User blog:Withersoul 235/COMMUNITY DISCUSSION — Leaving FANDOM (Fork)

Hello.

I have been equipped with the task of announcing on MasterSlender's behalf that he is planning to fork the Glitchtale Wikia from FANDOM. What this means is that he will abandon this wiki and export its content to another wiki hosting service — then continue there. Essentially, we are leaving FANDOM.

Please note that:


 * this is not my idea, per se. I am merely a messenger.
 * simply because it's on Slender's mind doesn't mean it's 100% guaranteed to happen — we will hold it a community decision.

I will introduce this project before we will get to voting.

First of all ...

REQUIREMENTS FOR VOTING

 * Must be a legitimate wiki member to cast a vote. We won't accept votes from random users from other communities.
 * Try to not excessively disrespect FANDOM in your comments

Why?
In general, Slender disagrees with the new FANDOM policies — and I agree on most of them. To make a quick list of downsides:


 * Ads all over the place, including in the article. Removing them directly violates FANDOM's Terms of Use. Oh, and those annoying as hell videos atop pop culture pages.
 * Disallowance to hide the FANDOM modules — id est, Trending Articles and the Fan Feed. Even though over 80% of the entire network doesn't even remotely care about anything they write. Like, at all.
 * The customization policy. Look, I can get that we should leave the FANDOM footer and top navigation alone. A rule I agree with. But why must the Wiki Header / Navigation and the space right above articles stay completely consistent and unmodified at all costs? Why are all those harmless JavaScript snippets banned for sitewide? Control over your wiki design and features is being massively spiked down.
 * FANDOM often interferes with your wiki to make whatever change they feel fit without prior permission request. In a way, this is hypocritical. They claim wikis are owned by their entire communities and things like bureaucrat demotions require community vote, but the staff just do whatever they want without justification, even if the community opposes the change.
 * URL change. Why the hell do we have to change to ? Wikia — yes, Wikia — was created as wiki hosting service. Not as pop culture news site! I barely recognize the original network anymore. Not to mention this leads to disgusting results like autism.fandom.com (legitimately exists) and hitlerparody.fandom.com (also legitimately exists). This also doesn't fit with joke/fanfiction sites and community/social network-themed wikis.
 * Lots of random feature removals and replacements. Why did the Forums ("normal" and wikistyle; e.g. Forum:Index), Monobook / Pseudo-Vector, Forum highlighting before the actual Forum removal and the option to email users through FANDOM have to go? The fact we got the shitty Discussions feature instead of the far superior Forums doesn't make it much better. The Discussions are lackluster, lack mountains worth of features including proper wikitext, HTML and templates and worst of all, are completely uncustomizable (CSS and JavaScript are prevented from working), except for the background which requires a full wiki theme overwrite and this app which only works for your browser and not for sitewide and doesn't even seem to work anyways. You're forced to use them as they are, period.

A short, maybe long summary, this was.

Where will we be headed?
Slender has decided to move to Neoseeker. http://neowiki.neoseeker.com/wiki/Alternative_To_Wikia

This network has a Private Message feature, a friend system, less ads, no ads in the content area and different notifications and Forums.

Oh, and this.

"We listen to our users. When creating new features, or fixing bugs we make decisions based on what our users want and need."

Also, you can apply JavaScript without having to wait for the Staff to look over it.

Obviously Neoseeker does have its downs — perfection doesn't exist. A list includes:
 * No Message Walls, Blogs or Comments. Everything is talk pages and talk pages only. This is because Message Walls, User Blogs and Article/Blog Comments were created specifically for Wikia and are an exclusive feature.
 * There are Forums somewhat similar to Wikia's tho.
 * No Oasis, Mercury and Lucy skins since those are also FANDOM only. You can use Monobook, Vector, Monaco and more, but not Wikia's skin.
 * Some other FANDOM only features. We can still reproduce Polls however.
 * Probably some other stuff we are / might be unaware of.

What will happen to the Wikia?
No idea. Slender wants it to die permanently and become completely unadministratable and unappealing, but I don't know if that would be realistically possible.

Voting Time
Voting will be done through the comments. There, you will either vote Support or Oppose. No Neutral votes, since those will not get us any further. Either you vote for or against, or you don't vote. If possible, please back up your vote with (counter)arguments. Polls are anonymous and easily cheatable, so we're not going for those; neither FANDOM's, Apesters and Polldady (all three of which are embeddable in FANDOM).

Deadline will be Thursday 1 November 2018. We will announce the results and then lock the blog. If voted in support, we will make the move.

Wither out.