61–70 of 237 posts
make some social noise. signals has always good impact.
I am slightly on the fence about this. If the goal is simply to provide a good platform for people to create and share information with each other, then it shouldn't matter if the wiki is indexed in Google or not, in fact "invisibility" might even increase the quality of contributions. OTOH if the goal is to monetize other people's contributions then yes, I totally get why the "Google jail" would be bad for that, but…
I think this logic falls apart if you realize that wikis only "work" when you're able to get some of the readers to turn into long-term contributors, and losing 90% of your traffic by not showing up on Google is a great way to kill that funnel. There's a ton of historical evidence of wiki migrations (1) starting out with all of the editors and none of the readers, (2) not doing anything to get those readers to the ne…
This is a shame because Fandom is frequently terrible, but also consumes all the oxygen.
It depends on which part. It is certainly heading down the same route as Wikipedia with all the problems that entails. You're usually better off on a smaller Fandom wiki as it won't have beeb taken over yet. The James Bond wiki is particularly bad, but Memory Alpha seems to be better run.
Some few months ago I couldn't find actors credits for particular roles they had in Star Trek franchise. For whatever reasons these bits were removed but still were present within Wayback Machine.
Then again, in the past I've seen hostile take-overs of fan made wikis into wikia/fandom "infrastructure". In one case wiki was copied, in time articles were slightly edited and new content was added containing... unsolicited fan theories.
The other case: wiki was copied 1:1 due to some inside disagreements, then incorporated into fandom and in approx. 2 years abandoned. The original died as well but someone managed to restore it from Wayback - this time in read-only mode
For a while, Fandom was having annoying ads and content that would get past my ad blocker. But a recent update has caused them to block users with ad blockers. I've been looking for explicit alternatives to Fandom for some content and it's annoyingly sparse. Just the other day I saw some meme about how if we saw as many ads taking over sites like we do now, that was a sure sign of having your machine getting infected…
Ad blockers are malware protection.
> Subdomains of existing domains are totally fine Damn, another push to centralizing and walling off user content in 'fandoms', 'reddits' and other closed communities? Have the internet cards been handed out now, and are we in the end-game? Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's every company
It’s not every company having the effective monopoly on what can be found (i.e. what exists ) on the web.
The bar has been raised on all web content for Google to index, esp new domains like you say but even some subdomains. That answer is quality content (higher than AI or human medians), links and pr and social activity and mentions, and then user experience.
And yet, I have to dig my way through pages upon pages of AI trash sites for many Google queries. Somehow THOSE don’t seem to have a problem getting indexed (Maybe they run a sufficient number of ads?).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But a recent update has caused them to block users with ad blockers. I'm noticing that Ad-Shield is becoming a continual fight these days with pageloads that complete then they fly in with a "ha ha here's a fake error report turn off your adblocker aye?". Every time their live support chat is open (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one), I send them Goatse.
> Every time their live support chat is open […], I send them Goatse. Unfortunately there is little chance that a human is anywhere near the other end of that chat these days, so your evil is somewhat wasted. > (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one) They want to appear to care. And appear to be a company of real people, who you might like if you met in real life, who will be out of pocket if you don't look…
It’s like screaming at a cashier because the supermarket head office made annoying changes to the company.
XML Parsing Error: no root element found
Location: https://www.poe2wiki.net/sitemap/sitemap-poe_wiki-poe2_wiki--NS_0-0.xml
Line Number 18040, Column 1
On to the Hytale Wiki example. I don't know if what I'm about to say applies to Google, but I'm approaching it from the perspective of my tiny dumb indieweb indexer for my personal search engine. It is much easier for me to index from a sitemap rather than try to crawl a website, so I basically look exclusively at sitemaps.
Looking at Hytale Wiki, my process:
* Site has a robots.txt file - good!
* Robots.txt mentions a sitemap - excellent!
* The sitemap is stored at /images/sitemaps/index.xml ... oh. I would usually not index anything from a /images/ folder, because I want to index pages only, not images. This would likely trip my exclusion filters. Let's ignore that and continue.
* The sitemap is a list of an additional 26 nested Gzipped sitemaps. Oh.
This is the point where my tiny dumb indexer would stop. Gzipped sitemaps are part of the standard, but they're relatively rare on the web for small sites. They typically only get used if a sitemap file exceeds the 50,000 pages-per-sitemap limit. In this case, 26 * 50,000 makes the HyTale Wiki look like a 1.3 Million page site. Do I really want to index 1.3 Million pages, an estimated 13GB of indexed text data, about a video game I'll probably never play?
My search index is storage constrained, and my indexer is very time constrained. The time I spend indexing your site is time not spent indexing another, possibly higher quality website. So at this point, I'd just grab the front page and disappear... like Google apparently does too.
Of course, the HyTale site isn't 1.3 Million pages, it's only 4,277 articles. That would all fit in the root sitemap file, and that might be the better approach for getting indexed.
> Subdomains of existing domains are totally fine Damn, another push to centralizing and walling off user content in 'fandoms', 'reddits' and other closed communities? Have the internet cards been handed out now, and are we in the end-game? Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?
This has been a thing for a long time in domain name resale for speculation or link farming or similar, domains that are aged with "backlinks" sell for more money.