User blog comment:Roads/Move?/@comment-20644-20120314173241

Hi all. Sorry to hear you’re discussing moving from Wikia. I wanted to clarify a few things for you before this discussion moved too far forward, that way there are no misconceptions. The first thing I wanted to clarify is the age restriction in the Terms of Use. This restriction is in line with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which is a United States federal law that’s been in effect since 2000. This law dictates that we cannot collect private information from individuals under the age of 13. Because we collect information like e-mail addresses (and even a username could be considered private information), we have to follow that requirement. Wikia is an American company based in the state of California, so all relevant state and federal laws apply to Wikia.

The only way we could allow individuals under the age of 13 to join would be to do something like asking their parents to send us a copy of their driver’s license or a credit card number, for every single account that person wants to make. You can imagine what a nightmare that would be to support and maintain! This is why other sites, like Facebook, also have an age requirement.

In addition to all of that, it’s important to note that if you do leave, what you’ll be doing is creating a copy of this wiki elsewhere. The Wikia version here will remain open for anyone who chooses to continue editing here, and for any future contributors. We expect that those who do leave respect that.

All that said, I do hope you choose to remain here, and I do want to make you aware of some of the downsides to forking from Wikia. You’ll be creating a duplicate wiki, thus splitting the editing efforts and the traffic. You’re likely to see a large impact on traffic, because Wikia SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Wikia’s reputation as a large site with lots of good information makes a big difference in search results. You’ll also lose Wikia’s stability, as well as the support we are able to offer.

On that note, we are willing to listen to what’s wrong and see if we can help so you don’t have to fork. As in, is there any support we can offer you or any help that you need? I’ll preempt any possible questions about this by saying that we can’t disable things like the e-mail address requirement, we can’t offer Monobook as the default skin, and we can’t change the age requirements of the Terms of Use, but we can see if we can find other ways to help make your experience at Wikia the best it can possibly be.

I hope to hear back from you on this. Feel free to reply here or on my talk page here on the wiki. Thanks!