User blog comment:MEffect Fan/New wiki skin opinion/@comment-217683-20101014085427/@comment-2088100-20101014151114

I've not looked into the situation too much, but the banning's I've heard of (sans spin from the affected party), have a justifiable reason behind them. Wikia's a business. IIRC, they take down the offending sitenotice with an edit summary to the effect of "Do not advertise a competing service on Wikia." They have every right to demand that. Ignoring that advice and placing a site notice up (which is visible on every page!) that says "Don't go here, go edit over here where we're moving!" is pretty bold and stupid. They have not, for example, removed anything dealing with votes related to moving, or featuring a link to the vote in the community corner. The sitenotice is what draws their ire, since that's visible by everyone who visits a wiki, including passers-by who don't know or care what wikia is.

I'm not trying to defend them or anything. It's incredibly [crappy] that they do this. I just want to get some perspective on the bans. Willfully ignoring a request not to advertise a competitor is painfully stupid. But that's what makes this even [crappier]. Wikis have no way to really get the word out about a 'forked' site starting up to people who aren't already aware of it. The only real way to kill the old Wikia wiki is to somehow take a brand-new site and push it above Wikia in search engine searches. Large wikis like WoWWiki could probably do that, as could wikis related to a very obscure subject. But we, for example, don't really have much control over the behavior of other sites linking. If you search for Turian, the top hit is our page about turians. That's awesome because we really are the most relevant page. But if we, hypothetically, forked over to a new wiki farm, that's a very huge hill to crest. The only way to draw users to the hypothetical new page on turians over the already top-linked page here about turians is to somehow convince site-owners and users to use the hypothetical new wiki over this one. That's no easy task. I suspect it'll be an impossible task for most wikis that are leaving, and many users will come slinking back after noticing that the wiki on their new host does not receive the attention and editors that they were accustomed to at Wikia.

Wikia's really holding all the cards here, and they know it.