User blog:BlazingStar/My Reaction to Wikia's New Look

Wikia's gone and done something historic. Something momentous. Something that will change how its users use the site forever: they've changed their layout. All of the wikis' layouts. Every single wiki looks like this, and we don't have a choice, not even logged-out users or non-members. It's a month old, but Wikia's still pretty much in uproar.

For those of you with long memories, you're thinking, "Hey! What about Monaco? We didn't have a choice with that." Correct. But at least Monaco was highly similar to the old layout, which looked basically like wikipedia. It only made some modifications to the sidebar, making it easier to add links and drop-down menus to it. Things were pretty much the same in Monaco, only more streamlined. But this new look- as I've heard some users groan, the Wikia admins are pretty much "shoving it down our throats".

Now, I don't have that much of a problem with it. I tried to resist the change for a few days, switching my settings back to Monaco, but in the end I decided I might as well get used to it before it's forced on me. So I switched it back.

It was uber-confusing at first: All the admin buttons were moved! Our cool Hellsing picture was gone! And THE SIDEBAR DISAPPEARED! Oh yes, I was very upset about my (-ahem- our) sidebar. I had edited it, making it more convenient to users and helping it to grow. I had created the "Admin's Pick" list just for the sidebar. And now...it was gone.

With the sidebar went the only links on the Hellsing Wiki to the About Us page and Hellsing Wiki:Wanted Pages list, and the "Featured Users", which was an easy way to see the admins and the most frequent users.

I was very upset about all of this, not to mention the entire color scheme was gone to some stupid gray thing. Then I discovered something called Theme Designer. And my whole world changed. BOOM! Welcome back, old Hellsing black-and-red! Then Earth-san added the .png picture at the top, and this place almost looked itself again.

Except for the fact that now it looks like an effing blog, and the sidebar's on the top of the wiki. The templates are messed up for some reason, because they're designed for a different-sized page, plus their color schemes are messed up. A feed's been added to the side of logged-in user's pages which tells you about recent activity, which I don't mind- except it squishes the articles. Which I mind very much. -sigh-

I'm not foaming at the mouth over this new look. Some things irritate me, but I can get used to it. I just wish that Wikia had asked for feedback or used some beta testers before just radically changing the layout like this. And they still won't accept fedback. What do they think, that if they ignore it all, their users' anger will just go away? -shakes head-