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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#151

Post by whstl »

Dwedit wrote: post #129
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…

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

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 :(

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#152

Post by account42 »

pjc50 wrote: post #98
oreally wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective. sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?

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!

Perhaps, but VPS traffic prices are also already a lot better than "big cloud" traffic prices, especially if you choose your VPS provider with that in mind. And once your traffic is large enough there are also options where you pay for a fixed pipe instead of a transfer amount.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#153

Post by red-iron-pine »

sickofparadox wrote: post #34
formerly_proven wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page vs https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki (Though UESP has had banner ads for a while now)

Love the UESP, probably my favorite wiki.

UESP is amazing, and is a great example of what the non-fandom wikis are trying to be

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#154

Post by pornel »

oreally wrote: post #70
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…

> with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective. sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?

Cloudflare caches pages at many many datacenters, often colocated with large ISPs.

This lets Cloudflare deliver pages from their local cache over local links (which is fast and cheap), instead of fetching the data every time across the world from wherever the VPS is located.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#155

Post by bee_rider »

tombert wrote: post #68
dvngnt_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

laughs in ublock origin

I use ublock now too, but it's this really annoying feedback loop; people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers, and making the website worse and more likely for them to install an ad blocker etc... I know that running a website isn't free, so I understand the need for ads. Fandom is just a terrible version of it.

Things aren’t free, but alternative business models to ad-supported have not much of an opportunity to develop. The hope is that the feedback loop you’ve identified will iterate to the point that ad supported content becomes truly unbearable, and eventually enough room will open up that some alternative can develop.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#156

Post by bombcar »

munificent wrote: post #91
bombcar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dwarf Fortress wiki https://dwarffortresswiki.org is perhaps the most impressive I've seen, as it maintains namespaces to maintain (and update!) information about particular versions, because many players end up staying on a version for various reasons.

I wish the Minecraft wiki did that. I don't tend to play the latest version because I feel like it got overly complex and I get analysis paralysis if I play the latest version. But being on an old version makes navigating the wiki hard. I'm never sure if some content applies to me. Sometimes they say which version a feature was introduced in, but if a mechanic changes, they often just document the latest behavior.

Tell me about it; playing GregTech:New Horizons and trying to figure out vanilla mechanics related to 1.7.10 is annoying. All the GTNH specific stuff is on their wiki, but vanilla mechanics are just assumed.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#157

Post by cookmeplox »

diggan wrote: post #143
mossTechnician wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikia is a great example of enshittification - provide great value to users, then take it away from users and hand it to other businesses (eg advertisers), then take it away from businesses too. Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.

> 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…

We're already turning a profit! And there are no third-party investors (or debt) – it's all controlled by wiki people[1]

[1] https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#158

Post by ChocolateGod »

whstl wrote: post #151
Dwedit wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#160

Post by KomoD »

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.

You don't need to pay anything to run TBs through Cloudflare, you could use the free plan.

Rent VPS or managed hosting or host wherever you want, proxy it with Cloudflare on the free plan, Cloudflare caches it.

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