Wikia sucks

In case anyone reading this doesn't know, Wikia is continuing a long-standing tradition among "web 2.0" websites: Completely changing their look and feel without any community consultation and ignoring all feedback.  In most cases the site is still usable, but with Wikia, it's clear that the change is all about the ads.

A lot of wikis are leaving Wikia because of this, and two of them happen to be GuildWiki and PvXwiki.  They've completed their moves, so I went through all my previous Guild Wars posts and updated all the links to point to the new sites.  Since Wikia staff are a bunch of dicks, the old sites still exist, but those versions should be less maintained and may completely change to fit the new style.

Wikia's method of running their site has always been a bit strange to me.  They've always been focused on adding all these stupid social networking features, like forums, blogs, user avatars, and transforming the watchlist into a "following" list that becomes public unless you turn it off.  Last I checked, a wiki was a collaborative documentation platform, not a social networking platform.

They went wrong with the new layout in a few ways.  First off, they forced it on everyone.  No exceptions, except if you're Uncyclopedia.  What, do they sleep with the people in charge?  Second, the new layout has a fixed content width that can't be changed at all.  The worst part is that the fixed width is a mere 680 pixels.  Remember when display resolutions were that small?  Yeah, didn't think so.  The third thing is the ads.  They float all over the place, overlapping page content, and generally being as obtrusive as possible.  I haven't experienced them myself due to the wonders of AdBlock Plus, but I've seen the screenshots.  The fourth and final thing is that they sprang this on everyone with relatively little time for any individual wiki that had issue with it to raise their issue only to have all their ideas shot down.

Now, any user can edit the site CSS via their userspace, after all, this is still MediaWiki.  In fact, that was their proposed solution when people rightly bitched about the tiny width.  So basically, a wiki's only recourse is to redesign every single page to conform to the new width and ad layout, and hope it still looks decent when overridden by user CSS.  Users can also set their skin to Monobook, the old MediaWiki default skin, which is far superior to any skin Wikia has shat out over the years.  But again, you can't have your wiki set to Monobook unless you're Uncyclopedia.

I'm too lazy to start up MSPaint to make a simple Venn diagram, so just imagine this.  There are two circles, one labelled Wikia, and the other labelled Common Sense.  The two don't overlap.