Forum:Adopting a site feature policy

With forced extensions that the community clearly doesn't want, courtesy of Wikia, being a hot topic recently, I feel we should consider adopting a site feature policy, based upon the Wookieepedia equivalent.

Basically this policy will just state that unless a new feature or extension is part of a MediaWiki update, and that means not forced in by Wikia either as part of or separate from a MediaWiki update, the feature will be disabled by default until a forum thread is passed to allow for the feature to be enabled here.

My motive for even proposing such a thing is that I, as well as others, am tired of having worthless extensions shoved down our throats with no regard to how we as a community feel about them. I'm also sick of having to manually disable what we don't want that Wikia won't remove and I'm even more dismayed about how their TOS supposedly states that we're not allowed to disable extensions that we've decided we don't want, and making them optional via gadgets isn't an option because Wikia broke the CSS module both for that and in general (but that's a different issue entirely). No this thread certainly isn't "all about me" but I'm tired of having to deal with this and I know I'm not the only one.

Yes it can be considered a bold move to even discuss this but the truth is some wikis have managed to avoid forced extensions and if we just sit back and let this continue then we'll just keep on reinventing the wheel. I feel adopting this policy would be both a bold yet beneficial step in this and it would give us something to point at should Wikia try to force something upon us much to our chagrin. If other wikis have managed to stand up and get their voice heard, what reason is there that we shouldn't at least try?

So do we want this policy? 01:12, July 3, 2014 (UTC)