Merry Christmas from ShoutWiki staff!

Hi everyone,

it’s been busy here at ShoutWiki ever since we got our new server up and running. Now that it’s Christmas, it’s time for everyone of us, staff and users alike, to spend some time with their loved ones, eat well — and of course, open up their presents!
As a Christmas present from ShoutWiki staff to our awesome users, we’ve enabled the popular Monaco skin for all wikis! The skin will be freely available for all users on all wikis until 1 July 2011, after which it’ll be made an ordinary premium (paid) feature.

We’ve added a counter to the preferences page (Special:Preferences) on all wikis so that you can see when it is the last day when Monaco will be available for free. The counter message can be translated by editing the interface message MediaWiki:Shoutwiki-preferences-monaco-expirydate. After you’ve translated the message into your language, we’d appreciate if you’d contact us and allow us to add the translation to our Interface Messages Wiki so that other ShoutWiki sites with the same language can see the translated message instead of an untranslated, English version.

I’m very well aware of the fact that some people either cannot or aren’t willing to pay. While it’s unfortunate, it’s also how life (or at least business) works. If you want that can of Coca-Cola from the store, you have to pay for it so that the people who made it available for you are rewarded for their efforts.

However, as we wrote in early November, the Monaco skin will be free for 6 months.
Seeing that Christmas Eve approaches, we’re in the mood for some celebration as thus we’ve already enabled Monaco — that means you get to use Monaco for over a week before the countdown begins (on 1 January 2011). Why not use that time to design a cool theme or two? :–)

Currently, our Monaco has several different themes to choose from, which are:

• Sapphire — The “standard” white and blue Monaco.
• Beach — A theme using light blue and brown
• Brick — A theme using brown and darkred
• Carbon — This theme uses dark grey and black.
• Forest — A theme inspired by nature using, among others, different colors of green
• Gaming — This theme uses dark blue and yellow
• Jade — Using the normal white, but with green instead of blue.
• Moonlight — Using light and darker colors of blue, together with a star and moonlight background.
• Obsession — This theme uses colors such as black and dark red, giving this theme a darker look and feel.
• Pink — A nice, bright and pink theme.
• Ruby — Using white the normal white, but red instead of blue.
• Sky — Using the normal white for the content area, with light blue instead of blue and a light blue background.
• Slate — This theme uses light grey and yellow.
• Smoke — Using the normal white, with yellow instead of blue
• Spring — A theme using light green and light pink.

If you need any help in customizing the Monaco skin, feel free to contact our staff (via their talk pages, e-mail or by visiting the #ShoutWiki IRC channel). We have had to change a few CSS IDs so what worked in the past might not work on ShoutWiki as you’d expect.

On my own behalf, and on ShoutWiki’s behalf, I wish all of you a very merry Christmas and I want to thank you for using ShoutWiki!

Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team