Pain at Vim Tips wiki

So everyone can share the pain, here is advance notice of what
Wikia are planning for the Vim Tips wiki http://vim.wikia.com/

Wikia have several large wikis (much larger than ours), with
often young participants. Wikia want to boost kiddie
participation, which leads to more page views on wikia.com (they
don't care which wiki, so long as it's at wikia.com), and longer
visits. More page views and longer visits lead to much greater
advert revenue.

Wikia will switch all wikis to a new "Wikia" skin on November 3.
Other skins will NOT be possible (any preference settings will
be ignored).

The new skin features:
- FIXED WIDTH article content of 660 pixels.
- No sidebar on left.
- New 300 pixel wide sidebar on right with gee-whiz crap.
- Bar at top to encourage visits to other wikis.
- Floating bar at bottom ("Share" etc).
- Silly "edit section" buttons and some other nonsense.
- Probably more I don't know about.

The font size is much smaller than previously to compensate for
the 660-pixel fixed content width.

The good news is that not-logged-in users used to see a 300x250
pixel advert block at a random place in the article. That advert
will now be at the top of the new right-hand sidebar.

Some non-info is here:
http://community.wikia.com/wiki/The_new_look
http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Blog:Wikia_Staff_Blog

There is a lot of community dissent, and people from several
wikis are talking about moving to another hosting service.
However, Wikia know that such talk is largely hot air because
hosting that is free and reliable and supported is hard to find.
Also, Wikia will retain any existing content causing tremendous
confusion for readers (which is the "official" wiki?), and the
new site would have a hopeless Google ranking, probably forever.

John

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