I think you should be made aware of an upcoming mandatory change to the appearance of IH. Wikia's going to introduce a new Global Navigation bar, replacing the current Wikia navigation bar. The GN bar is still in beta and is being tested on limited wikis, but every indication is that this design will be applied to all wikis within a month or so. You can read the full blog introducing the changes here. But to sum up the changes:
- Current global nav bar (the dark blue one, above the local navigation "mosaic" menu) is going away
- New global navbar will be fixed to the top of the screen, even if you scroll down the page
- Search bar will be moved to the global navbar, and thus accessible even if scrolled down on a page
- Search bar will allow readers to search either on the local wiki or across all of Wikia
- Global nav update introduces new Wikia Hubs
- Dropdown menu, currently located under the user avatar and username in the upper right corner of the screen, is updated. The user avatar now appears as a circle instead of a square.
- The new global navbar cannot be customized on individual wikis; the bar's height, color and text is set and cannot be changed as per Wikia's Terms of Use. This includes the "Search this wikia" and "start a wikia" texts.
The Site Feature Policy requires that this feature be disabled automatically here as soon as it goes live to all of Wikia. This discussion is intended to allow users to comment locally on the new feature, and to indicate whether they support its adoption or not. If the local community does not indicate support for the new feature, I will contact Staff and attempt to get the feature disabled, in line with the SFP. So, if you want the new feature to be rolled-out here, be sure to mention so below. Additionally, if you feel strongly one way or the other about this feature, please leave comments on the above-linked Staff Blog.
So, thoughts on this new change?