 Catuse says at 05:22, December 20, 2014 (UTC) "Somewhere a zealous god threads these strings between the clouds and the earth, preparing for a symphony it fears impossible to play. And so it threads on, and on, delaying the raise of the conductor's baton." | |||
Heads up, Wikia is making some changes to layout. Note that this is coming weeks if not months down the road, and we shouldn't worry too much about it for now. You can see it in action at w:c:tardis. I personally think it's ugly, the text is too big, and the content width is too thin, plus the nav rail and the bottom navigation thing look like they're from those awful freehosting sites, but this is an early beta, and hopefully these problems will be fixed by time of release. If not, we can do our best to CSS over it. Wikia seems to have liberalized their anti-customization policies as of late — though, because this update moves ads into the content itself, they might change their minds there. We'll have to overhaul a lot of CSS and JS if this goes through though. Rail stuff, especially sideicons, will have to be either moved in with Recent Wiki Activity or elsewhere. We'll have to either float infoboxes left or move them under Wiki Activity. | |||
We have a number of things in place that should make designing for new skins easier, sort of. The Recent Wiki Activity box seems like a good place to put Article Icons, though this brings up something awkward about the design:
You see, the thing about Oasis is after the rail stops, it just looks like there is a massive gap where content looks like it should be able to flow into. This design doesn't do that, but it basically puts rails contents as part of the page. So infoboxes will go below it. That will be our biggest issue.
Fuck that right? I don't think Wikia want right-floated infoboxes used on wikis. If mobile skin is anything to go by anyway. Maybe we should just go for a full-width design; infoboxes bring a lot of trouble anyway. Though honestly I'm not much a fan of full-width infoboxes because they require considerably more complex design. I imagine what this was would give you an idea of how that looks.
Alternatively, icons could be moved to the left and our custom rail items could just be pop-outs. Like how the TOC is. Like how the TOC is? Aww, fuck that man. JBed (talk) 05:36, December 20, 2014 (UTC)
I think this will be incredibly difficult to design for. I do not see a single percievable way we can make our content look good given how much is obscured by ads and shoved into side rails. Also, doesn't this just make our width even worse? I would like to not change our infoboxes if we possibly can. If they need to be part of some rail on the side, then let's do that, but an ad appearing above them worries me. Now for my personal opinion. This new skin can fuck right off. Terrible design, narrows width even more when we are already compromising because of their old skin. Who thought this was a good idea, "hurr durr lets shove ads right above infoboxes and obscure content even more bcuz lol screw information sites we social network now". If we can vote to not have it then let's not have it. But if it's forced, then this makes me seriously think we should leave Wikia, but every wiki who has ever done that has ended up just splitting the community and being unsuccessful. | |||
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The article space in the new skin reminds me of how American magazine/newspaper websites lay out their articles. Like The Atlantic or something but less classy because they use "newspaper" typefaces. Are all websites gonna look like his then. 56% of Wikia users supposedly visit the site via mobile devices so I can see why they want to standardise everything. I'm trying not to be too negative because that's not going to help anything but the infobox thing is a problem. I suppose all wikis are going to complain about that one so hopefully Wikia can offer some idea what to do. | |||
BlueHighwind Q? 15:39, December 20, 2014 (UTC) TALK - So if you care to find me, look to the Western Sky!ツ: | |||
I've actually known this was coming for awhile, but I couldn't tell anybody until the release. Wikia actually has several other things coming down the pipe which I still cannot talk about. Most are minor, one I think is actually nifty if implemented correctly. Another change is one that I think is absolutely awful, but hopefully we can avoid that one (but it's a minor thing on the grand scheme of things). These new announcements should come in January. So far the other Wikia Stars are not terribly happy about it, reading the forums. They're not huge fans of the ads. I don't think Wikia is going to budge on that part. As for centered page widths, I'm actually supportive. Anyway, I'll try to keep you updated as I can. | |||
All they need to do is stop the ads obscuring the infobox and we're fine. The other workaround is just get adblock, which most people do anyway. Don't worry about Sideicons. On the Jak and Daxter wiki, we have Template:Games, which is right underneath the number of articles created, as you can see here. It's basically the same as Sideicons. We can do them like that. I fully support centering page widths, the ads thing is just stupid. | |||
I am aware of how other wikis do it, although we couldn't do it like that and look good without considerable changes. The icons are too damn high. JBed (talk) 15:52, December 20, 2014 (UTC)
| Catuse says at 18:54, December 20, 2014 (UTC) "Somewhere a zealous god threads these strings between the clouds and the earth, preparing for a symphony it fears impossible to play. And so it threads on, and on, delaying the raise of the conductor's baton." | |||
Techno, the ads aren't the problem RE: infoboxes. The problem with infoboxes is that they're shoved under Recent Wiki Activity, which may or may not have ads under it. Infoboxes should be at the top of the page, front and center, otherwise there really isn't a point. This is something that's actually better about mobile than browser, because I doubt mobile will have Recent Wiki Activity and other metadata; it's read-only. And we're not leaving Wikia. As much as we'd all like to, the only wiki that has been successful with a fork is KHWiki, and that was under extreme circumstances: Oasis completely ruined their content in a near-unfixable manner, they were undergoing something along the lines of a between mainspace and userspace editors (i.e. trolls vs 12-year-olds) and so a fork actually made working on articles easier, and they didn't have nearly as good SEO as we do, so they could actually bring down the Keyhole's search results. None of this is the case on FFWiki. | |||
KHWiki was successful? Really? And yes, the ads are the problem. I don't care if you shove Recent Wiki Activity above it, it's terrible but manageable. I do care if you shove a freaking World of Warcraft advertisement vid above it. | |||
Advertisers want people to look at the ad first and then the article after that. It's hard for Wikia to please both clients, wikis and the advertisers. When Oasis was brought out they made a big deal how the ads are not in the content was one of the new great features for wikis, and now they're back. :p That's why they put the ad there where the infobox used to be...that's where people look first just out of habit. Hope Wikia can show the feedback gathered from the test wikis to the advertisers and come up with something else... | |||
You can now view any page in Venus with "useskin=venus". [1]. I would imagine the edit form isn't the planned edit form. JBed (talk) 11:48, January 14, 2015 (UTC)
It's using Wikia.js (so I imagine Wikia.css) too. For JS not much of a problem, if skin=="venus" or "oasis". For CSS, a bit more of a problem. There is a class in the body that determines the skin, but the inclusion of that plays with the importance of the CSS rule.
I imagine they'll fully abandon oasis, so that probably is for if we decide to work on venus before it's implemented. I'll actually probably make "MediaWiki:Venus.css" and import it via JS for now until it becomes the actual skin. JBed (talk) 11:54, January 14, 2015 (UTC)