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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#211

Post by ARandumGuy »

teddyh wrote: post #190
ARandumGuy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clearly enough of an impact for Google to spend effort killing uBlock on Chrome, and (attempting) to block it on Youtube. Obviously Google is huge, and even a small percentage of users is still a lot of money on the table.

We can only draw the obvious conclusion: Namely that Google plans to introduce a lot more ads once they have an iron grip on the consumer. If Google did that before Google destroyed ad blockers, regular people would indeed start to use ad blockers.

That's possible, but I think it's premature to think this is part of some grand plan. What likely happened is that Google estimated the cost to fund a team to shut down ad blockers was less then the money they were losing from ad blockers. Maybe it's part of a larger initiative, but I'd be hesitant to assume that without more evidence.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#212

Post by fwip »

theamk wrote: post #140
Dwedit wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cloudflare dropped captchas back in 2022 [0], now it's just a checkbox that you check and it lets you it (or does not). And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this: I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare; but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas wh…

The checkboxes are also captchas.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#214

Post by jabroni_salad »

thih9 wrote: post #170
vman81 wrote: post #148

Hey, as long as they don't have those dark pattern cookie consent forms, I'm a happy camper. The EU should really have specified that accept all/decline all should be a top level choice instead of "Accept all" with the alternative being "learn more" leading to submenus for every one of the 891 "partners".

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...

what is required is not the same as what happens in practice. Visit any wiki.gg site and see what they're doing.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#215

Post by fwip »

Arch-TK wrote: post #166
citricsquid wrote: post #38

As the person ultimately responsible for the Minecraft Wiki ending up in the hands of Fandom, it is great to see what Weird Gloop (and similar) are achieving. At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run and so it didn't feel too much like selling out, because we needed money to survive[1]. 15 years later, the internet is a different place, and…

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.

"Kid" doesn't really have a hard cutoff. When you're 15, 12-year-olds are kids. When you're 30, 20-year-olds are kids.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#216

Post by tempest_ »

jchw wrote: post #103
citricsquid wrote: post #38

As the person ultimately responsible for the Minecraft Wiki ending up in the hands of Fandom, it is great to see what Weird Gloop (and similar) are achieving. At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run and so it didn't feel too much like selling out, because we needed money to survive[1]. 15 years later, the internet is a different place, and…

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…

Have any of Intels server offerings been "premium" since epyc hit the scene?

I just assumed they were still there based on momentum.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#217

Post by palunon »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #158
whstl wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least they moved away from Google Captchas, which really hates disabling of 3rd party cookies and other privacy-protection measures. I haven't had a problem with Cloudflare and their new Captcha system since their changed, but I still suffer whenever I see another website using Google Captcha :(

Ironically its now easier for robots to solve Google Captchas than it is for humans, as evident by the browser extensions that solve them that exists.

AFAIK most of those just pay a human in a low income country.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#218

Post by robertlagrant »

diggan wrote: post #144
pjc50 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!

> Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option. Otherwise, if you like the experience of not paying per GB/TB, go for a dedicated server with unmetered connection that has the same price every month, regardless.

It's more like: if you have a website that (sometimes) gets a lot of traffic, do you want Cloudflare to cache it and serve it with very few hits to your cheap server, or do you want your compute costs to expand to cope with the requests?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#219

Post by SoftTalker »

madeofpalk wrote: post #176
diggan wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not. Unless explicitly structured to prevent it, my bet is it will. If it's backed by a for-profit entity, it'll eventually need to turn a profit somehow, and users/visitors are the first to lose their experience at that point. However, if Weird Gloop is a properly registered non-profit with shared ownership between multiple individuals, I'll be much more lik…

Can we flip it? Some companies are explicitly structured to guarantee enshittification. Venture capital/private equity is what causes this. We've been poisoned to believe that websites should exist purely to achieve hyperscale and extract as much money as possible. When you look at the real physical world there are tons of small "mom and pop" businesses that are content with being self sustainable without some specia…

There are millions of websites like that. They don't show up on the first page of search results, so nobody finds them.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#220

Post by nemothekid »

tredre3 wrote: post #201
misode wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mediawiki software is not a static webpage

Mediawiki is trivial to cache, though. For all intent and purposes most hits will be cache hits, and thus "static" content. I'm also shocked at the tens of thousands per month, it can't possibly be hosting alone. It has to be that the maintainer had a generous salary or something.

Seriously? How does that even make sense to you? The OP had an asset generation 10k+ a month in profit and was so squeezed for cash he had to sell it.

Doesn’t it make more sense that a media have site would have been paying through the nose for bandwidth, hence the callout for cloudflare which would have made that cost free?

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