4 ms·

Yeah, I had to create a user on many language versions just to keep the old skin. I fail to see a point in wasting 2/3 of my screen estate to whitespace.

by jaywee 2y ago

mzajc 2y ago
I'm in the same boat. I think it's unfortunate that MediaWiki doesn't accept a theme header or cookie, which would be very easy to set with extensions. User sessions don't persist for very long and don't work in private browsing mode, while the querysring useskin= parameter is annoying to work with and isn't applied to hyperlinks.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- labster 2y ago
  People creating an account just to browse isn’t great for the WMF either. You don’t get the pages cached by Varnish and hit the Mediawiki servers directly. There’s still parser cache, but it’s still more load while logged in.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    I mean, a header/cookie just for skin would probably have the same issue, cache would have to be split or it would have to cause (varnish) cache to be skipped. Something people aren't going to be eager for if its a large number of users. Depending on where you are connecting from this is also a latency increase since you are no longer hitting geo-located servers.
    - labster 2y ago
      We could go the Reddit route and have monobook.en.wikipedia.org
- bawolff 2y ago
  In theory user sessions are supposed to persist for a year, although it seems there have been issues recently.
hayleox 2y ago
The problem with unbounded page width is that the content often didn't work well that wide. I use a 1440p monitor and on the old theme, paragraphs were often a bit too wide to read comfortably. As a Wikipedia editor, it was also very often a challenge when writing articles – it's difficult to make your placement of images and tables and so forth look decent on viewports anywhere from ~400px to >2000px wide. All that said, the new theme does allow you to return to wide mode -- on any page on the site, there's an Appearance options panel in the rightmost column where you can switch from Standard to Wide.

Yeah, I had to create a user on many language versions just to keep the old skin. I fail to see a point in wasting 2/3 of my screen estate to whitespace.

by jaywee 2y ago

Yeah, I had to create a user on many language versions just to keep the old skin. I fail to see a point in wasting 2/3 of my screen estate to whitespace.

mzajc 2y ago

I'm in the same boat. I think it's unfortunate that MediaWiki doesn't accept a theme header or cookie, which would be very easy to set with extensions. User sessions don't persist for very long and don't work in private browsing mode, while the querysring useskin= parameter is annoying to work with and isn't applied to hyperlinks.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
labster 2y ago
People creating an account just to browse isn’t great for the WMF either. You don’t get the pages cached by Varnish and hit the Mediawiki servers directly. There’s still parser cache, but it’s still more load while logged in.
- bawolff 2y ago
  I mean, a header/cookie just for skin would probably have the same issue, cache would have to be split or it would have to cause (varnish) cache to be skipped. Something people aren't going to be eager for if its a large number of users. Depending on where you are connecting from this is also a latency increase since you are no longer hitting geo-located servers.
  - labster 2y ago
    We could go the Reddit route and have monobook.en.wikipedia.org
bawolff 2y ago
In theory user sessions are supposed to persist for a year, although it seems there have been issues recently.

hayleox 2y ago

The problem with unbounded page width is that the content often didn't work well that wide. I use a 1440p monitor and on the old theme, paragraphs were often a bit too wide to read comfortably. As a Wikipedia editor, it was also very often a challenge when writing articles – it's difficult to make your placement of images and tables and so forth look decent on viewports anywhere from ~400px to >2000px wide. All that said, the new theme does allow you to return to wide mode -- on any page on the site, there's an Appearance options panel in the rightmost column where you can switch from Standard to Wide.