Forum:Skin changes

Hoo boy.

Wikia is rolling out their new skin now, and less than one month from now Monaco (what this wiki currently uses) will be removed entirely. Bascially, we're going to be forced to make some changes, and the default option is to switch to the new skin. This wouldn't be so bad except that the new skin is really really bad. All article space has to be squeezed down to a width of ~700 pixels, which is really measly. The sidebar is 300 pixels wide, it's full of rather distracting interwiki ads, and its positioning on the right evidently gives headaches to people with right-eye-dominance, or something.

Even more problematic is that, from what I can tell, the ability to customize the look of the wiki is IMMENSELY crippled. From what I can tell, the teletyped links we have now are impossible in the new skin, as is the ability to make it imitate the MSPA-site look. The custom tabber gallery style I worked out seems to be broken as well, which makes it absolutely unusable now. Editing the site's CSS to fix these problems apparantly breaks their new Terms of Service, so there's not a thing I can do about it.

So yeah. It's pretty bad. It calls for something drastic: either downgrading to monobook, which is a skin that imitates the way Wikipedia used to look, or moving to a new free wiki service, like shoutwiki. Or keeping the new skin, I guess, but I think I've made it clear what my thoughts on that are. The monobook switch is the most enticing option by far, but I need to see what options are available customization-wise if we go that route.

I'll be working on it.

--Pigbuster 07:48, October 12, 2010 (UTC)