Forum:Gallery Tag notice

As I'm sure many of you have seen during these past couple of days, the images within the "Gallery" sections of all of our pages have become rather badly formatted due to a recent change by Wikia Central. You know, the usual things that they do to break every wiki that they host, including ours. This would have been relatively easy to fix with a new "heights" parameter added to the code, but it turns out that this very basic function was removed by Wikia intentionally some months back.

This means that we can't force the images to have uniform heights, the way that the tag used to work. Before, it defaulted all images to a set height of 120px, and that was perfectly fine for what they were used for. But since yesterday's change, it seems that the rows will now take on the height of the tallest image no matter what, and shorter pictures cannot be rendered to similar heights. The "widths" parameter still exists, but as expected, it only scales images by width, leaving the taller images just as tall proportionally.

At this time, there is no way to fix this. I know random users are going to come in and try to fix the gallery things on the pages, but I'm just going to say that those edits should be left alone and ignored. As for our own part, I guess we can try to scale image widths to 100px or somewhere in that range, and then leave everything alone after that.

This change has hurt a lot of wiki sites, and hopefully Wikia Central will receive a large amount of negative feedback so they will revert their changes. But don't count on it, especially since the custom Wikia features like the auto-welcome bot and Rich Text editor thing are features that the top people seem to praise, while lowly commoners like myself find nothing but rage.

Also, remember Zolo, I never supported image galleries to begin with, and I was a bit disappointed to see you add them all into the pages again after I had removed most of them a year ago. I still insist that galleries should be confined to category pages, since they take up unnecessary space on articles and force more objects to be loaded when users go to the articles themselves. I never cared enough to undo the changes again, because it's a waste of effort to me since I was ignored the first time, but at this point with Wikia's latest nonsense, it might just be better to put the image galleries back into the categories where they belong. This is up to you though, I'm not going to comment on it anymore since it's not worth the trouble.

Byakuren Hijiri (talk) 14:31, July 16, 2010 (UTC)