User blog:Tigernose/Moving off Wikia

Hello there.

As you may have been aware, Wikia are drafting in a new skin and essentially a whole new upgrade to Wikia. The new upgrade will be called Wikia and all currently available skins such as Monaco (the currently used one) and Monobook will no longer be available for use.

This new skin also comes along with a plethora of new features however we have found that they are counter-productive to our activities. The actual article content area is now only going to take up 40% of the screen. This is half of what Monaco gave to us, and this makes reading long articles way too hard.

Secondly, the sidebar will be only limited to 4 menus and also a limited amount of sub-menus after that. All of our sidebar menus are needed and we cannot afford to lose them. We also cannot afford to lose the sitenotice.

Also, the skin we currently have - and have worked incredibly hard to make - will be lost, and we cannot do anything to come close to it as all alterations to the new skin via css are prohibited by the new Wikia terms of use. We feel this is taking control of our own wiki, away from us (please don't leave your smartypants comments saying "we don't own this wiki" because they are useless).

This also prevents us from removing the image attribution feature, which we feel takes the in-universe and encyclopedic feel away from the wiki.

Overall, many, if not all, changes with the new Wikia are counter-productive to us and we will definitely have to recreate how this wiki works (crucial means of communication like the sitenotice are being taken away) along with redesigning many articles because of layout issues, if this was to go through.

Therefore, after many IRC discussions, we have decided to move off Wikia. This means that we will be taking all content from this wiki and will be uploading it onto our new host, be it another wikifarm or a self-hosted server.

Our most popular choice is to self-host ourselves. This will give us more control over our own website than any other wikifarm, however it comes with a downside that we will need to pay for a server. We are looking into setting up a donation system to help raise funds in order to pay for this.

Our second choice is free, and that is ShoutWiki - another wiki farm. This wiki-farm has incredibly good-spirited and helpful staff and has become very popular thanks to wikis such as Darthipedia, moving there.

You may be worrying that you will lose all your userpage stuff. Luckily, all pages including userpages, and their histories, will be imported. The only thing left to do is to create an account on the new server or wikifarm, which will only take a tick - just make sure to use the same account name if you want to keep your userpage.

You also may be wondering how this will all work. Unfortunately, we cannot shut down the old wiki - which will still remain on Wikia. We are looking into ways to remove content from the old wiki, but if we can't: we'll do what Darthipedia did and we will simply clear out the main page and link to the new site. Our only concern is what some users may do with the old site and we don't want it to be ruining our chances of the new site gaining traffic.

That is all, and happy editing for the meantime.