I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years.

Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.

I remember reading the Minecraft wiki back in the early 2010s, back when Fandom was still Wikia. It would have been much more appealing at the time than it is today - not just for the reasons you list, but because Wikia actually kicked ass in the early 2010s. It was sleek, modern, and easy to use. And today, it isn't.

Thanks(seriously). Fandom may not be great, but you could have said I don't want to foot the bill, turned off the servers and walked away. Then the community would have lost every thing. Leaving it with Fandom gave Weird Gloop something to start with instead starting from scratch.

Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for attempting to read a web page.

You and your team made(a good portion of) my childhood. I remember spending nights studying all the potion recipes and enchantment odds. Thanks for all you did

One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.

For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error.

It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.

One of the things on my todo list is to spend some solid time thinking about load-shedding, and in particular tools and methods for small or hobbyist projects to practice it. Like what do you turn off on the site when it's the 15th of the month and you're already at 80% of your SaaS budget?

Like maybe if a request for an image doesn't result in a 304, instead of sending a 200 response you redirect to lower res versions, or just 429 out. How much throttling do you do? And do you let bots still run full speed for SEO reasons or do you do something else there?

> with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective.

sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?

Hey Criticsquid!~ \(￣︶￣*\)) It's Azxiana[1].

I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them.

[1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

In all fairness, running modest to large MediaWiki instances isn't easy. There's a lot of things that are not immediately obvious:

- For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out.

- You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation.

- Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages.

Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on.

The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs.

If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money.

One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic...

At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...

> At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run.

What kind of decisions got you in that position? Hard to phatom.

You say you were a kid when you sold it. I could have sworn you weren't from conversations we had on IRC at the time.

Although I most assuredly was a kid.

holy crap that minecraft wiki is fast now. I actually stopped going to fandom because it was so slow.

Tens of thousands to run a static webpage? LUL

I have seen cookmeplox, one of the admins of the Runescape wiki, round these parts. Thank you for your work, as a gamer and new Runescape addict. For an MMORPG as massive as OSRS, having a good wiki is crucial and probably the reason why it's seen a resurgence over the past few years.

Factorio and Rimworld have amazing wikis as well. And they're both maintained by the developers AFAIK...

> I can only assume that’s a testament to the quality of mediawiki.

I was curious about this so I poked around both and I think I disagree. Both load very fast for me and are snappy and look pretty nice. The one difference is that the Runescape wiki has a single ad in the sidebar or at the bottom, below the content footer. While the Fandom wikis have 3+ ads, far larger, one of which covers content until interacted with (like being closed). For me, Fandom's ad approach absolutely falls within "offensively bad," while the Runescape ad approach reminds me of early 2000s, "here's an ad to pay the bills. We've tried to keep it well out of your way."

So I'd opine that it has less to do with the quality of mediawiki, and more about how much money both Wiki hosts are seeking to gain from the existence of these resources.

Fandom PoE still pollutes the top of Google searches :(

And we just launched the wiki for PoE2 which GGG are hosting for the community.

It's usually due to incentives and the time horizon you're optimizing for. If a manager is tasked with maximizing revenue over the next 12 months no matter what, then increasing the ad load is a lever you are probably going to pull.

If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc).

The reality is that some businesses shouldn't take VC money and shouldn't get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.

It's the classic question of "how much of our brand did we sell to achieve this bump in revenue?".

Selling your brand is a very real thing, and I wish more people would take it into account. Brand health correlates with long term health.

I’ve wondered about this wrt public transportation. They keep raising prices, making it less affordable for people. Eventually basically no one is riding, so they … raise prices.

It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I’d like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more money.

I think the technical term is enshittification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

I didn't think I could Fandom being worse than it already is, but imagining it stuffed with AI-generated slop...

Former Wikia engineer here too! I also thought there was a lot of potential there. We even invested in some RDF and structured data and NLP projects (second screen, sentiment analysis on comments for detecting flame wars, etc), but for various reasons they just didn't work out beyond hackathons and demos. I think there were a lot of well meaning engineers who wanted to make stuff like that work. Part of the problem is mediawiki itself. A page is literally just text using an awful hacked together xml parser and some regexes to emit HTML. It might look like a database sometimes when it is rendered (and there is Wikidata) but there is no actual structure to it, just a pile of templates made of other templates that people have to tediously wrangle by hand. That it eventually turns into some HTML that you can view is almost an accident.

A data moat of user provided wiki contents? The thing that this article is advocating for the users themselves to own over the hosting site??

Somehow I don't think that is the solution.

Former Gamepedia/Wikia/Fandom engineer, I left not too long after Fandom bought out Gamepedia/Curse. You left at a good time. The upper management had no idea what they were doing and were entirely disinterested in the company. Talking with the CEO felt like talking with someone that had no idea what they were doing there.

I assume that Fandom pays Google for that placement

> However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?

Yes, per this post:

> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.

...

> If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi[1]

1: https://weirdgloop.org/contact

Valve is in a unique position. Private company which makes infinite cash from their store. Plenty of freedom for little community outlays which can be impossible to approve when you have to justify finance numbers to the street.

That's what seems to be happening here. Riot games paid for the wiki to be moved from fandom and hosted by weird glop but governance seems unchanged.

Yes, despite the poewiki migration being a fairly long time ago now, the fandom wiki still ranks frustratingly highly. The data on it is of course now very outdated and causes confusion for new players.

I wonder how much the effect of lots of people having a redirect extension has. If google sees people click on the fandom result and not come back, do they treat it as a good result when in reality people are redirecting to poewiki via the extension?

The situation improves every league, particularly since now there are quite a lot of items, skill gems or skill tree node passives/notables missing from the fandom wiki. It's much better than in the past when you could outright search "<skill> poewiki" and not have the poewiki result anywhere.

But it still feels like there's a long way to go, and it's a shame because it further increases the knowledge gap between experienced players who might know to seek out the poewiki, and new players (or very casual players) who might not.

It hints also at the power of the "old web" and it's historic power over google rankings.

Making MediaWiki survive non-trivial amounts of traffic is much harder than simply setting it up. It's not an impossible task for sure but there's no one click performance setting.

oop, my bad. it got oomkilled somehow - should be back up now :3

original post is at https://j3s.sh/thought/stop-using-fandom.html

Thanks, I had the same problem.

Yeah, the site is down (502 status)

To they can. See the Minecraft wiki for example: https://minecraft.wiki

From the article

> (hint: it’s all about the domain). If we ever start going down the same path as Fandom, everyone can just leave! I would love to see other wiki platforms start to do this, because I think it’s the only way you really solve the problem.

So yes, the wikis have their own domains for this exact reason.

Currently, every wiki they host is on its own domain (besides the meta one)

Just a week or two ago my chrome plugins got temporarily disabled for some reason, and I didn't notice for a day or two... until I happened to check a fandom wiki. Then for about five seconds I thought I'd somehow installed All The Viruses.

And ironically, I already hated fandom before I'd seen it without an ad blocker! Just for the large sidebars and ugly flyouts and whatnot. It really feels like a contender for worst site on the internet.

It's not even accurate at times. I think a lot of the dedicated fans have given up on it. I've seen several that have chunks of straight wrong information.

Usually it's stuff where the fan seems to have picked up on something implied in a story, but missed where it is clearly stated that isn't the case ... but then they go and write on fandom and make lots of assumptions from there and fill in other gaps with guesses.

Fandom is perfectly usable with adblockers and the "Cleaner Fandom" userscript. But only with those extensions!

I have blocked the domain on my browser; this helps with mindless clicking on fandom sites appearing on top of Google searches while the communities have moved on to other wikis.

agreed. the good thing is, it teaches a new generation why adblockers are great.

What are these 'ads' of which you speak?

In a nutshell

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page

vs

https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki

(Though UESP has had banner ads for a while now)

laughs in ublock origin

The "fan" in "Fandom" means the fan in your computer.

I skimmed the post linked at [^1], but I have a doubt about that:

> Fandom is actually part of the for-profit arm of Wikipedia

Are you sure about this? Since Fandom got acquired by private equity in 2018, I don't think Wikipedia has any stake in Fandom anymore

That is already the case:

> The GDPR is specific that consent must be as 'easy to withdraw as to give', meaning that a reject-all button must be as easy to access in terms of clicks and visibility as an 'accept all' button.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#EU_cookie_directiv...

Jimmy Wales lost my respect with Wikia itself, even before it was acquired.

There was a huge push in Wikipedia in the 2010s to delete content that could be moved into Wikia/Fandom, and a huge amount of quality information was removed. It was clear the goal was to pump views in the money-making website.

Then we only saw Wikia becoming Fandom and getting progressively worse.

Jimbo is a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, and as such I find it unsurprising that he has created both a wonderful, decentralized, communitarian project as well as a capitalistic nightmare. Libertarians are essentially anarchists who selectively turn their brains off when they see dollar signs.

Whenever my phone accidentally opens fandom with Chrome rather than Firefox mobile (with uBO), I wonder how the hell anybody browses the internet on their phone without an ad blocker...

It gets a lot better with an ad blocker and other annoyance-blockers. The deeper question is whether or not you think it’s worth it. I think many people visit Fandom pages only briefly from a SERP and then take off, like Wikipedia but specific to a game. If that’s the way you use Fandom then it’s probably not worth it.

What makes it worth it is if there’s a page specific to a game you like and you spend a good amount of time there reading stuff. That’s a long tail thing though.

Most of the time I don't notice it because I use Firefox w/ uB0 on all platforms. But recently I've been playing some games on Steam and trying to use Steam's browser overlay to cache some guides. Its browser seems to be a chrome fork and does not support any kind of adblocker, unfortunately, and so I've been exposed to just how bad Fandom wikis are without one.

That's just par for the course for any online service these days, though. It's not like Netflix, Hulu Spotify are keeping their prices flat.

Also, the site is really slow. The only thing that the site manages to turn on is the computer fans.

The reason behind Fandom buying Gamepedia/Curse is both a blessing and a curse(HAH!) that would require a specific set of circumstances to happen again.[1]

Basically during 2018 Curse's owners, Twitch and Amazon, wanted more head count for Twitch and to cut out anything that was not part of Twitch's main mission. The decision at the time from the Twitch CEO was to completely shut down Curse and fire everyone by the end of 2018 even though Curse was a cash positive subsidiary. That would mean turning off every single wiki with no transfer to anywhere else. It would all just be gone.

So the director of Curse at the time worked his ass off find a buyer for the company. The final options came down to The Verge, Wikia, and one other that I forgot. Essentially Wikia was the only one that could promise to meet all of the buyout terms and a two year transition period of employee benefits for current employees.

I'm not going to call Wikia a savior here, but without any company offering to buy Curse a lot of wikis and jobs may have been lost that December.

[1]I signed some NDA about this, but it has been many years and I don't care.

With Weird Gloop they have agreements that the community can move the wiki away from Weird Gloop if that happens. For example this one is not legally binding yet, but once the minecraft wiki had a legal entity it will be: https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...

If they're non-tracking ads (related to the content of the wiki, instead of the content of the visitor), I could almost like them.

There's also a channel on the rs wiki's discord for reporting bad ads, which Cook responds to very quickly (single digit minutes from the interactions I've seen).

> But how did Vim get in a Fandom in the first place?

It was created back when Fandom was Wikia, back when it was a good place to host a wiki

Check out BreezeWiki (https://breezewiki.com/). It lets you view any fandom wiki with a much better UI. The Indie Wiki Buddy extension also lets you automatically redirect fandom to BreezeWiki (https://getindie.wiki/)

There's a recent rough breakdown of costs and funding in [1]. In short, most funding is from ads. I don't think that takes into account funding for the newer Minecraft or LoL wikis, but it'll either be funded by ads or the game devs.

[1]: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-03-...

Given that Jimmy Wales is president of Fandom, I don't know if that's a good idea for WMF to get involved.

There are advertisers who specifically want to reach fans (gamers, tv/movie fans, etc), the name change was to make that ad sale conversation stronger: https://about.fandom.com/mediakit

It’s particularly dumb given it was literally entering the lexicon as a generic term in a lot of instances.

There have been several competitors formed in response to or predating Wikia/Fandom over the years, particularly Gamepedia/Curse Media (which Fandom acquired). Fandom also acquired other game-focused community knowledge resources, like GameFAQs and Giant Bomb.

There's also now wiki.gg, which focuses on official wikis run by game developers and was launched after the Gamepedia acquisition by Gamepedia's founder and a former Fandom president. Several wikis are on independent MediaWiki farms like Miraheze or ShoutWiki, and numerous others self-host entirely independently.

This Weird Gloop effort seems to be more like wiki.gg, but for community-run wikis rather than gamedev-run wikis — bespoke relationships with communities that want to migrate or relaunch, rather than open sign-ups to a platform like Miraheze or ShoutWiki.

That would be Miraheze [1]. Community funded wiki farm. However it's had some instability such as internal conflict and server issues, but it's better than all the alternatives.

[1]: https://miraheze.org/

Does anyone know of an iOS Safari extension that allows to freely configure such substitutions?

> but having a site which changes a lot but is still static can cost a arm and leg

How so? Seems like it would be trivial in PHP

Literally the second sentence of the article:

> We’ve spent the last couple months working with the Riot folks and the League wiki editors to move it off of Fandom

There is a browser extension called Indie Wiki Buddy that keeps track of who the best wiki for each game is. And for the ones that do insist on using fandom, it can redirect to breezewiki which is a lite and respectful rehoster.

https://getindie.wiki/

I'd say if you cannot tell what its hosted at, its "good". If it shouts "fandom" in your face, its "bad". Easy!

I mean.. you can use your eyes to tell if it's a good wiki or not.

Thanks! I've been meaning to write up a post that talks about some of the specific tricks we're using. A couple big ones:

- Heavy use of Cloudflare Workers to cache ~95% of logged-out pageviews, with a particular focus on doing a lot of edge-side modifications to minimize cache fragmentation

- Using the MediaWiki jobrunners to repopulate the parser cache before pageviews are requested, so even when pageviews hit the server, there's a high chance that the core contents have already been computed somewhere

- I realized that MediaWiki latency is usually dominated by I/O wait time. For example, some pageviews require thousands of synchronous database/redis cache reads, so the difference between 0.5ms lookup and 0.1ms lookup adds up. So we colocated more of those caches on the same physical machines as the webservers that were reading them, which on average dropped latency by ~40%

Do it. The costs shouldn't be borne by a single entity, they should be spread across the community of users. Onboarding and lag are two big hurdles to overcome, as you will inevitably have to put editing behind a transaction.

I think with Fandom similar with Reddit, or Twitch, most people focus on the interface experience as sole advantage of the platform, and miss how they provide an accessible space to incubate new communities. You get low barrier to entry hosting, operation tools, and network exposure.

If there actuallt exists a community, they can scare up somebody to host some infrastructure the community depends on. Otherwise the community is dead, and it’s archive.org you should be thanking.

WeirdGloop is supposedly profitable despite having only a single, non-intrusive banner ad. It's perfectly possible to run forums/wikis/etc. on even just the free tier of Cloudflare/Oracle OCI.

The issue is that Wikia/Fandom, Reddit, etc. subsumed most other alternatives by offering what was for a long time a legitimately convenient and decent-quality service, but now that communities are too locked in to move (due to intentional measures like changing forking policy, and the community having to fight against network effect/SEO) they enshittify to squeeze out profit. Result is a worse site than if Fandom/etc. had never existed.

Relatively optimistic about movement towards structures that resist this kind of exploitation.

Most of the platforms you mention are "replacements" which have "won" over a long term—Google unseated AltaVista and Yahoo!, Reddit outlived Digg and SlashDot, and microblogging like Twitter started as blogs. And of course, Fandom "replaced" other, less bad wiki farms by virtue of buying them.

Dont give them any ideas

You have named all the players. Maybe throw ShoutWiki in there, but I recently tried to create a wiki there and it wasn't working—YMMV. There's also NIWA, focused on Nintendo-related IP, but I believe that's more of a webring and doesn't manage hosting for their members.

Self hosting is also relatively uncomplicated.

Can we stop it with the "bad apples CEO" thing. These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do. They're not exceptions. Theyre the norm.

The reality is that ads and such are (probably) the only effective way to go and founders will sell to capital groups for profit. Over and over. Look at image hosting, which is a similar case. We went from ad laden tinypic's and such to ad-free imgur and now imgur is ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit.

We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.

fextralife has the exact same behavior as Fandom: autoplaying their Twitch streams to farm views and displaying ads, at times hiding it in invisible iframes, or making it so small you can't find it, leading to Twitch making rules against embedding autoplays, ads everywhere, shitty AI generated stubs for half the articles, botting and automatically piling on criticism, and fundamentally, it's just plain wrong, everywhere.

The initial Dark Souls wikidot was excellent. Fextralife bullied and threatened them into closing down. At this point, people don't move on because of habit, but the quality for the Elden Ring wiki is dramatically bad. Information is outdated, poorly maintained, actual fixes are being reverted by their own, paid editors, other wikis are suspiciously often the target of attacks and deleted content.

Every page has a live chat and video stream. The content tends to be better, but it's not mechanically much better than Fandom.

It also highlights an important difference between why wikis can be useful. If I want information about Elden Ring as a game, Fextralife is pretty good (with some ublock filters to kill the stupid chat), but it does that at the expense of information about Elden Ring as a fictional world. That's not usually why I'm looking up Elden Ring information, but it sometimes is.

It's not fresh in my memory, but I recall being extremely annoyed at the Elden Ring wiki around the release of the game; not for lack of being filled out, but the site was just not fun to use.

Truth be told, it appears that Weird Gloop/mediawiki has a bit of a monopoly on wiki platforms that don't suck.