Forum:Wikia has failed us yet again

I can't thank Brandon Rhea enough for bringing this to my attention. As stated on this forum on SWFanon, at some point within the last several weeks, Wikia (aka, Uberfuzzy) disabled editing for unregistered users not only on SWFanon, but for Darthipedia as well. This was done to prevent vandalism from Assaulthead, a recently blocked user from the fanon wiki who has been trolling Darth and creating such wonderful articles as "Brandon is an evil Nazi". Brandon can put a "This is not a “bash Wikia” thread" notice on the fanon forum, but I'm letting you know right now there's going to be quite a bit of bashing here, all reasonable however.

Now I don't necessarily agree with letting unregistered users edit, but it does serve its purpose and in Darthipedia's case, we've allowed anons for far too long. The fact that Uberfuzzy did this without so much as asking a single administrator doesn't gripe me at all. I'm used to waking up in the morning and finding the staffers abusing the powers when and where they feel like it. Do I like it? No. Not in the least. But every wiki hosted by Wikia is their own personal stomping ground and there's not a goddamn thing anyone can do about it. All's fair in love and war. No, what gripes me is the fact that he, or any of the other staffers, didn't even give us a notice. Not a friendly reminder, not a memo on the IRC, not even a fucking tweet on Twitter something Wikia has become increasingly obsessed with. Instead, we're left to find out ourselves when some guy from New Jersey mysteriously logs out while editing due to a Wikia error.

Oh, but there's more. Not only does it disable editing from unregistered users, it also disables editing from users who haven't confirmed their email address. Now one might ask "how exactly does this prevent Assaulthead from creating a multitude of articles regarding Brandon Rhea's Nazism, factual or otherwise?" And here is your answer: It doesn't. Quite clearly stated, once you enter in an email address in your preferences and then confirm the account via email, everything's fine and dandy. And has it prevented one vandal from editing? No, and it never will. It has instead possibly halted dozens of potentially good and useful edits to the site.

Words can't even begin to describe how utterly useless the staff are right now, but the fact that Brandon Rhea has had to create a fucking petition on the subject sums it up perfectly. Now in case you don't remember this, back in 2007 it was decided that we would allow anons to edit and instead place messages on their talk pages urging them to sign up. Wikia has once again imposed their own boundaries they setup in the first place and completely disregarded the opinions of the community. Why even bother creating ownership policies if you're just going to blow them off?

So, in short, we're all stuck with this until Wikia decides what to do. They have no clue how long it's going to last, but it will last. We either go through the personal hell of contacting Uberfuzzy/Special:Contact (which happens to lead straight to Uberfuzzy) or we don't. This is not a blog posting, (there's places for that, and Wikia isn't one of them) nor is it a message to incite Wikia bashing. It is an announcement made by a member of the Darthipedia administration to the community, completely neutral by our standards. Cheers. &mdash;  S G  1  [citation needed] 03:56, October 28, 2009 (UTC)