Wikia changes layout; becomes the next LJ in userbase trust
Wikia, for those of you who don't know, is a wiki site that lets you start a wiki on any subject. It's used a lot for things like Wookieepedia, the biggest Star Wars wiki or WoWWiki, which'll play a starring role in the wank, down to wikis for individual RPs.

Recently, they've been working on a new skin, that will be used by all the wikis on their site. Since before, Wikia let people modify the format extensively, they weren't real happy about this. Especially since it apparently looked terrible for the most complicated pages, used, of course, mostly by the most popular wikis with boatloads of information to organize. People really don't like it.

In fact, they don't like it enough that some of them, especially the big ones who'll have their formatting jerked to hell, start moving their content to a new site. After all, it's their content to do with as they please, right? Wikia views this as vandalism, and stops people from deleting their content, and a whole bunch of people suddenly realize that Creative Commons licenses mean that the hosting site can continue to use your material even after you hate them. Whoops! Note: WoWWiki hates the new layout so much that they abandoned their old domain name as well as everything Wikia-specific. Now that's hating a layout. Wikia also stops wikis from sending messages to people about where all the editors went.

Today was the day they ceased to support the old layout. Unsurprisingly, people continue to wank.

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	tetradecimal 2010-11-04 12:58 pm UTC (link)
	Why did they even change the skin? Like, was the custom formatting screwing up server performance or something, or was it just "we feel like doing it and we can"? (Reply to this)(Thread)

	cmdr_zoom 2010-11-04 02:53 pm UTC (link)
	Alexa's comment below suggests one possible explanation: to fit more ads in. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	tetradecimal 2010-11-04 02:58 pm UTC (link)
	Oh, that makes sense. ...although scuttling all the wiki content so no one will actually want to view the pages they put ads on, that doesn't make sense. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	cmdr_zoom 2010-11-04 08:57 pm UTC (link)
	They get to keep all the content, since it's "vandalism" to try to remove it. Posting notices sending people to the new site(s) is also verboten. They're probably hoping that no one notices it's not being updated anymore, or just blindly follows the first Google link. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	kylenne 2010-11-05 06:12 am UTC (link)
	In the case of WoW Wiki, the new ad-saturated layout was actually messing with a lot of the pages to the point where quite a few of them were nearly unreadable. I run Firefox with AdBlock and that one dude's script, and the spacing was wonky on a ton of articles. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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