1053113 - Hide obsolete and unsupported skins on wiki.mozilla.org

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations :: IT-Managed Tools, task)

Description

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

Please add the following line to the LocalSettings.php file for wiki.mozilla.org:

>>>
$wgSkipSkins = array( 'cavendish', 'chick', 'standard', 'cologneblue', 'modern', 'myskin', 'nostalgia', 'sandstone', 'simple' );
<<<

This will remove these choices from the Appearance tab in Preferences, but it will not change the preferences of any users who have already selected these skins, nor will it switch the default skin. (Both of these changes will come at a later date.)

Note that this also leaves the 'gmo' skin as an option for now.

Comment 1

[Jason Crowe [:jd]]

This change was made and deployed on prod. I saw the list of available themes for my user decrease so it appears to be working. Let me know if you need anything further.

Cheers

Comment 2

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

I see this is done now, but I'm mildly concerned (only mildly, mind you)... what drives this change?

I ask because we're reducing user choice (for users of wikimo), and I don't see an obvious upside. Are we just attempting to avoid users selecting a "pretty" skin and later complaining that it doesn't work completely? Does that actually happen very often?

(I know they don't all work very well, but some I would definitely deem tolerably functional, personally)

Also, do we have stats on how many people are actually using these old skins? I'm wondering what the expected scope of impact is if/when we make them unavailable entirely.

Comment 3

[Christie Koehler [:ckoehler]]

Jake, 

We're working on an announcement about the upgrade that will address some of your concerns. 

In the meantime, I'll answer your questions here.

(In reply to Jake Maul [:jakem] from comment #2)
> I see this is done now, but I'm mildly concerned (only mildly, mind you)...
> what drives this change?

What's driving this change is that having unsupported skins on the Mozilla Wiki takes resources that could be spent on other tasks.

> I ask because we're reducing user choice (for users of wikimo), and I don't
> see an obvious upside. Are we just attempting to avoid users selecting a
> "pretty" skin and later complaining that it doesn't work completely? Does
> that actually happen very often?

Yes, we're reducing user choice in favor of better user experience. Yes, people file bugs that are specific to unsupported skins. Additionally, unsupported skins do not surface via the user interface all the tools needed for best practices on the wiki. 

> Also, do we have stats on how many people are actually using these old
> skins? I'm wondering what the expected scope of impact is if/when we make
> them unavailable entirely.

We do have numbers! These are folks who have specifically set a skin in their preferences.

+-------------+------------+
| up_value    | user_count |
+-------------+------------+
| cavendish   |        444 |
|             |        424 |
| modern      |        267 |
| cologneblue |        133 |
| vector      |        108 |
| standard    |        105 |
| monobook    |         78 |
| myskin      |         70 |
| chick       |         61 |
| sandstone   |         44 |
| nostalgia   |         42 |
| simple      |         36 |
| gmo         |         26 |
+-------------+------------+

Comment 4

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

I just talked to jd about this as well.... very cool, thanks for the details!