This page consists of valid criticism and complaints about Wikia's handling of issues pertaining to Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki. Because of these, we are seriously considering packing up and moving Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki to another server.
The move is currently under discussion on this page.
Misleading the Wiki
- On April 7th Wikipedia staff began to talk to us about switching to the Monaco skin, claiming improved load times, more hits, and more involvement. Another change was the replacement of the skyscraper ads with banner ads, mostly because Wikia could get more revenue from banner ads. We eventually switched partially because we were informed we could switch back, and made a new logo to fit the new skin.
- On June 11th, we were notified that Monaco was changing. This included replacing the banner ads with poptart ads that are located in the actual article. These did with most of our pages by pushing the main article image down below the fold. This also changed the masthead layout effectively forcing us to throw out the work we did for the old Monaco. Oh, and we can't switch back to Monobook anymore.
Misleading others about the Wiki
- As part of the announcement on the mandatory switch to Monaco, Teletraan-I's site statistics were used to show the effect of switching to Monaco. The problem: This was effectively saying that the decline of pirates is the cause of global warming.
- The switch took place around April 24th. This was the weekend BotCon was held. A ton of new information was revealed, which meant a bunch of updates and related traffic.
- That really big, 300k spike? That's when the Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen subtitle was announced.
- The smaller spike, around the end of May? The day "SUV: Society of Ultimate Villainy" aired in Canada & "A Fistful of Energon" aired in the US
- The plateau from June 3 onward? That's when English-language Transformers Animated episodes world-premiered for three days in a row on Nicktoons UK, with corresponding worldwide downloading and non-downloaders wanting to spoil themselves.
- The rise in early May? Post-BotCon combined with the Dubai airings and the corresponding firestorm, which died down as all the BotCon stuff got played out and Animated pages started getting protected against anons.
- Weekdays in the middle of May? That's when nothing much was being announced or shown, and the skin wasn't pushing anyone to check much out.
- As for checking out the customisation options on Monaco, when you're apparently stuck with something, you try to make the best of it. And the worse it gets, the more percussive maintenance is required. If it worked out of the box, it wouldn't need customising. - SanityOrMadness 01:51, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
Wikia Staff forging ahead on changes to our pages in spite of vocal dissent
- Wikia rep announces that he's here to help us change the layout of the Main Page to accommodate the new Wikia ads, which are how we must pay for our sins now that logged in users no longer see ads in the article space.[1]
- Wikia rep puts up an example of how this will work.
- The example conveniently omits the announcement link to our ongoing discussion regarding leaving Wikia, links to adblock plus, and replaced the site's TFWiki.net title in favor of the default Wikia title.
- Teletraan-I users say, in no uncertain terms, "Thanks, but no thanks."
- Wikia rep takes his proposed revision live.[2]
- Teletraan-I users again point that the resulting page is broken in Safari and Firefox 2, and that he has no consensus for this, and revert it.[3]
- Wikia rep puts his version back again as an "update," changing the broken code, but claiming that everyone else's broken layouts were just caching problems. [4]
- Teletraan-I users point out that Wikia rep is ignoring vocal dissent towards this change.[5]
- Wikia rep claims he noticed no major dissent and decided to forge ahead with changes because he thought we didn't object, in spite of him posting to the same discussion where dissent was voiced.[6]
More issues
Further issues involve
- More ads for people who are not logged in
- Talking ads
- Ads that expanded and cover article images and text
- Removing ads for Logged-in users, which means the people who make the most contributions don't see the same thing 95% of the users see.
- Wow. Now we've got a Wikia person censoring an established editor's anti-Wikia statement as "vandalism."