Discussioni utente:Avatar

Nonciclopedia needs you!

<<A copy of this message was sent to the staff mail>>

Dear Staff/Avatar,
I know that at the moment you are busy changing the skin, but Nonciclopedia needs you NOW.
Our site can't go on like this:

• there are too much technical problems
• the code is old and too heavy
• upgrades are needed to modernize the site
• we need some more additional functions and extensions, that we'll submit to you later

We are tired to invent thousands of hacks to bypass your technical lacks, hacks that often slow down the site.
We are tired to be unconsidered, despite we represent the 3% of the users of Wikia and 80% of the italian users on Wikia.

For example, we are waiting since months the "next week meeting" about the adoption of the vector skin for the Uncyclopedias, we even created a beta version for you, considering your needs of attracting our users to other Wikia wikis, like WikiAnswers. But it seems that we were completely forgotten.

For these reasons, the exasperation of the community led to a votation to decide if we should transfer Nonciclopedia on Uncyclomedia's servers. A votation that was, as you can see, slightly for the transfer... but you should understand that these who voted against the transfer did so only because they were aware of your possible veto and your policy of not deleting. Otherwise the votation would have been unanimously for the transfer, and believe me, I was one of these who didn't vote.
The community decided for the transfer, and the work is already in progress. But I persuaded them to wait (already before your message), because I wanted to make a last try with you.

The proposal is simple: separate Nonciclopedia (and the other Uncyclopedias in general) from the other wikis, creating a parallel space on Wikia. This means that we need a standard software, without all these things that have nothing to do with a parody of Wikipedia.

Obviously, these things will remain unchanged:

1. Users will still be shared on whole Wikia
2. Ads will be added in the skin, so that your profit won't change (if you want, we can work on the skin by our own, and you can control anytime)

while you'll have the following benefits:

1. the possibilities to reach and create other wikis will be inproved, implementing the features that we discussed some time ago with Angela
2. you'll have a special and functional space for the Uncys, that surely will persuade other Uncys to come back to Wikia

A central administration, only partially delegated, can be good for small and medium sized wikis, where administrators and users usually aren't enough skilled to completely maintain a site, and represents a good starting point because it removes work. But for big wikis with a lot of users like ours, the need of a bigger independence is necessary to improve the administration.

We offer ourselves as guinea pigs for this job and we are ready to help you on the technical side, we have the requiried skills. An example of the "procedure" can be the following:

• creating a parallel section on Wikia
• temporarily moving nonciclopedia.wikia.com to it.nonciclopedia.wikia.com and redirect everything
• installing from skratch the latest version of mediawiki with the vector etc. on nonciclopedia.wikia.com (this means not your modified version)
• integrating the ads without messing/making heavy the code
• coming to an agreement about the possible additional extensions useful for our humorous content
• living happily ever after

Demonstrate us that you are really a modern company that considers their customers-users and can adapt to the needs of those. We want to remain on Wikia, but you have to give us the right conditions. Because if you don't want to listen to us and come to an agreement, you'll have to realize that your host is incompatible with the humorous parody of Wikipedia-wikis, now and forever.

And please, don't tell us that you can't spend money to support this operation, you aren't talking to small babies. We are expecting that you won't offend our intelligence. Some of our admins are skilled webmasters and webdesigners, technically competent.
The proposal was thought to be free of costs:

• you don't have to develop any skin from skratch, you just have to install the standard mediawiki software, that already has the vector skin: 0$
• your time will be spent only to implement ads and some extensions, but this is surely less than the time you'll need to update and/or adjust all technical problems on Nonciclopedia: 0$
• we are offering 100% free technical support of qualified users and, if you trust us enough, you can even let us do everything by our own giving us a temporary and limited FTP access (read for it.nonciclopedia.wikia.com, read+write for nonciclopedia.wikia.com). We can't do any damage, can we?

Hoping that you'll agree with us, we are waiting a swift answer. --Zaza; ^(eh?) 16:06, ott 24, 2010 (CEST)

PS: Lately ads aren't visible any more (probabily since you started modifying the skins) and we have some problems with the login (one of the many other problems). But the admins are using AdBlock and we didn't notice the problem. A user told us and we are reporting that to you to adjust it.

Hey Zaza, thanks for your comprehensive mail. I'll respond here publically and send you a copy as reply to your mail to staff.

First of all you're right, that there is not clear enough communication between the Italian community and Wikia. I really think we should work together on finding Italian users who are interested in becoming helpers to establish a better information flow in both direction.

To address the points in your mail which I have discussed yesterday briefly inside staff: We currently plan to rollout MediaWiki 1.16 in January. While no final decision was made yet, we are strongly considering offering Vector as an alternative to Monobook for the Wikipedia parodies once we are on the new version. We also know we need to consider other options, including grouping Uncyclopedia sister projects in a different way. At the momenet it’s too early to know what the best plan is, but we will talk to the communities as soon as we have a clearer idea of the options.

I'm sorry to hear that you have multiple technical problems. It would be very helpful for us if you can create a list of all current problems and send it to me, so I can check if and what problems can be nailed down and hopefully be fixed.

In the long run, some kind of advertisments are needed on all wikis on Wikia, including the Uncyclopedia projects. But we haven’t found the right solution yet (Google, for example, would not allow placing their ads besides some of the more... interesting... content on Uncyclopedia). We are testing different setups, and considering various options, but this process may take a while and we are OK with hosting these wikis without ads for the time being.

I'm pretty confident we are able to find a way which will please the active Nonciclopedia community - right now from my perspective the most important step is to establish a better communication channel which hopefully this communication can be a start for. --Avatar<staff /> 21:04, ott 26, 2010 (CEST)