It seems we are once again at a critical time in the history of Brickipedia.
From what's been said, there are quite a few people who are intending to stay here. That's really great to hear! But what I'm worried about is whether those who have decided to leave will try to make it difficult for them to do that. From what's happened so far, it seems that that's very likely.
So far we've seen advertising of the re-built fork, which is outside of Wikia's Terms of Use; changes in the color scheme that seem designed to make the wikia less attractive; removal of the "contribute" button which most people use to add new pages; trolling on Central and other chats; and, perhaps the worst, offensive trolling on a blog post meant to support those who are victims of cyberbullying and feeling suicidal. Whatever your disagreements with Wikia, that is going pretty low.
As well as those recent issues, there are the problems that happened after the last fork attempt. That included deletions, vandalism, removing the usual wordmark, and promotion of the new wiki.
I realize that the motivations for some of the above will be disputed, but the overall combination does not give us much faith in the behavior of many members of this community during the next period of transition on this community. In similar situations in the past, we've seen everything from malicious CSS changes to redirect links, to wholesale mass-deletes by bots. Most of these require admin rights, but it seems that at least some admins may have been part of the disruption and trolling
Given how much has already happened, it doesn't seem prudent to leave the current administration and bureaucrats in place right now. I realize this is probably penalizing some who would never cause disruption, but too much has happened already for it to be sensible to take the risk. So I will be removing rights from all admins here until things are calmer. I realize that leaves the wikia without its caretakers for now, but I've asked the VSTF and others to keep an extra eye out here for a while.
I also need to repeat the forking guidelines. These are not optional.
- Please do not link to your new wiki on the main page of the Wikia version.
- Please make sure that any threads about the fork clearly say that people have a choice to move with you or to stay.
- Please do not post to users' talk pages with messages about the fork.
- Please do not try to delete pages, change fundamental elements of the site or otherwise damage the content. The wikia should be left intact and available for any future editors to use.
- Please do not use this wikia to promote your new fork. This includes templates, notices or URLs on pages other than the announcement.
This doesn't cover all possibilities, so any relevant changes that are not covered by these guidelines will need to be discussed in advance. I will be reverting some of the changes recently made, including the "goth" background.
This has been a very difficult blog post to write, and possibly to read. As I said to Ajr recently, I have a real soft spot for this wikia, and very much wish that we weren't losing some of you from this community. But I also feel that this has been an amazingly long and drawn out process, and at this point the Wikia version of Brickipedia needs people to either move on, or commit to building this wikia.
For everyone, I would ask: are you committed to making this wikia the biggest, most comprehensive, and best resource for everything LEGO? Including it being better in all ways than any other wiki? If so, thanks for being here, I hope we can help you with that :)
If not, then please simply move on and let this wikia be.