Comments:Potential Wikia mass exodus

Yeah just what we need.....more pop-up ads and other crap on our webpages. Since I have dial-up and run Win 2000, animated display ads either crash my computer or delay content downloads which really frosts me royally. For sites that are supposed to be 'user driven', why not let the USERS decide the issue rather than risk a stampede of users to other sites or creating their own? I thought Wiki was supposed to be an ALTERNATIVE to all the other websites out there. Now it's becoming, like so many others, just another website full of annoying ads. Sad really. Oh well. 207.69.139.156 19:06, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

ugly
I swear - every time I look at wikia it becomes uglier. Bawolff ☺☻ 08:27, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

A real headache
I speak from bitter experience when I say that many, many people are not happy with Wikia at the moment. The community of Illogicopedia (of which I was a founder back in January of last year) has recently moved from Wikia to new servers due to ever-increasing bureaucratic decisions going on at Wikia. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as just forking the content and closing the old wiki. Under tedious licensing laws Wikia can legally keep a copy of the wiki on their servers (even if the original community object to it): and you'd better believe they are doing. They want to keep the old wiki open and hope a new community comes along to adopt it. However, even if the site name were to be changed, the content would still redundant as the community and all articles are now housed at illogicopedia.org.

Anybody with a shred of respect for the opinions of Illogicopedia's community would just close the old wiki down and create a redirect. But why the heck should they respect a group of people who are no longer with them? A little thing called 'being nice people and not robotic drones with potato cut responses who are only in it for themselves when it boils down to it'. Though their responses to queries are relatively rapid, the whole thing is wrapped up in a bureaucratic ball that leaves many people, not least me, with a major headache.

I may be preaching to the converted but be warned: Wikia is not all it promises to be. I'm disappointed: we believed that they would be an honest wikifarm that makes decisions based on what is morally right. Though they are well within their legal rights to keep our old wiki open, they certainly have cheesed a lot of people off.

I should have known better, though: there is plenty of precedent. Let me state that the New Monaco skin which was applied across the board may benefit some communities, and good luck to them. However, the decision of actually applying the skin should have been left up to individual wiki communities, who, after all, know what's best for themselves. In Illogicopedia's case, Wikia's decision overrules the say-so of the administrators who care about the wiki, visit and edit it day in day out. They are in a much better position to decide what is best for their community, not some totally detached overlords who think they know what's best.

In summary: if you do wish to start a wiki, create your own Mediawiki server or heck, even go to Editthis. But for goodness' sake, if you decide to go with Wikia please, please read the licenses and terms and conditions carefully and understand you are selling your soul to the devil. -- Hindleyite (talk) 17:37, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Wikia seems to hate infoboxes
Many wikis i know of, and most of my own projects on Wikia (wich i left), are using infoboxes for the layout of data about charaters, objects, and all. Per exemple, this i the case of gamming wikis and even is with MemoryAlpha. Wikia has long been trying to reserve the infoboxes space for their own usage. First they introduced a square add that was floating right at the top of most pages. Theirs servers where inserting it before any content that admins or users where adding to pages.

Now, Wikia still do this but they changed from floated content to an whole column that reduce the size of the content space greatly (coupled with their new fixed width that is). Now any table that is supposed to clearly present tabular data are horizontally squished and harder to read.

Some said that Wikia want to be better viewed on smartphones, handhelds and gaming consoles. But a fixed width isn't the right answer.

My main reason to leave Wikia wasn't really the new skin (but that was before testing it out). I decided that Wikia service wasn't appealling to me anymore when their changed their term of use so that local admins can't remove from the UI things we think are harmfull to our specific wiki using CSS or JS.

But, i think it's perfectly normal for a free commercial service to have that sort of things in their terms of use. When i've first comed to Wikia, all wikis were still using the old Monobook skin (the old Wikipedia look). I registered on Wikia after taking to time to read their terms of use and many other page like that. I then aggreed to use the service because it seemed to fit my needs.

So now, after Wikia made a lot of changes to it's service, it's doesn't fit what i expect to gather a community on any subject i could like. So i left Wikia. All alone. I mean, i can't move my projects elsewhere and had to left them in their hands. I know there is others wiki farm out there but if i would copy my projects there, i would be all alone and no one would ever comme to join me since Wikia wikis always comes higher up in Google results.

So, i'm in for a break of wikis. I have accounts on Wikipedia (in both french, my first language, and english) but it's really not the same thing. On Wikipedia i mainly only correct spelling and fix code error when i see some.

So, i think i'll now have more time to work on some personnal projects and publish articles on my blog (in french) from time to time. TulipVorlax (talk) 16:13, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

"Time to Turn Evil" mode on.
Inspired by the awesome XKCD strip: http://xkcd.com/792/

Wikia decided that they are big enough to pull this "time to turn evil" stunt and rake in the profits.

Their agression on the hosted communities is based on the assumption they can get away with it because now the hosted wikis are hooked deep enough to not leave.

Unfortunately, unless the mass exodus really happens (and IMO it won't because they really are hooked deep enough) wikia will get away with "murder".