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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#441

Post by account42 »

Svip wrote: post #432
stavros wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of costs are associated with something like this, and what sort of visitors are you getting? I'm wondering what kind of infrastructure you need.

Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours. Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence…

4 requests per second is absolutely something even a cheap VPS should be able to handle, even if you double that for peak load. You just need to put caching in front of everything dynamic.

Disappointing for people just carelessly giving Buttflare the keys to the kingdom and effectively excluding alternative Browser users without considering other options.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#442

Post by account42 »

echelon wrote: post #336
Svip wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Their growth people emailed me again and again and tried to do the same with StrategyWiki decades ago. Here's one of their emails: > [Redacted] mentioned that your site was very cool - and that you're heading off to college. As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame) and we are trying to become THE resource for all gamers > I was wondering if you'd consider moving over to wikia now that you'…

> As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame)

And Jimmy should be ashamed about being involved with Fandom/Wikia. Then again, he's also not ashamed about begging from third-world people and others much less well off as himself.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#443

Post by account42 »

bawolff wrote: post #309
tredre3 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not everyone is a professional web hoster with requisite knowledge on how to setup caching properly. Mediawiki involves edits that users expect to propagate instantly to other pages. Sometimes this can easilt result in cache stampedes if not setup carefully. MediaWiki supports extensions. Some of the less well architectured extensions add dynamic content that totally destroies cachability.

Everyone is better off learning how to setup caching properly than continue to pay tens of thousands dollars per month. It's not rocket science.

> Mediawiki involves edits that users expect to propagate instantly to other pages. Sometimes this can easilt result in cache stampedes if not setup carefully.

Most users should not even be hitting MediaWiki. It's ok to show cache entries that are a couple of seconds or even minutes out of date for logged out users.

> MediaWiki supports extensions. Some of the less well architectured extensions add dynamic content that totally destroies cachability.

Again, nothing reasonably needs to update all that often.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#444

Post by stavros »

Svip wrote: post #432
stavros wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of costs are associated with something like this, and what sort of visitors are you getting? I'm wondering what kind of infrastructure you need.

Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours. Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence…

Ah OK, that's basically exactly the setup I'd use as well. Surprising that the server alone couldn't handle the traffic, as the sibling says, 4 rps isn't that much when you cache (cache hits are basically free).

I imagine 90% of the traffic (or more) is anonymous users, which can be cached, doesn't Varnish handle that without breaking a sweat?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#445

Post by jampekka »

thih9 wrote: post #371
jampekka wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law is not enforced. The non-enforcement is largely by design/lobby though.

This law hasn't been enforced here but it's not like it has never been enforced; major websites like Google, Facebook and others were forced to add "reject all": https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/21/23035289/google-reject-al...

It took EU enforcement eight years to enforce obvious violations of the law for a few companies. The illegal nags are still rampant.

And e.g. Meta (and many newspapers) already has a new obviously illegal tracking scheme with the "pay to not track".

The intended effect of GDPR would have been easily gotten with legally binding do-not-track and similar automated means. Very few people want to be tracked, but most of them are against their true consent.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#448

Post by mrweasel »

zoeysmithe wrote: post #92
burkaman wrote: post #25

If you're wondering what happened to Fandom, just look at who runs it now. > In February 2018, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, backed by private equity firm TPG Capital, acquired Fandom. > In February 2019, former StubHub CEO Perkins Miller took over as CEO - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) It's hard to imagine a worse leadership team than private equity + StubHub.

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 a…

> These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do

I'm sort of without, in the sense that they are for profit, so the CEO is going to attempt to increase profit. The problem arise when short-term profit is priorities over all else. I don't see the point in trying to have a record year, in terms of profit, if that means that customers/users are leaving your business long term.

Part of it might be the whole misguided SV startup mentality where we burn a ton of money and then sort of hope that profit will appear when volume is reached. Imgur is a pretty good example, not once did the founder stop to think about why all their competitors sucked. In the long run Imgur was forced down the same dark path because the idea is, and always was, going to be unprofitable.

I don't think Fandom is unprofitable necessarily. They have a lot of original content, written by unpaid users, and which has been increasing in popularity. The problem is how profitable they need to be vs. how profitable they want to be. They don't need to be a billion dollar company, there's nothing wrong with being a 100 million dollar company, or how much they are able to sustain without pushing users away. They just have to not lose money.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#449

Post by diggan »

pjc50 wrote: post #438
diggan wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option. The free plan is a lot bigger than you think. > dedicated server with unmetered connection And where have you found one of those with reasonable pricing?

Hetzner is pretty cheap, but only offers Europe location for their dedicated servers last time I checked. For more locations, DataPacket is nice, although a bit more expensive.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#450

Post by diggan »

robertlagrant wrote: post #218
diggan wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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?

Usually you have something like a platform/tool/service that is mostly static requests that could be cached, with some dynamic requests that couldn't, as they're CRUD requests or similar.

If your struggling to serve static content, then do go ahead and slap Cloudflare on top of that bad boy and probably your visitors will be a bit happier, instead of upgrading from a cheap VPS.

If you're struggling to serve the dynamic requests, Cloudflare/CDN won't matter because these things actually need to be processed by your backend.

So instead of trying to shave 50ms off from my simple static requests with a CDN, I'd much happier to optimize for all the requests, including the "dynamic requests" that need to hit the backend anyway.

I'll still go for a dedicated server with proper connection and performance rather than a shitty cheap VPS with a CDN in front off it.

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