MediaWiki talk:Sitenotice

Time to drop that banner?

When we originally introduced this banner, it had a purpose: educate our visitors that our website had moved to a new domain. It served this purpose very well (at the time), but in the last 9 years, the banner essentially provides a count of how many revisions since 5.0 stable and points to the latest progress report from the Dolphin blog (requiring a manual edit every time a new blog post lands, BTW). IMO it has no purpose nowadays and I guess our visitors simply grown accustomed to ignore it anyway.

Another motivator is that since the recent MediaWiki update we have a proper mobile layout (can be selected from the link at the bottom of the page if it doesn't trigger automatically) and the current design of this banner (as well as other custom templates we use) don't play nice with the mobile layout. Those can be fixed, sure, but for this banner in particular, I don't feel like spending any time in fixing the design of something that (IMO) is not useful anymore. So yeah, I want to drop it, for good. Thoughts? - mbc07 (talk) 12:10, 20 July 2023 (CEST)

I'm honestly more concerned with the excessive amount of advertising now, there are 3 separate banner ads as well as pop-up ads that take over the full screen; which I'm finding very distasteful. Seems we frequently don't even show the sitenotice on pages, replacing it with an ad. The ads also obscure the "Mobile view" link and other footer content. Kolano (talk) 17:35, 21 July 2023 (CEST)

You're right, this went out of control (hadn't noticed before as I have ad blocking enabled on my main browser). I guess the ads increased since the last MediaWiki update? The forum and main web page, which used to have one or two banner ads, seems infested too - mbc07 (talk) 00:52, 22 July 2023 (CEST)