271–280 of 503 posts
Fandom is one of my least favorite things now. The site ends up having more ads than the average porn or piracy website, it manages to slow down my relatively beefy laptops without even trying. I love the idea of fan wikis, but Fandom is basically the worst possible implementation of that idea.
Everyone complains about Fandom, but it's the only reason 99% of the communities on its site have a wiki. Take a random game like https://endlesslegend.fandom.com/wiki/Endless_Legend_Wiki That game is 10 years old and its wiki was built in the height of its popularity when it had people to build it. The developer moved on, the community moved on. If its wiki weren't on Fandom, then its wiki would depend on some rando…
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.
And archive.org is not a replacement for a website, not even a Fandom wiki. It's horrible to use and you're lucky if it indexes a quarter of what you want, especially on a property as big as a wiki. And it's read-only.
On Fandom I can still log in and make improvements.
Would be cool to know what extensions you’re using on MediaWiki and how you’ve set it up to maximize performance. These wikis seem really quick to respond.
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…
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Aw, I take that as it is in fact a for-profit company already. Regardless, I wish you luck for the future! May you not go down the almost inevitable enshittification hole.
At least it is a private company though, meaning they are are required to make constant year over year gains for shareholders and investors. They have much more control over where the company goes and how it operates.
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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…
> I think a lot of the dedicated fans have given up on it. I've seen several that have chunks of straight wrong information. It's a not-so-open secret that a lot of wikia wikis are not only vandalised but encouraged to be vandalised as to make people move off them.
Everyone complains about Fandom, but it's the only reason 99% of the communities on its site have a wiki. Take a random game like https://endlesslegend.fandom.com/wiki/Endless_Legend_Wiki That game is 10 years old and its wiki was built in the height of its popularity when it had people to build it. The developer moved on, the community moved on. If its wiki weren't on Fandom, then its wiki would depend on some rando…
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…
You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that. The problem is that there's rarely the will because it's a hobby endeavor for tiny communities, and until you last as long as the Fandom alternative would last, it wasn't even necessarily the right thing to do.
You can't just migrate and call it a day. You have to stick around for another decade so people can find that information long after you've lost interest in the game and fiddling with MediaWiki.
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At least it is a private company though, meaning they are are required to make constant year over year gains for shareholders and investors. They have much more control over where the company goes and how it operates.
Shouldn't it be worrying that companies are required to make consistent gains* for shareholders and investors? At some point, a company will naturally reach a market saturation point. * ETA: I meant "growth" here, not profit
Employees should buy out investors if they want to keep operating for their own personal profit.
Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that…