care to edit about the game and its subpar spinoffs.

There are ways to avoid this garbage though and work around the problem:
 * 1) We change our own site layout and skin. I dislike the colours of this one and I feel there are many ways we could edit this to improve it and make it look prettier. This will require community input and discussion.
 * 2) Add personal css that removes the Wiki Activity bar that obscures infoboxes. Honestly, this is the worst part of the skin. Personal css can solve actually a lot of issues and you can basically customize the site to your liking. But however, I don't want to do this for people, I've played that game before, so while I will help with any changes, I will not write out skins for people.
 * 3) Switch to Monobook. Dromlexer has recently been working on his own Monobook skin which is nearly ready to be released site-wide. If you wish for a pleasant experience, that may be a simple solution to the problem.

So, now I've given you the bad news, discuss. 