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BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

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Re: BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

#31

Post by Dracophoenix »

immibis wrote: post #10
offbyone wrote: post #5

Self-hosting breezewiki -- even on the same machine that you browse from -- gets neatly around the way fandom wikis block the breezewiki public nodes. I've got it self-hosted and now I never see that damn fandom interface.

We need a browser or extension that does this stuff automatically in the browser, so it looks like a normal browser request. By "this stuff" I mean BreezeWiki, Invidious, Nitter, whatever that one for Reddit was called.

There's already an extension called LibRedirect that can do this.

Re: BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

#32

Post by cAtte_ »

Xelynega wrote: post #6

The minecraft wiki has moved off of fandom, fandom just overtakes it in SEO. Linking to the fandom wiki like you do on this site probably helps fandom more than you're hurting it. Just help wiki maintainers move to better platforms.

if you open any of the links for Minecraft, TARDIS, or Zelda, you'll see there's a gigantic banner placed by BreezeWiki that directs you to the new wikis. unless you mean that the links themselves are bad for SEO, which is unlikely

Re: BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

#33

Post by Jedd »

offbyone wrote: post #5

Self-hosting breezewiki -- even on the same machine that you browse from -- gets neatly around the way fandom wikis block the breezewiki public nodes. I've got it self-hosted and now I never see that damn fandom interface.

Sounds like an easy way to solve both problems. Does it cache the fandom site, pull it all down, or it's just a redirector / re-theming front-end and makes calls out to fandom for each page load?

I skimmed the docs looking for an architecture overview, but couldn't see an answer to this. The low resource requirements cited for the docker container install suggest it's just doing page-loads and re-rendering them.

EDIT: So I've now set this up as via docker on my nomad cluster, and it's just proxying the pages and searches to and fro. It's a bit heavy - sitting at about 410MB while idle, but doesn't feel like there's any performance impact compared to hitting upstream directly.

Re: BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

#34

Post by pabs3 »

labster wrote: post #12
jjmarr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.fandom.com/licensing > Except where otherwise permitted, the text on Fandom communities (known as “wikis”) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0 (Unported) (CC BY-SA). > To grow the commons of free knowledge and free culture, all users editing or otherwise contributing to wikis that use the CC BY-SA license agree to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-d…

Using any automation to copy from Fandom is prohibited, and they do not provide backups of images and other media. This means that any attempt to copy a wiki to another host is either a manual process that could take days of downloading, or violation of the computer abuse act and a federal crime. And then they won’t delete your wiki if the community asks for it. Fandom is hostile to forks.

ArchiveTeam have an automatic process to upload wikis to archive.org, and it works fine for Fandom hosts.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Wikibot

Re: BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

#36

Post by jchw »

I've been a hater of Wikia/Fandom for so long that it's been nice seeing people finally turn on them in a bigger way in the past few years. I've ran an independent wiki for a pretty long time, and it was amusing to watch the backlash grow over time, and see our humble little community get featured on Indie Wiki Buddy.

The very first wiki I remember garnering a lot of backlash was the Touhou Wiki, quite a long time ago. It was an amusing case because they decided to leave relatively soon after Wikia forced the ad-ridden theme on everyone, but Wikia decided they were too big to leave, banned the admins and appointed new ones. The community revolted and set the wiki on fire, eventually requiring admins to step in and roll back the vandalism.

Since then, they've just gone further and further mask-off regarding how they blatantly abuse their SEO position, extract money from user-generated content, and manipulate teenagers attracted to the perceived prestige of running "the" definitive wiki about some subject they're interested in. It's very depressing. I'm glad that wiki farms make it easy for people to run community wikis, but I'd rather everyone learn how to set up Mediawiki on crappy cPanel shared hosting again than have Fandom be the future. I think the company most responsible to kill them is Google, because their broken-ass search engine is the primary reason why Fandom works. I know that this is a hard problem to solve, but in my mind it's easy: start punishing large-scale SEO abusers like Pinterest and Fandom. It's five fucking years too late to start now, but that timer isn't resetting. Once you cut off their advantage over independent websites, and force each wiki to at least stand out on its own, it will definitely deal a fairly big blow to the machine they've built.

I'm sure it's been pointed out by others in the comments, but rather than BreezeWiki, you might want to consider Indie Wiki Buddy, which will redirect you to independently-ran wikis instead. (Or you could use both. Whatever floats your boat.)

https://getindie.wiki

Re: BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

#37

Post by labster »

gruez wrote: post #30
labster wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using any automation to copy from Fandom is prohibited, and they do not provide backups of images and other media. This means that any attempt to copy a wiki to another host is either a manual process that could take days of downloading, or violation of the computer abuse act and a federal crime. And then they won’t delete your wiki if the community asks for it. Fandom is hostile to forks.

> or violation of the computer abuse act and a federal crime. I thought the linkedin scraping case set the precedent that anonymous scraping was legal?

Maybe it is, I’m old and remember old stuff. Also the rules maybe apply differently under Trump, who knows.

Re: BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

#38

Post by techjamie »

duxup wrote: post #21
ninefoxgambit wrote: post #17

If I see a fandom wiki it’s an automatic won’t visit

Not that it matters even if you did ... on my phone the page is overtaken by ads that open more ads and it's unusable.

Back when I had an iPhone 6, visiting Fandom sites was completely unusable because it had ads that automatically spammed the app store open. I had to be fast just to close the tab or the app store would get forced open again, regardless of whether I did anything or not.

I needed the info on the wiki page I was using though, and got around the issue by disabling the app store through parental controls.

Apple allowing that app store opening nonsense single-handedly made my decision to go to Android.

Re: BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

#40

Post by thih9 »

Beautiful.

I noticed the layout breaking on some pages, e.g.: https://breezewiki.com/Battleheartlegacy/wiki/Necromancer - the table extends beyond the horizontal edge of the page, at least on mobile.

Still a more user friendly place than fandom/wikia and I am now going to use BreezeWiki instead.

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