Monday 16 June 2008

Reasons why New Monaco sucks

The New Monaco skin comes into effect tomorrow, whether you like it or not. Don't look at me, it's Wikia's fault! The people paying for Wikia's hosting, i.e. those who like to bung the place up with ads, think it's better than the traditional Monobook. But is it really?

Warning: rants may follow.
  1. Stupid banner adverts at the top of the screen. Sure they're necessary but I do think they're drawing attention away from the content. Why not put them at the bottom? Heck, things even looked better when they were on the right hand side.
  2. Dissimilarity with Wikipedia. WP doesn't have the Monaco skin: in fact I would go so far to say as all the available WP skins are better than Monaco, and that's saying something.
  3. Where's the eye candy? It just looks a bit naff. Visually it resembles a poorly designed blog rather than a wiki. As a designer I'm getting sick of the techies having their way with things.
  4. It's selling out to commercialism. Come on, what happened to tradition? Grumble.
  5. Too much stuff going on. If the banner ads don't hog your screen space then the 'featured Wikia' and link bar bits will.
  6. It's mandatory. We were never asked about this and there is no option to change the default skin for individual wikis.
  7. Uncyc got to keep Monobook. What gives? Oh yeah, pick on the smaller wikis because you know you can't beat the big guys. Grumble, groan.
Rant ended. You may now breathe easily once more.

And now, reasons why New Monaco (gasp) doesn't suck.
Having said all that, there are some good bits to Monaco. After all, it's Web 2.0 friendly and has some cool features, such as an article rating system. Plus, if you don't like the layout you can always select your personal wiki preferences to Monobook, so maybe I should shut up.

So, the change to Monaco ain't all bad, really. I'm sure that in time we'll come to accept, nay, love the new layout once all the bugs are ironed out - I just hope that's sooner rather than later. Oh and that picture? It's Monaco, of course!

1 comment:

  1. I was gonna write something along the same lines as this, Wikia is always kissing Uncyc's arse and im sick of it, so much for treating everyone the same.

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