Forum talk:Wikia's New Look

Moved from Talk:Narutopedia#Wikia's New Look.

Since Narutopedia is one of the bigger Wiki's in Wikia, i'd like to know your take on Wikia's New look. As you guys have more than 2000 pages, you will be greatly affected. For those who dont know what I'm talking about visit the Muppet Wikia and to see what content pages will look like, visit the Kermit The Frog page. And yes, the size of the page, is what this wiki will have to be like as well, content width is not optional. Since you have an infobox for every page, and a lot of images, its needless to say that the pages will look crappy.

Just want to know if Narutopedia has any ideas on how to tackle this. 112.135.111.142 (talk) 21:19, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

It's no worse than Monaco. The only difference is that navigation is on the right instead of the left. It can't be that difficult to flip infobox placement if deemed necessary. ~SnapperTo 23:10, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, but there is the more pressing issue of Content Space, the size of page isn't optional, and cannot be adjusted using coding. If you check the Kermit the frog page you'll see how crammed information is, Narutopedia has Infoboxes, Pictures, and in some cases tables, all that which will not bode well with the space issue.

Well, there are a lot of other issues other than content space, such as how other Wikia's seem to stand out more than your own, even when a visitor is in this wikia, thanks to the Over sized Wikia header that they now introduced, and the New Image Attribute option that'll now list the Image Uploader under every image used in any articles, and how Blogs won't be optional anymore (and for Narutopedia who, I believe had it removed, It'll come back), those are just a few problems. Explore their Test Wiki, the Muppet Wikia, Twilight Wikia, the Red Dead Wikia, the Healthy Recipes Wikia, and the Glee Wikia to see for yourself the problems of the "New Look"112.135.87.156 (talk) 02:48, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

Basically, Narutopedia, which prides it self on a no nonsense, encyclopedic, and comprehensive source of Information wikia, will become a fan blog, which looks like twitter or Facebook.112.135.87.156 (talk) 02:51, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

• Overly small content area. About 1/2 the size of what I see now on the wiki (quite literally), infoboxes will take up 1/2 the width of an entire page as a result, and will look awkward because they are no longer the rightmost thing.
• Barely any control over style, at the very least it's not going to be the nice kind of color oriented theming we have now where the focus is on a simple naruto-like color scheme site wide, rather than a big overweight background image.
• Our wiki logo isn't going to fit completely in any way in the new skin, namely, goodbye slogan.
• The new skin is going to make it hard to have navigation as good as our current sidebar, and trying to fit cooperation with the animanga hub...
• Our talkpage Archive tool was designed for Monaco, since Wikia is disabling that there will be no more access to that tool.
• Non-optional blogs, image gallery in the sidebar, image attribution of copyrighted images to random users; These will cause problems with more people not following the wiki's policy.
• Prominent "Create page" link; This is going to have people bypassing any semantic forms setup we might have and creating garbage pages.
• The new skin completely removes the sitenotice and instead replaces it with small ephemeral notification bubbles... in other words, say goodbye to any possible way of telling new users to follow policy.
• By the new ToS all these features that are going to cause problems with wiki policy and quality of the content are forbidden to be hidden.

Knew about it for awhile, didn't want to bother putting anything up till the skin was testable or up. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) Sep 29, 2010 _@ 14:42 ^(UTC) 14:42, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

So in short the new Wikia skin will basically almost FUBAR the site? Omnibender - Talk - Contributions 22:14, September 29, 2010 (UTC)

O.o Must be my day, seeing this discussion here. Wikia's new skin will ruin a lot of Sites, and they seem dead set on it, and are even refusing to compromise on even article space. Yes, it'll totally destroy most Sites. In fact Bleach Wikia has threateened to Move hosts, and some Wikia's like Darthipedia have already moved. Almost all the comments that the staff have recieved in their blogs have been negative, but they avoid the negative comments like a plague, so, unless they have a massive change in heart, Wikia will stop being Wikia after November.

Btw Dantman, slightly good news, according to the staff, Blogs can still be deacitvated but not through CSS, you'll have to contact the staff...AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 07:11, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I've been talking with one of the admins at the Bleach Wiki, and they are considering moving, along with WoWwiki and few others. Perhaps that should be something we look into as well?--TheUltimate3 (talk) 20:46, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Which brings up the interesting question of: how is it even possible to move so many articles and files.--TheUltimate3 (talk) 20:49, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

And its going live October 6th. So I think it may be a wise decision to make some decisions now.--TheUltimate3 (talk) 20:56, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I will just leave this here. A list of alternatives.

Since I'm a Bureaucrat at the Reborn Wikia, and sice we are also going to move if Wikia continues to be completely deaf, i sent the people at Shout Wikia an email and here's the response:

"Hi AlienGamer, thank you for your interest in ShoutWiki. We're pleased to know that you're considering moving to ShoutWiki. :-) Our technical team can import a database dump generated by Wikia's system; if your wiki is a smaller one (like around 100-200 pages maybe), you can export the articles yourself by using Special:Exportspecial page on the Wikia wiki and then using Special:Import on the new ShoutWiki wiki. For larger wikis, I'd recommend grabbing a database dump from Wikia (see the Wikia wiki's Special:Statistics page for more information) and contacting us. Jedipedia, the Finnish StarWars wiki, for example, started out as a Wikia wiki but now it exists as a ShoutWiki wiki -- and the site has over 4,000 articles currently!
(Regarding my question on Monaco in the future)
We're planning to roll out a set of premium (paid) features in the future, of which new skins would be a part of. These new skins will include user favorites such as Monaco. We haven't actually decided on premium feature pricing yet (hence why premium features aren't live yet!), but we plan to make them affordable in order to attract as many customers as possible, while still gathering money for server costs. We hope that you'll enjoy using ShoutWiki and if you have any futher questions, please don't hesitate to ask!"...AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 23:19, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I sent them a second mail regarding how images may be included in the dump and:

Hi again AlienGamer, you can email ShoutWiki's technical team at technical@shoutwiki.com directly, or better yet, file a bug at our Bugzilla (http://bugzilla.shoutwiki.com/) to have the technical team import the wikis for you. Unfortunately you will need to register a separate Bugzilla account, but that should be only a minor nuisance. Once you have registered, choose "Enter a new bug", select "ShoutWiki" and choose "Imports" as the component; enter necessary info, such as the URL of the Wikia wiki and the ShoutWiki wiki, on the description field, give the request a good summary (like "Import foo.wikia.com to ShoutWiki" or something like that") and press the "Commit" button once you're done. Our technical team will deal with the import from that point on; they can easily export images from the old Wikia wiki with aspecial script and then import them back into the new ShoutWiki wiki. If you need any futher help, don't hesitate to ask -- I know frompersonal experience that using Bugzilla isn't that easy. ;-)..AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 23:26, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Btw, for anyone intrested, you can view what the New Skin looks like on Narutopedia by changing your user preference, i.e Preferences-->Skin-->New Wikia Look. See for yourself, lol, i'd love to hear your thoughts once you see it...AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 23:44, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Doesn't seem to work. I just get the current default Wikia.--TheUltimate3 (talk) 23:46, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Then that option might be limited to Beta Testers, and let me tell you, the image policy would be the last of your concerns...AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 23:48, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

Just saw a feature of the new skin that'll piss off long Narutopedia editors....Article Comments, thats right Article Comments, users can now Comment on Articles that are there in the Wikia!..AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 23:52, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

YEah thats enough to warrant a move in my opinion. Hate those things, why does an encyclopedia need comments?--TheUltimate3 (talk) 23:54, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

I stopped commenting on the Staff Blog, because its like we get automated answers, but their reasoning: [1], basically, they're gonna force you to become a fan page...AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 23:59, September 30, 2010 (UTC)

They want to enforce the idea of "Community Center" instead of an "encyclopedia". Yeah it would be best for us to jump ship.--TheUltimate3 (talk) 00:06, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

There are no words for me to describe how much I hate, despise, detest and loathe article comments. I barely go the wiki where I'm a sysop and a bureaucrat since they enabled those and the badge/medals. It's pure pollution and it hazes the recent changes so bad I can't look for actual non-article comment edits to check for accuracy and vandalism. Is there a way to disable it? Omnibender - Talk - Contributions 00:56, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

I think Naruto Pedia is the cleanest most informative wikia I visit really! You guys have so many active members who contribute. More than any other wikia I like. Why focus on little changes. As long as you keep your policies the same and enforce the rules no one wants to get banned so everyone will follow the rules, and so people get blogs no one reads blogs and I don’t think it’ll have a large effect on the site since everyone already uses their talk page for conversation anyway. Have faith in people, and try to find a compromise not everyone on the internet is a spammer and not everyone on the site will abuse any new features as long as you send everyone a message stating your new rules. Also maybe only allowing registered users to edit pages may help with the spam a little.TwinRisingDragons (talk) 01:12, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

@ Ultimate3, you'll be suprised at how many major Wikia's are jumping ship. Darthpedia has sum 582,970,629 articles have completed their move, and are waiting for offical confirmation before making their move complete. Actually, judging by the Staff Blog Comments, a lot of Wikia's will jump ship if this gets implimented, but a lot of people, me included, are hoping that they atleast compromise.

@Omnibender, No clue, most features are non optional, but they decided to have Blogs as optional, so maybe. But from this point on Admins have less control over their Wikia. Things can no longer be disabled via CSS, you'll have to contact Staff. ..AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 01:17, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Mark my words, article comments will be like the plague. The only way I know to filter them from the recent changes page is to mark it to exclude the talk pages from showing up, and that takes away both nasty comments and useful talk page edits. Couldn't they have created that abomination under a different namespace? I can see pages getting filled with shipping shit and Tobitardness faster than A's reflexes. Also, there's this big "CREATE A PAGE" button, so there'll be loads to clean up. Will article comments and blogs be turn-off-able? Omnibender - Talk - Contributions 01:21, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

If this was simply a change in the skin like they did with Wikipedia, I'd be ok. I would even like Wikia to have that "pending changes" feature, that would be great. Omnibender - Talk - Contributions 01:23, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

@TwinRisingDragons, its not things like Blogs that you have to worry about, its the absolute rape that the content is gonna take. Imagine content space at half the space available now. Since I'm a beta tester i saw what the articles look like. Let me tell you this, you'll have to change every single page in the Wikia to make the Wikia look decent. And it still won't look as good. I'd give a screenshot, but according to terms of agreement I cant.

At the end of the day, this wont look like an encyclopedia anymore, but a site like Facebook or Twitter...AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 01:24, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Hmm... well maybe the abusefilter will come in handy to block people abusing those features... otherwise I got 2 life jackets on. SimAnt 01:26, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Hi everyone. I can answer a few questions. I see Ultimate3 already linked you to my blog over at Bleach wiki concerning wikia alternatives. You can look at that if you would like for info on moving and problems and things associated with it. Also, article comments will be able to be turned off. I am very glad for that. As for your content, unless you like long walls of text, things are not looking good. Naruto's page is alright. It is certainly not the worst I have seen but it will need some content taken out if you plan on staying. Wikia randomly made me a beta tester today for some reason so i can see all the pages in the new look--God (Pray) 01:32, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

A list of Wikia's leaving..AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 03:07, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Bwah! Bwah! I want my heart medication or else I'll DIE! I suppose that when you all get a flat tire on the highway, you pull over and have it changed too, right? Idiots; you all need to grow up. These servers are located in America, and in America, when you don't like something, you complain about it until your Social Security benefits kick in. You don't actually do anything. Did the Incas leave when the Spanish arrived? No, because unlike the rest of you pussies, the Incas were men. Inca women? They were men also. And like men, they took smallpox and discriminate slaughter with dignity. Don't even get me started on the Jews. Jews have got so much more balls than you that they have some of it cut off at birth. And they've had four diaspora. But you say, "Snapper, didn't the Diaspora consist of the Jewish people leaving the holy land?" No, kind cuckold. The Diaspora consisted of the Jewish people being forced to leave the holy land.

Really, I think you're all just missing the perks of this necessary transition. Namely, we can finally replace the current, gaudy background with this. ~SnapperTo 03:29, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

---

*sigh* I wish I was online earlier to deal with this... ok, to rattle things off.

• As AlienGamer mentioned about blogs, don't worry about them, we can have them disabled by staff.
• CreatePage is going to be an annoyance, but lets hope we can find a way to specifically add messages to users on that page.
• Don't worry about article comments, that one is not a problem, most brand new wiki may have article comments, but individual wiki get Talkpages or Article Comments depending on what they have been using more... in other words, with our pile of talkpages we're of course already going to be set up to use talkpages instead of article comments.
• Now for shoutwiki... first the part on my bias. I'm not getting into anything involved with ShoutWiki, I don't trust them one bit. Quite some time ago I was involved in a group trying to create a good wiki host I came up with the name "ShoutWiki", but after awhile the group disappeared. The users appeared to disappear from #wikia, and even from #mediawiki, some time later there was some shady business, Angela contacted me asking about a shady site using the ShoutWiki name which Wikia believed had gotten ahold of Wikia data which was supposed to be private. After that was dealt with, a fair time later, the ShoutWiki you see now came up.
• Now, my history aside, here is the practical issue.
  • The Narutopedia is within Wikia's top 10 wiki, see http://www.quantcast.com/naruto.wikia.com and http://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com/traffic/sites?sort=reach-desc&country=US
  • We have a huge amount of traffic any place this wiki moves to has to be able to cope with an extreme amount of load very quickly. However going by this blog post ShoutWiki hasn't even moved past using a single server. Quite frankly if we were to move to ShoutWiki, we'd probably bring so much load along that either ShoutWiki would die altogether from the load, or be burdened so much that they drop us without warning.
  • And frankly, I was a core developer myself, I have the experience needed to host MediaWiki wiki, and Wiki Farms were my specialty. In fact right now http://wiki.commonjs.org/ is being hosted by me, and http://baseswiki.org/ was setup by the company I work for. The level of what you could get from any of these wiki hosts around is what we could get (or rather, in terms of control, less) from me hosting the wiki myself.
  • The actual issue is not what it takes to setup a distributed set of servers (I could even do that with cloud servers for a start) it's what it costs to host an infrastructure capable of handling wiki like the Narutopedia. It's prohibitive to setup something like that if you are not able to balance it out by making enough money from the wiki. And to be frank, advertisements don't generate nearly as much as you think they do. And that's fine for small startups, and companies like Wikia with large external donations. But for us, it means anyone hosting the wiki is paying out of their pocket for awhile if no-one can up up with a good way to finance the wiki.
  • Btw, there's a security hole on most of these wiki farms.
  • And importing users is a whole other mess... Actually I had some thoughts on how an extension that allowed for user migrations could be built.
• You'd be surprised at how much I've thought about something like this before you guys... in fact I think I had thoughts about this even before Wikia came up with Oasis. I actually already have 4 domain names suitable for the Narutopedia. I even considered what it would take to get into contact with some companies involved in the creation of the series a few wiki are involved in.

~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) Oct 1, 2010 _@ 03:51 ^(UTC) 03:51, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

I want to point out, I read all of that Dantman. All of it. From what I understand, ShoutWiki is apparently evil, and we'd kill any service we could use. It sounds like we'll be stuck with the New Wikia Look, but you apparently have 4 domains we could potentially use.

Did I read it correct or am I just stupid.--TheUltimate3 (talk) 04:51, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Well part of that's my bias, I had issues with members of the group in the past and don't trust them anymore. And for the pile of research I've done in the area of wiki hosting, I haven't found a single host that seems to have a good setup — I could spend pages detailing issues with wiki hosting and ideas on how to make a good one. In fact I've been experimenting with developing a really good quality Wiki Farm system that gives a great deal of control — Referata comes close, but we'd probably kill them too. I have entertained the idea of setting up a network for hosting anime wiki, and even the idea of seeing if companies like Viz, FUNi, Crunchyroll, etc... would be interested in direct advertising. But honestly, unless someone can come up with a good idea on how to monetize the wiki to pay server costs, there's no way anyone will be able to handle the load. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) Oct 1, 2010 _@ 05:23 ^(UTC) 05:23, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

And not to be rude, but I wouldn't want to be under the advertising thumb of Viz, FUNi, ect. Part of the reason I feel we work so well is because we aren't getting paid by them, per say. I don't know I feel like if we work with Viz we'd end up in trouble somehow.

That piece being said, overall what is our plan? Wait things out and go along with the move? Because I seen the new Layout on Red Dead Redemption Wiki and I was not impressed, not even a little, and AlienGamer said he saw Narutopedia in the new layout and he said we'd practically have to redo all the articles to make them presentable.--TheUltimate3 (talk) 05:31, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Well... the only other type of group I could think of that would pay as much as any of the anime companies, would be the ones with those horrid MMORPG advertisements that take over the bg on crunchyroll... ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) Oct 1, 2010 _@ 05:48 ^(UTC) 05:48, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

At least they tend to not ask questions (I assume). Just let you post what ya want while they advertise their game on the side. Though that still didn't answer my real question, as of now, what does out outlook look like?--TheUltimate3 (talk) 05:56, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

...^_^ I'm bad with early formalized plans... there is no plan... If there were plans, the Animanga Mascot would already have a name, heh. I sent an e-mail to my boss asking what he thought. Still listening for ideas on this end... I debated setting up a poll. Whatever the case it's unlikely to do a full move entirely before Oasis is made default. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) Oct 1, 2010 _@ 06:21 ^(UTC) 06:21, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Although I dont like leaving Wikia (I doubt anyone does), since the staff wont even make a compromise, Me both as n admin (of a couple of Wikia's) and as a user dont have much choice. Personally I dont like seeing a Wikia look like Twitter.

Even for Narutopedia, re designing 3000+ articles is a lot to do, and a lot the staff is asking with no gurantee that by next year they decide to change things further. If you read the latest Staff Bog, its obvious that the staff have already made up their mind, and is dead set about this (I really, really hate their reasoning). Maybe Narutopedia can do a detective Conan. They have their own domain, yes they pay for it, but they get wayy less traffic than Narutopedia, if they can do it, i'm pretty sure we can...AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 08:56, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Way less traffic is the tricky part. They can probably handle their entire load with a single server, we'll need a proper network. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) Oct 1, 2010 _@ 11:22 ^(UTC) 11:22, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

I must speak up. Although I'm not a regular editor here, I do browse quite a lot. I am also a Beta Tester for Wikia, and have been for over a month. And from what I have seen in this month, the new look only affects the space in which the articles are placed in. It's not that bad looking, actually, and it's still as easy to navigate. Sorry if this didn't help in any way, just had to get this off my chest. Koukishi.^....Talk_.^..._.Contributions. 12:44, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Seems to me, from what little I have seen, the fixed width (which i seem most upset about..), stems from their inability to properly place advertisements using tables and align, while detecting other elements... SimAnt 15:56, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

While the full image of Naruto's article on the new skin made me cringe on how squeezed everything was, I thought it wasn't as horrible as I thought it would be, which is a plus. If blogs and comments can be disabled in anyway, it'll also be a plus. Please tell me they don't enable to badge/medal abomination by default. Omnibender - Talk - Contributions 18:15, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

As far as I've seen, badges haven't been present in the Beta. Koukishi.^....Talk_.^..._.Contributions. 20:51, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

I read on the bleach wikia i think that the staff had said something about putting the infobox in the rightmost area, outside of the article text... (haven't found where they actually said it..), but if they do that, i think i would be content with the space issue. SimAnt 22:57, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Ya apparently... but that's a "After we've already forced your content into the small area with no alternative and you've already started butchering your content to try and fit in this area, we 'might' give you the option to move some of that content into the sidebar... no promises of this being ready early enough for you to stop rewriting your content the first time, and end up needing to rewrite it a second time." kind of promise. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) Oct 2, 2010 _@ 02:07 ^(UTC) 02:07, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be possible to have two big Wikia's, like say Bleach and Naruto to get a domain and split server costs? Both Wikia's get a fair amount of traffic, which mean's a higher chance of Donations to keep, even a large Network running.112.135.107.122 (talk) 10:20, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

I played with the idea of starting a whole animanga wiki network off-wikia, any Wikia wiki that wanted to leave could join in, after doing the Narutopedia adding other wiki is trivial. But the issue is Naruto vs. Naruto + Bleach isn't that much different, there are plenty of people that edit both, but mostly it's unlikely there will be any "split" of server costs, a few more donations might come in, but it's quite unlikely for adding another wiki to come anywhere near doubling the donations. But in any case, if the Narutopedia moves other wiki are welcome to come along if they want to follow what the decision on how to deal with balancing out costs. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) Oct 2, 2010 _@ 11:53 ^(UTC) 11:53, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

Random thought... I absolutely loath Hulu, they distribute in US only and they're basically a big black hole sucking most of the R1 distributors into offering US-only streams when they have a whole R1 license that covers all of North America (and a bit more IIRC) and treating their non-US consumers second-class and either giving them nothing (Viz), or putting bad effort into their alternative streaming methods (FUNi)... But apparently 3rd parties embedding Hulu videos can get 10% of Hulu's cut of the advertising profits of people watching the videos from the 3rd party site. I hate the idea of using Hulu, (of course, on every hulu page we'd offer a link to Crunchyroll with a message welcoming all non-US viewers... heh "Sorry to those of you not in the US, we know you'd love to help the wiki out by watching Naruto on the wiki instead of directly on the streaming sites, but because of Hulu's unnecessary region restrictions you'll have to head over to [Crunchyroll] to watch Naruto along with our founder. We wont get any of the cut from it, but have fun enjoying Naruto.") but it's a potential idea to look into in addition to advertisements, someone on bleach mentioned PlayAsia affiliation, varying levels of sane advertisements, and donations. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) Oct 2, 2010 _@ 13:40 ^(UTC) 13:40, October 2, 2010 (UTC)

Meh, I live in Asia, so I guess Hulu really wouldn't work for me, but if it helps the Wikia to find the server costs, it's definitely something to look into. Plus 10% of even the American viewers that come to this site, could potentially be a game winning move. Its definitely something to look at..AlienGamer ^{(Userpage ⁝ Talk)} 14:08, October 2, 2010 (UTC)