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Monaco: coming soon to a ShoutWiki near you!

ShoutWiki will be making the popular Monaco skin available for free for the next six months, after which it will become a premium (paid) feature to support ShoutWiki financially.

Hello there everyone,

We have been getting more and more questions about the Monaco skin lately, and we thought it would be best to write about it.

Firstly, I would like to answer the most frequently asked question, does ShoutWiki have Monaco? The answer to this question is: yes, ShoutWiki has its own Monaco. The Monaco skin is one of our premium (paid) features that are still in development. You can in fact try out Monaco and other premium skins on our Premium Examples wiki; do note that you need to be logged in to be able to access the preferences page.

We haven’t yet finalized the pricing (among a few other things) on premium features, but once we do, we’ll make all of them available. Don’t worry, our goals is to make all the features as affordable as possible, while still maintaining profitability.

For Monaco, however, given its popularity, we have recently begun thinking of something different. While there are still a few things that need to be ironed out before we can enable Monaco, as soon as it’s ready, we will enable the Monaco skin for free on all ShoutWiki wikis for the duration of the next six months. By that time the premium features will be fully developed and anyone who wants to use Monaco after the six months are up will be able to keep it for a modest fee.

We understand that you’d prefer Monaco completely free, but please understand that maintaining a wiki farm has its costs too. Thus, we will make sure that the pricing for Monaco is affordable for everyone, while still profiting enough from it to maintain ShoutWiki.

Jedimca0
Customer Support Team

21 replies on “Monaco: coming soon to a ShoutWiki near you!”

I don’t mind Monaco being a paid feature,as long as vector is an available option. Before you upgrade Monaco to premium status, are you going to install the latest version of mediawiki?

Advertising this post on wikia: [http://community.wikia.com/index.php?title=User_blog_comment:Sannse/New_look_roll_out_–_meeting_place/@comment-Anno1404-20101130164602&diff=prev&oldid=591921]

@anno1404: Blog comments are moderated, thanks to spambots; comments will need manually to be approved by a staff member in order to show up here.

@Roxy13: Yes, that is correct. We’ve been thinking of a monthly fee. After all, while the Monaco skin is very pretty and many people are used to it, it’s not required for any site in order for the site to be a wiki. 🙂 It’s more of a luxury thing. Of course we’d love if many people would buy premium features; that way the server funding costs can be covered quite easily without disrupting the service (for example, by adding more ads — no-one wants those!).

Jack,
Have you considered CAPTCHA’s and a “flag this post as inappropriate” instead of moderation?

The more freedom editors have to post, the more active editors you will have, and the more questions will be asked and answered 🙂

Just a thought.

Hey my post showed up right away this time. I was also going to suggest, if you don’t use the CAPTCHA idea, a message that the message has been received and is being moderated.

thank you misza.

This announcement has received A LOT of excitement. As we let wikias know that Monaco is available, more wikias transfer here, the three top questions will probably be:

1. What specific date will Monaco be available?
2. How much a month after the six months?
3. Will all of the Monaco extensions be available, specifically the blog, forum and poll extensions.

An important point to emphasize, which I am sure you all know. The longer this is postponed, the more editors will get used to the new wikia skin they are using, and the less wikias will transfer here.

I agree fully with Anno. People really loved blogs over at wikia, when they move here they’d probably want to have them. Some wikis heavily use forums as well, like the Borderlands Wiki, half of it is item trading forums. The fee they’d need to know soon, so they’d know if they could stay long term. And the specific date, if there isn’t an exact one you’ve got, then knowing for sure what MONTH it will be out would be good too. Hope this helps.

Well, I guess we’re out. I mean, we at Sonic fanon are DESPERATE to get Monaco, and our site is falling apart at the seems, but even then we’re not willing to pay for Monaco. If you made it a free option, we might move here temporarilly. But just like us trying to save Monaco on Wikia, such a request is pointless. So good luck to any who can afford it.

Just to mention, I would very very strongly consider moving wikis here if Monaco were available for free, indefinitely. You could add all the ads you like, with a monthly paid package available to remove them. However, if the monthly fee for Monaco is mandatory, it’s not going to happen.

@Cepheus: I’m sorry to hear that you’re not moving to ShoutWiki unless we make Monaco free indefinitely. I’m afraid that that’s not going to happen, at least not in the forseeable future. The sad fact of life is that everything costs &mash; food, electricity, servers, developer hours and so on. Hosting many wikis for free isn’t cheap, and thus we need to make money to pay our bills. We believe that having some fancier, unique features (stuff that you can live without) available upon payment is a lot fairer than plastering (content) pages with ugly, obtrusive ads. It seems that this is not just the opinion of our staff, but also the opinion of our users.

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