Uncyclopedia:How Zana Dark ruined the site and why it will never get better

Hundreds of thousands of wiki pages load bloated Zana Dark templates, it's no wonder I feel such a tense, ominous presence whenever I'm on this site! Like some sort of oily tentacle has found its grasp around my throat, oozing slime which smells of necrotic rot...

Zana Dark has irreversibly and irrevocably ruined Uncyclopedia with her shitty templates, and it will never get any better. Let me explain:

Shitty templates

There are two ways to fix a template on Uncyclopedia, or any wiki in general. You either:

1. Meticulously edit the template to make sure it's backwards compatible with all the pages it's being used on, or

2. Make a new template and then painstakingly edit every page it's on to use the new one

However, disgraced former admin Zana Dark has revolutionized a new way of editing templates, which degrades the site's performance, obfuscates basic site functions, and destroys any chance of understanding how any of the templates work:

3. Haphazardly delete the old template and all the subpages and dependencies to make them unrecoverable via a simple revert, and then just slap your own shitty template on like 5 pages and call it a day, OR

4. Go through every high traffic template and then edit them to use your own suite of templates, which are indecipherable garbage piles of spaghetti code with no documentation

Unintuitive template naming

Zana had given her templates one-letter names like Template:A or Template:I, using numerous subpages like Template:A/SS and Template:A/R. It's already a challenge trying to navigate the complicated web of Uncyclopedia templates, but it's one thing trying to decipher the good faith efforts of many editors trying to come together (or just haphazardly importing Wikipedia templates), and it's another thing entirely having to bear the weight of intentional and egotistical obscurantism.

None of the names are intuitive, many of them are a maze of confusing redirects, and the only way to supposedly learn how to use Zana's templates is to attend Zana's bewilderingly named "Aunt Jemima's Templating Academy". It provides no actual templating instruction, but is simply a jumbled assortment of her garbage templates followed by obfuscatory markup presented with no context.

Poorly optimized garbage

Zana's shitty templates also significantly slow down the site. For example Template:X is just a template full of colors, which just so happens to be transcluded in tens of thousands of pages, since she makes every page use Template:X in lieu of just specifying the color. So instead of just loading the markup text hexcode for a color, each and every page with that template loads tens of thousands of kilobytes of useless garbage. About 50,000 Uncyclopedia pages are loading an extra 60Kb of unneeded markup, leading to increased server lag and load time. Obviously, you don't need to load a 60kb list of every color imaginable if you want to make a text box blue!

The sheer extent of the damage to the site is horrifying. Tens of thousands of pages are all using these shitty, data hogging templates that are completely unneeded. Quite frankly, it's evil. The fact that someone would spend thousands of hours making the site worse, less functioning, slower, and uglier feels more like a sign of malintent than simple stupidity.

The icing on the cake is that all of her shitty, rotten, broken, deprecated 1997-style coded templates all talk about being "mobile friendly" in the documentation, when none of them are! She's a moron! A complete ignoramus, and it's infuriating how she deletes perfectly usable templates and then declares them "deprecated" because she didn't shit them out. For example, it seems on a number of pages, Zana had also replaced the standard [[File:Image.jpg|thumb]] syntax with her own custom template Template:A/I. I'm sure if she weren't already banned, we'd all be forced to use Zana links instead of the built-in MediaWiki markup!

Another example of this practice is how she unnecessarily switched all the templates from using the Wikipedia imported Template:Ambox and Template:Mbox to Template:AmBox (camel-casing in template namespace like a dipshit) and Template:OmBox, which are all worse, and completely unintuitive. It's textbook narcissism, to change things merely because you want to "make your mark" or "feel important."

When you join a community project, you must subsume your ego to the goals of the site, but all of her navigational templates are so shittily coded and garishly designed that they are more akin to vandalism than anything. If you don't know what you're doing just use Template:Navbox!

Shitty Design

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3, the text reads, "I ain't Ja Mama, I ain't ya Sistah, I ain't ya Grand Mammy neither! I am Aunt Jemima and I coined that 'ol SOB!! Fo shizzle my nizzle Snoop Dogg ain't got nuthin on me!"

Fig. 4

Perhaps her utter ineptness and idiocy could be excused if she had an eye for graphic design, one that could mesh well with Uncyclopedia's mission as a Wikipedia parody. However, this could not be further from the truth: Zana Dark is by far the worst "graphic web designer" in the history of web development (see figures 1 through 4 for reference). She makes Gene Ray look like Michelangelo!

If you look through the templates she's edited, you'll see a consistent pattern of making templates more difficult to edit and worse to look at. They are dogshit. All that effort she's putting into making the site visibly worse, it's like a slow motion train wreck.

Main page idiocy

I'll give you another example of her insipidness, something that can shed some light on her complete and utter lack of competency and good sense. On June 2021, Zana Dark, without consulting any other site admins or the rest of the community, unilaterally decided to fuck up the main page. She was upset that main page sections weren't separated into columns. If she had looked at the CSS with inspect element she would've see a media query to collapse the columns into one column given a certain browser window size:

 @media screen and (max-width: 1024px) {
     .mp-topbanner {
         flex-direction: column;
         align-items: center;
     }
     .mp-row {
         flex-direction: column;
     }
     .mp-row > .mp-panel:nth-child(1) {
         margin-right: 0;
     }
 }

Of course, she had no idea how the CSS worked, having no clue where the stylesheet was, so she added some retrograde CSS to add columns, instead of simply lowering the max-width. The rest of her edits were her trying to fix the mess she made when needlessly adding her janky markup. And she added tables. Tables! I'm no webdev, but I know that using tables to layout website elements hasn't been acceptable since 2003. It's horrifying, it feels like a literal corrupting force, a snake has coiled itself around the site. It's evil. It's satanic.

It Will Never Get Better

To meticulously undo all the work Zana has done would take hours of manually reverting thousands of templates to their pre-Zana versions. Her edits have wormed their way all over the site's most important templates, and major parts of the site now rely on her shitty templates to function. At this point, the tumor is inoperable, as there are approximately five or so active users, none of whom know how the fucking templates on this site work! To simply rollback all her edits would no-doubt create large dependency problems within the site, since much of the site's previously functional templates have been replaced by her incompetently made off-brand copies, and reverting the site to before she began her work would be impractical, and a major inconvenience to users.

It was one thing when the templates on the site were built through the honest work of inept amateurs doing their best, there was a charm to their good-faith efforts which made the site feel homely and special. Now, major portions of the site are being sustained by the malfeasance of someone whom I consider to be the avatar of some corpulent, libidinous demon!