Talk:Suggestion/@comment-25494824-20150405222128/@comment-8-20150408234028

Hi Ninthsense. We do have to be somewhat inflexible about some aspects of the site, just so we can effectively host many thousands of wikias. We have tried allowing exceptions and special cases, and it really hasn't worked. But we also try to keep the restrictions to a minimum, we ask that the overall "framework" and functioning of the site stays the same, leaving a lot of room for customization and creativity

We're also always looking at the site and how we can improve it, with the article width being one aspect of that. We have gone from fixed width to a fluid one, so those with larger screens don't have too much sidespace, and we also tried out a prototype layout that removed the right rail to expand the content area and moved ads into the content area instead. We got a lot of great feedback on it from the community, and learned from observing reader behaviors as well. That prototype was just testing out some ideas (including the wider width) and won't be released, but it shows the sort of thing we look at to try and balance ads and content (and to improve other aspects of Wikia). Please keep an eye on the Staff Blog for more!

50.152.18.158: Comments are a bit of a complex area, and a lot of the answer depends on the abilities of your techy guys. I believe, (but am not certain) that comments, message wall posts and forum posts are in the database download we provide. However, the way they work is dependent on article ID. And that's unique to each wiki. You couldn't just import them the way you do articles, you would somehow have to figure out what to do to manipulate article IDs to get them into place. This is not my area, but my understanding is that this is difficult to impossible.

Of course, before that you need to add the extensions. Many of Wikia's features are on MediaWiki, but we don't always have time to package them up nicely to get them on there. So you might need to look in our code (most of which is openly available) and pick out what you need. I think that's already been done for Comments, but I don't see Message Wall or our forum over there.

One other thing to mention about the download, while I'm on the subject: it does not contain images. Because images are not under the CC-by-sa license that the text is, we are not allowed to package them up and provide them for download. I understand that various people have worked out alternate ways to download images for import to a new wikia, so you would have to find one of those to transfer them.

I'm happy to answer any other questions, or maybe I can talk some about the advantages of staying with Wikia :)