It gets a lot better with an ad blocker and other annoyance-blockers. The deeper question is whether or not you think it’s worth it. I think many people visit Fandom pages only briefly from a SERP and then take off, like Wikipedia but specific to a game. If that’s the way you use Fandom then it’s probably not worth it.
What makes it worth it is if there’s a page specific to a game you like and you spend a good amount of time there reading stuff. That’s a long tail thing though.
Whenever my phone accidentally opens fandom with Chrome rather than Firefox mobile (with uBO), I wonder how the hell anybody browses the internet on their phone without an ad blocker...
Most of the time I don't notice it because I use Firefox w/ uB0 on all platforms. But recently I've been playing some games on Steam and trying to use Steam's browser overlay to cache some guides. Its browser seems to be a chrome fork and does not support any kind of adblocker, unfortunately, and so I've been exposed to just how bad Fandom wikis are without one.
Can wikis on weird gloop use their own domain names? I feel like that is the best way to ensure that they can leave and that the host can't keep a zombie version of the wiki that hogs Google search position.
> (hint: it’s all about the domain). If we ever start going down the same path as Fandom, everyone can just leave! I would love to see other wiki platforms start to do this, because I think it’s the only way you really solve the problem.
So yes, the wikis have their own domains for this exact reason.
> [This post] (and many others) have done a much better job than I could, explaining from a reader’s perspective why Fandom is bad place to host a wiki,
The linked post (at j3s.sh) appears blank to me, so if others have the same problem here’s an archive link: https://archive.ph/kwt1b
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.
Assuming you're not on an adblocker, what's really odd is every page has a video about the subject. Not an advert, just a video that you aren't interested in.
I don't get it. If I'm looking up a specific year in the star trek universe, say 2381, to see what happened, why would I want 14 minute video on "a history of star trek".
Then why would I want it again when I check the next year
You watch it, and Google Ads records a veeery long "user is present on website" time, which is a boost in SEO - Google ranks how long people spend on a website, hence the "trend" of endless waffling around in stuff as basic as cooking recipes, or inline videos that entice the user to spend time on the website. Even if all of it (nowadays including videos) is AI-generated slop. But if the user immediately finds the information and goes back or closes the tab, then the site will get punished for being actually efficient and useful.
Putting autoplaying videos on every page farms their view count and gets the algorithm to show it to more people, which drives ad revenue. It's quite similar to how Fextralife embeds twitch streams to farm viewer counts.
> It's quite similar to how Fextralife embeds twitch streams to farm viewer counts.
Fextralife notably stopped streaming almost a year ago after Twitch announced that embedded views would no longer be counted. The solution is in the incentive, but unfortunately on the modern internet those generally don't favor the user.
As I understand things, video ads produce more $$$ - the advertiser pays more per view, and per click; and the click-through rate is higher. I've heard claims of video ads making 5x more.
I assume the irrelevant video is included to give Fandom more video ad space to sell.
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.
> people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers
I have serious doubts about this step in the spiral. IIUC, people who use ad blockers are still vanishingly few, and therefore the loss of ad impressions should not be that large.
Some sites have a message like "hey, we can't serve you ads, you must be using an ad blocker, stop that and absorb the advertising as is your duty because we need the money". But maybe that's just desperation and they aren't losing much to ad blockers anyway.
Many people believe that the loss is great, especially web site owners, which would certainly explain such messages. But lived experience shows at least me that most people don’t even know what an ad blocker is.
It's clearly enough of an impact for Google to spend effort killing uBlock on Chrome, and (attempting) to block it on Youtube. Obviously Google is huge, and even a small percentage of users is still a lot of money on the table.
We can only draw the obvious conclusion: Namely that Google plans to introduce a lot more ads once they have an iron grip on the consumer. If Google did that before Google destroyed ad blockers, regular people would indeed start to use ad blockers.
That's possible, but I think it's premature to think this is part of some grand plan. What likely happened is that Google estimated the cost to fund a team to shut down ad blockers was less then the money they were losing from ad blockers. Maybe it's part of a larger initiative, but I'd be hesitant to assume that without more evidence.
Remember that Google has established a pattern of hiding their true motivations so well that even lawyers can't find them (internal chats "off the record"), and they're in trouble with the law as a result.
The feedback loop doesn't work like that. You are implying there is some target revenue that the website aims to hit, and if it fails to meet that target it adds more ads.
But that's just nonsense, if a website can get more revenue from more ads, they are gonna put more ads right away, they aren't gonna wait until their revenue drops under some magic number before they do.
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.
That's a positive feedback loop. Ads are the root of all evil on the internet, and the end of that loop is "no more ads". And I don't want to hear shit about the internet dying without ads, in the same thread people are talking about cloudflare serving TBs of data for free or a $4 unmetered VPS.
These sites aren't adding ads to punish the non-ad blocking users, they're doing it because Google Ads keeps slashing the premiums to keep more of the pie for themselves.
Ublock doesn't block the AI generated FAQs without manually stepping in, and it certainly won't block all the bad info as the more dedicated and knowledgeable fans move to other wikis.
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.
Vandalism on Fandom wikis is counter-productive. It just makes it look more active, to both users and search engines, and so will in turn make it harder for people to find the independent wiki. The best thing to do is just to ignore abandoned Fandom wikis entirely.
Prior to my discovery that fandom was bad and a lot of wikis were moving away, I was following so many instances of out dated info in games I was playing due to not realizing that the wiki was no longer maintained since the active contributors had moved elsewhere and updates/patches to the game had rendered the info moot.
I am aware of a few game communities that purposefully poison the fandom version of the wiki with inaccuracies that are non-obvious and time-consuming to verify (so they aren't just auto-reverted).
Yeah the more dedicated fans have usually gone off to the independent wiki instead, leaving the Fandom one a hellscape of rumours and outdated information. Just compare the versions of Nintendo wikis in the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance and their Fandom equivalents for example, and the quality difference is like night and day.
Same goes with just about every wiki that has a counterpart that's not on Fandom.
Just a week or two ago my chrome plugins got temporarily disabled for some reason, and I didn't notice for a day or two... until I happened to check a fandom wiki. Then for about five seconds I thought I'd somehow installed All The Viruses.
And ironically, I already hated fandom before I'd seen it without an ad blocker! Just for the large sidebars and ugly flyouts and whatnot. It really feels like a contender for worst site on the internet.
I have blocked the domain on my browser; this helps with mindless clicking on fandom sites appearing on top of Google searches while the communities have moved on to other wikis.
I just disable javascript and googletagmanager and don't see any ads. The good moment is that Fandom shows static content as opposed to an average web 2.0 SPA.
If Google were to have the astoundingly poor business sense to secretly allow payment for higher 'organic' search rankings: they'd hopefully at least have the good sense to not blow that secret on a fish as small as Fandom.
How so? Fandom seems to have Google ads. We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher. Google's search ranking is black box. Edit: I guess at great effort you could scrape thousands of sites, not if they remove or add Google ads, and track their rating.
I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.
> We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher
This to me is a different argument, though admittedly reasonable to arrive at through the language of "paying Google for placement".
> I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.
I mean, yes. Though I should hope I needn't preamble any statement about <company> with how cynical I am about their intentions... It's not relevant here because I'm not arguing on the grounds that 'Google would be ethical and kawaii if they didn't accept payment for organic search ranking'--I'm saying that from a business standpoint it wouldn't make sense.
Ok sure I might have misunderstood you. I agree that Fandom is most likely not writing checks or paying directly in other means to Google for increased search rank.
They don’t need to. Fandom benefits from being an old and popular site. Google manually adjusts their ranking to prioritize such sites, because they think those sites are what the “average” searcher expects to see come up when they search certain topics.
Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.
> However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?
Yes, per this post:
> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.
...
> If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi[1]
One of the first sites I downrank in kagi is all the fandom sites. I don't outright ban them, sometimes they're all there is, but I try and make it so any other result shows up ahead of them
Just as an example - the stardew valley offical wiki is massive and complete, and nearly everyone uses that, but google still directs users to the fandom site for almost any specific search. Its one of the main things that has led me to think that using Google gives far less useful information than competitors.
Crazy seeing a weird gloop post in the morning on HN.
Cook is very passionate about wikis - as is the rest of the team - and the RS wiki has long been regarded as one of the best gaming wikis on the internet; no contest. If you run a wiki - talk to Weird Gloop. The blog isn't bullshit and they genuinely want to help.
I think it's awesome that they're helping more wikis move away from Fandom after the success of the Minecraft wiki moving.
They also are running a wiki for Andrew Gower's upcoming game as well.
I really hope I hear about other wikis making the move in the near future. Fandom deserves to die out.
The RS Wiki is the single website I've whitelisted in my ad blocker. And despite needing ads to cover costs - they made sure to ask the community first about adding them and what alternatives to funding might be possible. It was really a last resort and they are obsessive about making sure the ads are non-intrusive, single banner, not in primary real estate, and not harming the wiki experience. If any ads cause problems they completely pause running ads until the ad host resolves the issue. Although I'm usually signed in - so never see ads anyway as they only show for users who aren't signed in.
There's also a channel on the rs wiki's discord for reporting bad ads, which Cook responds to very quickly (single digit minutes from the interactions I've seen).
The Runescape wiki is simply amazing. It’s one of the most well built fit for purpose pieces of quality software+content that I have ever come across. It’s clean and crisp visually and well organized at the IA level despite being exactly the type of content problem that resists such attempts by nature. What a solid community. The software doesn't fell clunky, it’s fast and responsive and still feels modern. I can only assume that’s a testament to the quality of mediawiki. I’m glad that it’s getting the attention it deserves.
> I can only assume that’s a testament to the quality of mediawiki.
I was curious about this so I poked around both and I think I disagree. Both load very fast for me and are snappy and look pretty nice. The one difference is that the Runescape wiki has a single ad in the sidebar or at the bottom, below the content footer. While the Fandom wikis have 3+ ads, far larger, one of which covers content until interacted with (like being closed). For me, Fandom's ad approach absolutely falls within "offensively bad," while the Runescape ad approach reminds me of early 2000s, "here's an ad to pay the bills. We've tried to keep it well out of your way."
So I'd opine that it has less to do with the quality of mediawiki, and more about how much money both Wiki hosts are seeking to gain from the existence of these resources.
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.
The good ol' Mediawiki look of the DF wiki reminds me of the underrated, and oft maligned Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup wiki: http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Crawl_Wiki
I haven't played DCSS regularly since probably v0.24 or v0.25, so things may have changed - but if I recall correctly, it was not kept up to date very well, character guides are flat-out wrong, etc...
One of the Crawl design philosophies is that it should be possible to play without needing to consult a wiki. E.g. inspecting a monster shows you its spells and their damage ranges, there's a searchable in-game encyclopedia of all items/spells/monsters/etc., there's an extensive in-game manual with things like species skill aptitudes, examining an item tells you exactly what skill level you need to use it optimally, and so on. There's plenty of useful stuff on the wiki, but it's not a priority to update because it's not entirely necessary.
Factorio has a similar goal, which actually works really well. It lets the wiki focus on strategies and things that aren't well described in-game, but for quick "how does this work" you can just stay in game.
I mean yeah, I agree, I'm a longtime player. I appreciate DCSS's in-game discoverability. I find wikis useful for more in-depth explanation of game mechanics though. How combat rolls are calculated, etc. Ideally a wiki would provide that kind of deeper level of information, guide materials, etc.
Interestingly, DCSS's best source of info is the IRC bots/learndb.
Could you say a bit more about that? Normally I think "have to support people stuck on old versions" is something that happens when you're selling enterprise software to insurance companies. This is the first I've heard of it in games.
Players comfortable with the ASCII graphics version (the one that existed for years) often just paid for Steam release with pretty graphics just to support the brothers. And then kept playing the "hardcore" version they are used to.
As mentioned, some versions of the game introduce breaking concepts that earlier players may not want to deal with (either because it breaks save compatibility, or they don't like the mechanic, etc).
Minecraft has this somewhat also, with some people sticking on various versions because of mods, or play style, or combat, etc.
For example, one huge change was going from a 2D map to a 3D one, another was how world generation was done.
DF had a massive update probably a decade or more ago that changed the game from 2D to 3D (still represented as 2D z-levels though). With such a change, obviously some people would want to stick with the old version. There have been numerous large updates since then (the game has been in development for 22 years) and with each you get some people that just don’t want to update, either because it might ruin their current games or they prefer to avoid new features etc.
Another example is the various Dungeon and Dragons wikis that allow you to toggle between versions, since it has existed for 50 years now.
On the Steam platform for instance there is an option (perhaps developer supported) to stay on a certain version of a game. For instance, in the game Mount and Blade: Bannerlord, players notoriously stay 2, 3, or even 10 versions behind in order to maintain compatibility with specific mods or sets of mods (10s or 100s of mods). Eventually, enough of the modders move to the next or latest version and the players gradually move with them.
Games with "always on" or auto-updaters avoid this.
This actually used to be the norm: you'd release slowly, and support old versions for years (which still isn't that long, all things considered). It wasn't until relatively recently that six months became some sort of unconscionable amount of time to support software, because it's friendlier to the companies and developers writing it, instead of the users using it.
It used to be the norm because releasing and installing stuff was hard and expensive.
I agree we should be focused on the users, but I think the solution there is not to leave them on various outdated software, but to make it so easy for them to be on the new thing that they are happy with frequent updates.
And I feel pretty strongly about this because I've met people whose entire lives are about keeping old, broken stuff limping along so that pathological bureaucracies can never get their acts together. Sure, it's a living, but it's also a colossal waste of human potential.
I have seen cookmeplox, one of the admins of the Runescape wiki, round these parts. Thank you for your work, as a gamer and new Runescape addict. For an MMORPG as massive as OSRS, having a good wiki is crucial and probably the reason why it's seen a resurgence over the past few years.
It's more a testament to the devs. I kept up with the RuneScape wiki Discord server for a bit and there were flamegraphs flying left and right. You can see some of there recent performance improvements here: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-06-...
I think the theory is people edit more if pages load lightning fast. I can attest to that, especially if you use tools for partially-automated mass edits like https://github.com/wikimedia-gadgets/JWB
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 ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit.
We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.
They are objectively bad for some definitions of bad. What do you want for them? Universal respect? Just because taking something good and making it shitty is one way to make money doesn't mean that it is the only way to make money.
That's still an extremely blunt point. While we can imagine some alternative world where we all live in a communist utopia and the internet is the great free place it was in its early days, it's not so easy to build such a society. All the attempts I'm aware of either didn't scale (small, local communes) or were large-scale disasters resulting in the deaths of millions.
What we have now is no paradise, but it's not a disaster either. It's balanced on the razor's edge of disaster, however.
I'm assuming parent-poster means "publicly-traded corporations with limited-liability and low friction on transfers of ownership."
However you're right that "capitalism" encompasses many potential different varieties and actors. For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.
For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.
Family owned businesses can be sold to private equity just like any other. Instant Pot was a family owned business started by the inventor and it was famously sold to private equity who then proceeded to raid its assets and bankrupt the company.
In contrast, I've never heard a complaint about a previously-respected product run by a private-equity firm that became ruined after it was taken private by a closely-held family business.
And yet, when YouTube cracks down on adblockers, people on here get outraged instead of just paying for Premium. Everyone keeps saying "just let me pay" but when the option exists, it seems like most still avoid it and stick to complaining.
I read that in their battle with adblockers, the YouTube team seems to have broken Premium at least once. I think they were accidentally showing banner ads to Premium users.[1] It seems kind of odd, but wouldn’t your money be better off being spent on helping the ad-blocking effort rather than paying websites that seem to offer a gradually worse experience for everyone who isn’t blocking ads?
Yes, that's certainly an odd argument. Why would I do that when I'm happy with the service I'm paying for? Especially when it's the best way to support the creators I enjoy, since they get a much bigger share of revenue from Premium views than regular views.
I don’t trust or like the company. I expect them to drive up the premium price in the future, make it inconvenient to use multiple devices, etc. so I’d much rather steal their stuff.
This person is trying to clarify that the problem isn't specific to Fandom, it is a general problem with our system of capitalism and will never go away until we change our system of economic incentives.
Basically, sell everything of value to make a quick buck is the guiding principle of our economy at present. It's the best way to get rich even though it ultimately makes society way worse off long term. We have to solve this on a fundamental level or things like Fandom will just keep happening.
Can we stop this capitalism boogeyman thing? Market economies don't force people to conduct business this way. We've had our current system for a long time and while corporate raiding has always existed the current epidemic is very recent. Its the result of a complex confluence of market, legal, regulatory and competitive forces that make it an ideal move for many businesses.
I'm with you for the most part but we definitely need to hold PE and the Ticketmasters of the world more accountable- there's no escaping modern capitalism but better markets are definitely possible.
Yes, when I said "what happened" I was referring to how quickly the site changed for the worse and how extreme the decline was, not just the fact that it has ads. Most sites do follow the pattern described in the parent because they can't escape the need to make money, the transition is usually very gradual and they often stop at the point of sustainability, rather than pushing to the absolute maximum of short-term audience-destroying profit.
@zoeysmithe I'm sorry for the mass downvotes though, I think you are basically right. I still think it's worth noting private equity ownership because while we can't really choose what economic system we're in, we can often choose to work with people who care about more than just profit.
> 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.
Out of curiosity, how does weirdgloop pay for wiki hosting? The amount of traffic certainly wouldn't be low... what is stopping them from having to abandon these wikis in the future due to cost pressure?
There's a recent rough breakdown of costs and funding in [1]. In short, most funding is from ads. I don't think that takes into account funding for the newer Minecraft or LoL wikis, but it'll either be funded by ads or the game devs.
With so many communities interacting on Discord, and given that platform's ephemeral nature, I'd recommend having a module that can summarize highlighted chats and import or append them into the wiki as a stub that needs expansion.
Most of the updates I've made on Fandom were of this nature.
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.
If I could do things over again, on today's internet, I like to believe Weird Gloop is the type of organisation we would have built rather than ending up inside Fandom's machine. I guess that's all to say: thank you Weird Gloop for achieving what we couldn't (and sorry to all who have suffered Fandom when reading about Minecraft over the years).
[1] That's a bit of a cop out, we did have options, the decision to sell was mostly driven by me being a dumb kid. In hindsight, we could have achieved independent sustainability, it was just far beyond what my tiny little mind could imagine.
Thanks (seriously). Fandom may not be great, but you could have said I don't want to foot the bill, turned off the servers and walked away. Then the community would have lost every thing. Leaving it with Fandom gave Weird Gloop something to start with instead starting from scratch.
I can't imagine that this would have happened, like ever. The wiki was basically essential reading prior to starting to play Minecraft, especially in the early days. I think most the crafting recipes were documented by the developers themselves during those days.
If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.
citricsquid wasn't a Mojang employee. This whole thing is and always has been community-run [0], so the "they" in "if they killed the wiki" is not the same as the "they" that was selling Minecraft.
Now, one could reasonably ask why Mojang/Microsoft didn't (and I'm assuming don't) foot the bill for the manual that is an essential part of their game.
You and your team made (a good portion of) my childhood. I remember spending nights studying all the potion recipes and enchantment odds. Thanks for all you did
If you can run your application on Cloudflare Pages / Workers with Cloudflare's storage/DB things, it really gets dirt cheap (if not free) and very fast. And even without that, Cloudflare's caching CDN is very good, very cheap and very easy.
Ten years ago bandwidth was expensive. Still is, even if not as much. A simple VPS gets overwhelmed, but a simple VPS behind cloudflare can do quite well.
More than a decade has passed since then so I am stretching my memory. At peak we were serving in the region of 10 million page views per day which made us one of the most popular websites on the internet (Minecraft was a phenomenon and every Minecraft player needed the wiki). We were probably the highest traffic Wiki after Wikipedia. Nowadays Cloudflare could absorb most traffic because of the highly cacheable nature of it, but at the time, Cloudflare didn't exist, and every request hit our servers.
Yeah, Wikia in aggregate was in the top 50, maybe a top 20 site at various points. Wikia was built on caching. From my memory, about 99% of page views hit some kind of cache. If that dropped down to 97%, servers started to suffer. It's good to remember that the Fastly CDN company is a spinoff of Wikia, it was developed internally there first. Without that (varnish cache plus lots of memcache) Wikia would not have been able to handle the traffic. Mediawiki is horribly inefficient and one reason why Wikia was attractive as a host was that we had figured out a bunch of tricks to run it efficiently. The default configuration of mediawiki/wikipedia is real bad. Bigger independent wikis just couldn't handle the scale and many of the best independent wikis moved there for that reason. Just as one example, every link/url on a page hits a hook/callback that can call into an extension literally anywhere in the code base, which was several million lines of PHP code. I remember the "Batman" page on the DC wiki used to take several minutes to render a new copy if it fell out of the cache. That was one page I used for performance optimization tests. The muppet wiki and the lyrics wiki also had huge performance issues and fixing them was some of the most fun engineering work I've done. Every useful feature had some kind of horrible performance side effect, so it was always a fun puzzle. I also hate landing on a Fandom wiki now but thanks to the actual editors, it's still got some good content.
I bet, being by some counts the most popular video game ever - but which also makes it kind of a bad example to use when talking about wikis.
By definition, very few wikis will have to deal with becoming one of the most popular websites. (And as you say, at that point one should be able to figure out funding.)
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!
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.
Cloudflare don't charge per GB/TB. You get unlimited bandwidth even on their free plan. The problem with paying per GB is that it's in the CDN's interest for you to get a DDOS attack so they can charge you for all the bandwidth. It's in Cloudflare's interest to reduce DDOS attacks and unwanted bot traffic because it costs them bandwidth, not you.
I moved a few of my personal websites to AWS's CloudFront and it cost me like a buck a month, way cheaper than maintaining a virtual server to do it. Except that somebody somewhere decided to try their DDOS tool on one of them for a few hours in the middle of the night, and I got a bill for $2541.69.
The whole point of systemic incentives is that there is no conspiracy. Nobody wants a DDOS and every large provider will have people genuinely working to avoid them. But every time there is an opportunity to allocate resources, the team that gets to frame their return on investment in terms of real dollars will always have an edge over one whose value is realized only in murky customer satisfaction projections. Over the lifetime of a company, the impact of these decisions will add up with no need for any of the individuals involved to even be aware of the dynamic, much less conspire to perpetuate it.
That's sound logic. In this specific case of capitalistic incentives, I haven't noticed that it's working out in a way that make one more vulnerable to DDoS when one pays for bandwidth
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.
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.
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.
I remember reading the Minecraft wiki back in the early 2010s, back when Fandom was still Wikia. It would have been much more appealing at the time than it is today - not just for the reasons you list, but because Wikia actually kicked ass in the early 2010s. It was sleek, modern, and easy to use. And today, it isn't.
Every time I wind up on some garbage Fandom page I reminisce about the good old days of Wikia. I remember many a fun night trawling through pages while playing Fallout or Skyrim or whatever - all the information you could ever need, right there at your fingertips. It's an ethos you don't see so much on the modern net.
It’s funny that people are now looking back at wikia fondly because at the time most folks thought it was full of ads and shit. To the point where Curse/Gamepedia managed to get serious market share by not screwing with the community in the same way at the time.
I remember thinking that wikia sucked at the time, but at least it didn’t actively hinder me from finding what I was looking for. I just don’t open fandom pages because it locks up my phone.
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 likely to bet it won't suffer the same fate.
I skimmed around a bit on the website to try to get an answer to if it is an non-profit, but didn't find anything obvious that says yes/no.
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.
publicly traded companies are not "required" to make constant year over year gains for shareholders and investors, that is just what the owners usually decide to tell the company to do. The owners of a privately traded company could decide to, and the owners of a publicly traded company could decide not to. For example, zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes and if other shareholders don't like it they can kick rocks. This is pretty much the same situation that people imagine is the case with privately traded companies, even though facebook is obviously publicly traded.
"that is just what the owners usually decide to tell the company to do"
Because the entire system encourages it. The market rewards growth FAR more than it rewards a consistent dividend payout. (See: companies growing 40% YoY command a significfantly higher earnings multiple than those growing 10% YOY). So imo this is a like saying "people could decide to just invest money and then not seek the best returns possible." Also remember these shareholder are seldom John Smith principled human retail investor. It's firms whose entire purpose themselves is to seek maximum return.
"The owners of a privately traded company could decide to"
Meanwhile this DOES actually happen sometimes. See: Valve. We all know there's ways Valve could put up really great growth numbers for about 2-3 years while completely destroying all of the things that make Steam so god damn compelling to users that they can command the same cut as Apple, on an OPEN platform (vs Apple fighting utterly tooth and nail to keep iOS 100% airtight locked down). But they don't.
"For example, zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes"
TBC most founders/CEOs are NOT majority voters in their companies. They answer to the board. Most company founders lose voting control. The fact that Zuck is still in control is incredibly unusual and is a testament to how fast Facebook has grown that he's been able to keep hold of the reins.
Elon Musk is another CEO in total control. Although Tesla is a public company and therefore has a board, it’s stacked with Elon’s allies/appointees and answers to him, not the other way around. Despite Elon not being a majority owner of Tesla stock.
And when he took over Twitter in 2022, he immediately dissolved the board and fired the executives who were on it.
You just explained one reason why Steam is like this. Because they do not control the OSes Steam runs on. (Arguably, even not in the case of SteamOS.)
(Steam does try to do part of the job of the OS though, taking control over updates and even deciding what is acceptable on their platform and what is not.)
In fact, the relatively new concept of a "public benefit corporation" is (at least in part) an effort to allow for-profit entities to pursue goals other than shareholder enrichment. However, some have criticized public benefit corporations as being entities that simply strengthen executive control at the expense of shareholders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
About Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.:
Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich 459; 170 NW 668 (1919),[1] is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. It is often taught as affirming the principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, although that teaching has received some criticism.[2][3] At the same time, the case affirmed the business judgment rule, leaving Ford an extremely wide latitude about how to run the company.[citation needed]
The general legal position today (except in Delaware, the jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies are domiciled and where shareholder primacy is still upheld[4][5]) is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive.[citation needed] Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
This doesn't contradict what I said. In fact it supports it. I said that the owners of the company are the ones who determine what it does. The shareholders are the owners. If the owners of the company want it to do a certain thing, and the directors do a certain thing, and it does that thing, no court is going to stop them. There is a rule that says that shareholders aren't allowed to try to screw over other shareholders, but I don't think "The other shareholders decided to pursue the public benefit rather than maximum profit" would quality.
Actually, you pointed out a true inaccuracy in my comment, because when I said:
> zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes and if other shareholders don't like it they can kick rocks
This is only true in cases where zuckerberg's actions are not intended to benefit his interests at the expense of other shareholders'. I think in the Ford case, there was not a majority of shareholders who wanted to expand the business and increase wages at the expense of profit, So it was essentially two minority shareholders fighting.
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.
This wasn't exactly the question. The question was about growth. A company could be very profitable without growth (say, they own a mine which produces $40 million worth of ore each year with expenses of $10 million with no end in sight) or can have growth without profit (Open AI is a great example, or for history, the first 5 years of Facebook.)
I know most of stock investing is about capital gains and not dividends, but I think GP was saying it's inherently impossible to have growth forever.
On a financial level I get why people prefer to invest their money in a stock that goes up rather than one that pays them 8% a year consistently in dividends, but it seems unfortunate that somehow it seems like we aren't allowed to just have sustainable companies that don't depend on infinite growth to stay in business.
We have services agreements with the League of Legends and RuneScape developers, and we run 1 ad (below-the-fold, not in EU/UK) on the RuneScape wikis. This covers all expenses (including 5 staff) by a pretty healthy margin
> The company primarily relies on three streams of revenue: user donations, serving ads on select Weird Gloop wikis, and a contract with Jagex that includes a fee to cover hosting and administration costs.
I didn't see anything in the article about setting up incentives to keep the same thing from happening to Weird Gloop that happened to Fandom, which means the blog post is just empty marketing.
The only difference is that Weird Gloop is the little guy. Competition is good! That might be a good enough reason to choose them if you're in the market for wiki hosting!
But the moral posturing won't last if they become dominant, unless they set up incentives fundamentally differently than Fandom did, which doesn't seem to be the case.
As long as advertising is one of their revenue sources, the user experience will get crappy as soon as the network effects make it hard to leave. The cycle continues.
Did you read the post? There's a whole section talking about how they are entering into binding agreements that let communities leave (and take the domain) if they have a better option
Can we flip it? Some companies are explicitly structured to guarantee enshittification.
Venture capital/private equity is what causes this. We've been poisoned to believe that websites should exist purely to achieve hyperscale and extract as much money as possible. When you look at the real physical world there are tons of small "mom and pop" businesses that are content with being self sustainable without some special corporate structure to legally require that.
I work for private equity, and while we have a lot of layoffs, we don’t necessarily pursue short term gains (at least, as far as I can determine not as a factor of being PE anyway)
The article explicitly covers this question. Looks like they're setting up explicit legal(?) agreements. One key point is the domain name: minecraft.wiki, for example, not a subdomain of something owned by Weird Gloop. So the wiki can leave if it wants to.
Does that mean that to the users of these wikis, the switching costs[1] of the backend would basically be zero (one day they might just end up on a different server with the same content), while on the administrators' side the switching costs are at a reasonable minimum?
To my understanding wikis can take all their data, host it themselves, point the domain to their new hosting, and the move would be entirely invisible to end users if done properly and the quality of the hosting infrastructure wasn't considerably worse.
Observant users might notice the removal of any Weird Gloop branding but otherwise the only way people would know if the wiki itself announces the move or performance of the wiki becomes noticeably worse.
And Weird Gloop won't do what Fandom does and keep a zombie copy of your wiki online. So you won't be competing with Weird Gloop wiki traffic to reclaim your traffic. In fact, the obligations they agree to forbid it.
Upon termination by either party, Weird Gloop is obligated to:
- Cease operating any version of the Minecraft Wiki
- Transfer ownership of the minecraft.wiki domain to the community members
- Provide dumps of Minecraft Wiki databases and image repositories, and any of Weird Gloop's MediaWiki configuration that is specific to Minecraft Wiki
- Assist in transferring to the community members any domain-adjacent assets or accounts that cannot reasonably be acquired without Weird Gloop's cooperation
- This does not include any of Weird Gloop's core MediaWiki code, Cloudflare configuration, or accounts/relationships related to advertising or sponsorships
This sort of agreement means Weird Gloop is incentivized to not become so shit that wiki would want to leave (and take their ad revenue with them) because they've tried to make leaving Weird Gloop as easy as possible.
This is very reassuring. Usually, I assume agreements between different groups will inordinately benefit one party, but this particular agreement sounds like it creates a more level playing field.
And besides, it's not like non-profits are exempt from restructuring and becoming worse. There is no silver bullet.
Yeah - it would be on the same domain, so way users access it wouldn't change at all.
If any of the wikis we host want to leave, we'd provide them with a database dump. The admins would have to configure all of their own MediaWiki stuff of course, but I figure that's a pretty reasonable switching cost.
In all fairness, running modest to large MediaWiki instances isn't easy. There's a lot of things that are not immediately obvious:
- For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out.
- You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation.
- Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages.
Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on.
The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs.
If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money.
One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic...
At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...
A lot of things should be solved by having (micro)caching in front of your wiki. Almost all non-logged in requests shouldn't even be hitting PHP at all.
In my experience this hasn't been necessary yet on anything I've ran. I know WMF wikis run Varnish or something, but personally I'm trying to keep costs and complexity minimal. To that end, more caching isn't always desirable, because RAM is especially premium on low-end boxen. When tuned well, read-only requests on MediaWiki are not a huge problem. The real issue is actually just keeping the FPM worker pool from getting starved, but when it is starved, it's not because of read-only requests, but usually because of database contention preventing requests from finishing. (And to that end, enabling application-level caching usually will help a lot here, since it can save having to hit the DB at all.) PHP itself is plenty fast enough to serve a decent number of requests per second on a low end box. I won't put a number on it since it is obviously significantly workload-dependent but it would suffice to say that my concerns with optimizing PHP software usually tilt towards memory usage and database performance rather than the actual speed of PHP. (Which, in my experience, has also improved quite a lot just by virtue of PHP itself improving. I think the JIT work has great potential to push it further, too.)
The calculus on this probably changes dramatically as the RPS scales up, though. Not doing work will always be better than doing work in the long run. It's just that it's a memory/time trade-off and I wouldn't take it for granted that it always gives you the most cost-effective end result.
Varnish caching really only helps if the majority of your traffic is logged out requests. Its the sort of thing that is really useful at a high scale but matters much less at a low scale.
Application level caching (memcached/redis/apcu) is super important even at a small scale.
Most of the time (unless complex extensions are involved or your wiki pages are very simple) mediawiki should be io-bound on converting wikitext -> html (which is why caching that process is important). Normally if db is healthy, db requests shouldn't be the bottle neck (unless you have extensions like smw or cargo installed)
Most of MediaWiki seems to avoid too much trouble with contention in the database, but I was seeing it prior to enabling application-level caching. It seemed to be a combination of factors primarily driven by expensive tasks in the background. Particularly complex pages can cause some of those background tasks to become rather explosive.
As I was exploring self-host options that would scale to our org size, it turned out there was already an internal team running a company wide multi-tenant mediawiki PLATFORM.
So I hit them up and a week later we had a custom instance and were off to the races.
Almost all the work that team did was making mediawiki hyper efficient with caching and cache gen, along with a lot of plumbing to have shared infra (AD auth, semitrusted code repos, etc) thst still allowed all of us “customers” to implement whatever whacky extensions and templates we needed.
I still hope that one day Microsoft will acknowledge that they use Mediawiki internally (and to great effect) and open-source the whole stack, or at least offer it as a hosted platform.
I tried setting up a production instance af my next employer - and we ended up using confluence , it was like going back to the dark ages. But I couldn’t make any reasonable financial argument against it - it would have taken a a huge lift to get a vanilla MW instance integrated into the enterprise IT environment.
The rumour i heard is they were making their own custom thing.
There was some rumours that they were unhappy about mediawiki's response to patches they submitted (they made a bunch around accessibility). However i looked through their patches at one point when this rumour started flying around and it looked like most were merged. Those that weren't generally had code review comments with questions or pointing out mistakes which were never replied to. I sort of suspect the patch thing was some sort of internal excuse because the team involved wanted to make their own thing.
Regardless, im really happy they decided to open source their extensions and it was nice to see that they put in effort to upstream core patches.
With Digital Ocean the cpuinfo is obfuscated so figuring out exactly what you're running on requires a bit more trickery. With that said I honestly assume that the comparison is somewhat older AMD against even older Intel, so it's probably not a great representation of how the battlefield has evolved.
That said, Digital Ocean is doing their customers a disservice by making the Premium Intel and Premium AMD SKUs look similar. They are not similar. The performance gap is absolutely massive.
Cloudflare dropped captchas back in 2022 [0], now it's just a checkbox that you check and it lets you it (or does not).
And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this:
I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare;
but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas where you click on picture of hydrants, I hate this even more and think: move to Cloudflare already, so I can stop doing this nonsense!
total block on _old_ tablets - Android 4.4 specifically, and I am sure many people on HN would be horrified to see those anywhere close to internet. New tablets are fine.
As for "more user-friendly captchas" - I have seen some of those (like AliExpress' slider) but I doubt they will work as well as hydrants. And with new AI startups (1) slurping all the data on the web and (2) writing realistic-looking spam messages, I am sure anti-bot measures would be more important than ever.
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 :(
I used to have a lot of bot spam, but then I mostly foiled them with the world's silliest captcha. Looks like a math problem, but the solution isn't what's required to proceed.
For example I configured my osdev wiki (mediawiki based) so that the history and other special pages get the Cloudflare test but just viewing a page doesn't trigger it. OpenAI and other bots were generating way too much traffic to pages they don't need.
Blame the bots that are DDOS'ing sites for the captchas.
Not a lawyer, I'm guessing here.
I'd assume the intention matters a lot. Scrape bots don't intend to cause trouble, they intend to get your data (for free). Same way as when some famous person tells people on Twitter to visit a website or when some poor blog gets the hug of death from HN. The intention wasn't to bring down the site.
Aside from that: is DDosing actually illegal (under US law)?
Right. Pretty sure it's illegal under EU law(s), and people were already condemned for it (but yes, in case ill intent was proven) - why wouldn't it be illegal under US law - it's basically akin to vandalism ?
(In other news, the Internet Archive got DDoSed today :(
The other side of the coin is lizards trying to literally end the internet era with their irresponsible behavior, and hell, making a nice living in the process
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 as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.
A bit of a follow up to this; after a bit of thought, I am considering reaching out to Weird Gloop. I do not feel I am able to give The Infosphere the care that it deserves. And with Futurama back on Hulu, we are naturally seeing an uptick in activity. We have a very restrictive sign up in place, because I don't have time to moderate it anymore. It keeps the spam down, yes, but also new users away.
Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.
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 now.
The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.
Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.
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.
It's been a long time since I switched to Cloudflare. Looking through my email archive, it was December 2015. I uncovered an old discussion[0] about the switch, but it only seems to highlight that the server is slow.
But I think it speaks to my lack of skill in this area. I have no actual professional training in system administration, and entirely autodidactic in this area. Though it sounds like Weird Gloop can also provide guidance in these matters rather than simply taking on the hosting. I won't deny that at times I have felt defeated, and that may truly have been my reasoning for switching to Cloudflare.
Though this post and response so far have given me hope.
An off-hand reference to "350k/day" shouldn't be naively translated to "4 per second"
350k/ day likely means sometimes it's 3.5 million, all smashed into a 30 minute period of time, because some nitwit linked to my site.
And then, I get paged about "my site being down" and I have to stop hanging out with my friends or family and fiddle around with things I don't want to fuzz with. Or maybe it just breaks and doesn't self heal and it is offline for a week until I notice it and fix it, and by then people all think the site's gone.
Anyhow, sure, maybe people not wanting to devote their lives to devops fanfic is something that can "just be solved with this simple trick cloudflare hates" but maybe not.
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?
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're going to might have less time with your studies. As an incentive I can point to a few things that might make the move easier
Cripes, that sounds creepy and exploitive. I'm pretty sure it would have raised more than a few red flags in my mind, even as a teenager about to head off to college. (Granted, I was a wee bit uptight at that age.)
> 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.
This is basically an offer to buy your business for $0 and we might hire you as a contractor. It's a bad deal. I mean Jimmy Wales himself wouldn't have accepted this for Wikipedia.
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.
Seriously? How does that even make sense to you? The OP had an asset generation 10k+ a month in profit and was so squeezed for cash he had to sell it.
Doesn’t it make more sense that a media have site would have been paying through the nose for bandwidth, hence the callout for cloudflare which would have made that cost free?
I could have the numbers wrong, archive.org is down otherwise I would check as we shared information publicly at the time. As far as I recall, we weren't taking money from the websites, we were spending on infrastructure alone with more than $10k in spend in the final month before the sites were acquired. I think it is easy to forget how much more expensive running things on the internet was back then along with the unprecedented popularity of Minecraft. Once archive.org is back online, I'll track down numbers.
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.
> For all intent and purposes most hits will be cache hits, and thus "static" content
That's not what static means in the context of hosting. Static means you upload files by FTP or WebDav or some other API and that's it. Something like hosting on S3. If users can log in, even if they usually don't, it's nothing like static any more.
I have no idea how it works, but given that the read:write ratio is probably 100:1 or more, certainly it could just serve static, prerendered pages straight from the filesystem or something like memcached?
[Im a mediawiki dev]. Typically people use varnish for that use case. MediaWiki does support serving logged out views from a filesystem cache, but varnish is generally a better idea. There are also some caches out of memcached (mediawiki has "parser cache" in memcached which is the part of the page that stays constant between all users. Typically people use varnish on top of that for the entire page for logged out users)
Sometimes people add things to their sites that are incompatible with caching, which will make hosting costs go way up.
One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.
For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error.
It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.
I don't really know how exploratory most games are compared to old Minecraft. Some games like Stardew Valley have certain things that are much easier to do because of third party wikis but I don't think the same is true of a lot of games in the same way it was for Minecraft.
I picked up Stardew Valley a few months ago for the first time, and consciously chose not to use the wiki. I'm obviously way behind where I would be had I used the wiki, but it's been fun figuring out what works by myself.
One game I recently got which has great exploratory potential is Shapez 2. The in-game help is amazing.
> One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.
While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors.
Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.
Video game magazines would regularly publish short walkthroughs and maps, as well as tips on common places to be stuck in popular games, and cheat codes.
Guidebooks were found in stores next to the games, they were typically slim, full-color affairs full of screenshots and production art, with complete lists of all the stuff you could do in the game. Full walkthroughs, item statistic charts, locations of the 52 Secret Gears you need to collect to build the Wind-Up Sword to achieve the secret ending, etc, etc. Here's a photo of someone's collection of a bunch of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/originalxbox/comments/12rsvll/seems...
I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them.
[1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o
One of the things on my todo list is to spend some solid time thinking about load-shedding, and in particular tools and methods for small or hobbyist projects to practice it. Like what do you turn off on the site when it's the 15th of the month and you're already at 80% of your SaaS budget?
Like maybe if a request for an image doesn't result in a 304, instead of sending a 200 response you redirect to lower res versions, or just 429 out. How much throttling do you do? And do you let bots still run full speed for SEO reasons or do you do something else there?
To be fair a lot of wikis' and internet cultural places' continuity woes would be mitigated by making it easier to decentralize hosting or at least do a git pull. Wikis especially don't tend to be that large and their S/N is quite high, making them attractive to mirror.
I play a lot of Path of Exile and one of the best quality of life improvements I did this summer was adding the Fandom Path of Exile wiki URL to my Kagi deny list so it never shows up in search. The official one that is maintained and kept up to date by the game developer poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki was always third or forth on my searches.
Yes, despite the poewiki migration being a fairly long time ago now, the fandom wiki still ranks frustratingly highly. The data on it is of course now very outdated and causes confusion for new players.
I wonder how much the effect of lots of people having a redirect extension has. If google sees people click on the fandom result and not come back, do they treat it as a good result when in reality people are redirecting to poewiki via the extension?
The situation improves every league, particularly since now there are quite a lot of items, skill gems or skill tree node passives/notables missing from the fandom wiki. It's much better than in the past when you could outright search "<skill> poewiki" and not have the poewiki result anywhere.
But it still feels like there's a long way to go, and it's a shame because it further increases the knowledge gap between experienced players who might know to seek out the poewiki, and new players (or very casual players) who might not.
It hints also at the power of the "old web" and it's historic power over google rankings.
I mean the Wikipedia content arguably belongs more to the Wikipedia community than to the Wikimedia Foundation... Of course it is hardly possible to gain the approval of a majority of editors.
> But like all problems in PoE, PoE2 will fix it. ;)
Isn't that the game for which Sannikov came up with his new global illumination algorithm? [1] (Apparently yes)
it already belongs to the Wikipedia community, but it's licensed under a copyleft licence. Ditto for Wikia. Anyone can fork it if they give proper attribution.
I tried adding some helpful links to the new Runescape wiki back when the split happened, and within a few hours Fandom had permabanned my decade-old account across their entire network.
Not a huge loss, although it still feels like a bitter ending after I spent years sprucing up a bunch of their wikis.
By the way, you can replace the fandom in the url with breezewiki and get a much more pleasant experience without ads. it's not that much of a difference on desktop, and the layout might debatably be uglier, but it's a godsend on mobile where the search bar doesn't even work half the time for me.
A few years ago, Path of Exile migrated from the fandom to a new site. GGG (Path of Exile's company) even decided to host the new wiki on their servers (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3292958)! At this point, the new wiki ranks higher then the old one, but for a time it was an issue. Interesting to see more cases of games wikis leaving Fandom with how horrible the site is, and hopefully this is just the beginning of a trend.
Just tested a bunch and it seems like `path of exile [skill/currency]` usually ranks the Fandom higher while `poe [skill/currency]` ranks the new wiki higher which is why I never noticed (I actually never noticed because I block the PoE Fandom and pin the new wiki on Kagi)
There is an extension which automatically redirects you from Fandom to the new wiki. While that's convenient it probably helps Fandom stay near the top.
It does, if you’re clicking on those fandom links and not subsequently providing any negative signals back to Google it’ll assume that’s where you wanted to go.
It was and remains a worthwhile trade-off to ensure folks got to the right wiki though.
I'm happy that people are creating alternatives, but personally I never had a problem with Fandom.
Yes, they will monetize the content, but they'll also manage it because it makes them money. Content on fandom is probably going to still be available 10 years later. It's the same with DeviantArt, it's worse now than it has ever been, but artwork uploaded 10 years ago is still available, and it will probably still be available 10 years later. You could also say this about Youtube, Google, and many other platforms.
I hope the emerging alternatives prove to be successful, but so far I still don't see a reliable alternative for Youtube, Google, or DeviantArt (or even Twitter, Reddit, etc.). In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a replacement win in the long run. Maybe I'm just too young.
Most of the platforms you mention are "replacements" which have "won" over a long term—Google unseated AltaVista and Yahoo!, Reddit outlived Digg and SlashDot, and microblogging like Twitter started as blogs. And of course, Fandom "replaced" other, less bad wiki farms by virtue of buying them.
But I don't personally remember any of that happening. I wasn't using Reddit when Digg was still around, just like I didn't join Facebook when MySpace was still relevant. The first time I used Yahoo! was after its search engine because Bing with a different label.
Comments sections on wikis there for e.g. FromSoftware games can tend toward rebarbativity, and the ads can be annoying, but in my recent experience the information troves compiled for big games such as Elden Ring are an indispensable resource.
It's not fresh in my memory, but I recall being extremely annoyed at the Elden Ring wiki around the release of the game; not for lack of being filled out, but the site was just not fun to use.
Truth be told, it appears that Weird Gloop/mediawiki has a bit of a monopoly on wiki platforms that don't suck.
fextralife has the exact same behavior as Fandom: autoplaying their Twitch streams to farm views and displaying ads, at times hiding it in invisible iframes, or making it so small you can't find it, leading to Twitch making rules against embedding autoplays, ads everywhere, shitty AI generated stubs for half the articles, botting and automatically piling on criticism, and fundamentally, it's just plain wrong, everywhere.
The initial Dark Souls wikidot was excellent. Fextralife bullied and threatened them into closing down. At this point, people don't move on because of habit, but the quality for the Elden Ring wiki is dramatically bad. Information is outdated, poorly maintained, actual fixes are being reverted by their own, paid editors, other wikis are suspiciously often the target of attacks and deleted content.
On a scale of 0 – Good, I would score my overall experience with fextralife as "not great", especially when viewing it on my phone. I don't know the history and controversies re: other sites, I only started reading fextra wikis in 2022/23.
But I haven't experienced problems with information in the guides. Off the top of my head: for Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Hollow Knight, I don't recall a single time when the info was flat out wrong. In the case of comments pointing out something incorrect or incomplete, it had already been fixed by the time of my reading.
Every page has a live chat and video stream. The content tends to be better, but it's not mechanically much better than Fandom.
It also highlights an important difference between why wikis can be useful. If I want information about Elden Ring as a game, Fextralife is pretty good (with some ublock filters to kill the stupid chat), but it does that at the expense of information about Elden Ring as a fictional world. That's not usually why I'm looking up Elden Ring information, but it sometimes is.
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 random person paying the bill for eternity for a game they themself moved on from long ago.
Yeah, it has ads, but someone has to pay the bill. I'll take the ad-ridden wiki that exists over the idealized one that went offline seven years ago when the interest died out.
This becomes a metaphor for the internet in general.
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.
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 intentional measures like changing forking policy, and the community having to fight against network effect/SEO) they enshittify to squeeze out profit. Result is a worse site than if Fandom/etc. had never existed.
Relatively optimistic about movement towards structures that resist this kind of exploitation.
For the RuneScape wiki at least, they seem to have a paid agreement with jagex to maintain the wiki. Which makes a lot of sense, the game devs probably want to have a good wiki for their own game (especially for a game like RuneScape). Not sure if that's the case for the other wikis they host, though.
That is correct. However the jagex funding is not really enough[1] so they added ads. The League wiki seems to be also under this model, but I suppose they got a better deal. The Minecraft Wiki doesn't have any ads at all, and it's just been feeding off by the runescape wikis.
Woah, I didn't know that what jagex has paid for basically only covers the infrastructure. It's crazy considering how central the wiki is (because the game is very far from "self documenting"). Thanks for the info!
WeirdGloop also runs wikis for the biggest, most active games and communities in the world. I'm more concerned about the rest of the wikis like the example I gave where I'm googling for game mechanics for a dead game.
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.
> WeirdGloop also runs wikis for the biggest, most active games and communities in the world
Most of the costs are those that scale up/down by activity - MediaWiki itself is free/open-source and the wiki's content is contributed for free by volunteers.
Also, keep in mind I'm not saying that each wiki needs to be individually self-hosted. Can be a host the size of WeirdGloop but made up of smaller game wikis, for instance.
> I'm more concerned about the rest of the wikis like the example I gave where I'm googling for game mechanics for a dead game.
Prospects for long term information accessibility are pretty terrible on sites aggressively squeezing out all the profit they can. See Reddit eliminating archives and third party clients and then cutting off all search engines that don't pay, or mass deletions of user content by sites like Photobucket/Imgur/etc.
> You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that.
With significant difficulty, fighting against both Fandom's policies and SEO/network effects. The OP lists "wiki communities need to be able to freely leave their host" as the primary rule for "How to not turn into Fandom 2.0".
> You have to stick around for another decade so people can find that information long after you've lost interest
Hence ability and willingness to pass on the torch is critical - so that the information doesn't die with one person or company.
I think with Fandom similar with Reddit, or Twitch, most people focus on the interface experience as sole advantage of the platform, and miss how they provide an accessible space to incubate new communities. You get low barrier to entry hosting, operation tools, and network exposure.
— A $POPULAR_THING Wiki is swiftly created, some freelancers are hired to create article stubs. Links to it spread through other popular wikis.
— People trying to learn something about that topic get a lot of search results directing them to that new wiki. They assume that it's some kind of “community”, try to participate, and never realize that they're making love to an inflatable doll. Real activity, links and clicks now force the pages to stay on top, and attract even more naive visitors.
Of course, it's not specific to that site. “Social” sites often make people believe that they “interact” with thousands or millions of others, when in fact they shout into an empty box, and watch the movements of a primitive mechanism.
It's hard running and managing wikis, and anyone/org/group that does so outside of the auspices of fandom or similar trash-aggregation hosts should be celebrated. Love this for weirdgloop. On a related note, shoutout to liquipedia[1], which has been a great experience for so long (a number of years I refuse to recognize as it would prove I'm old), and I have always feared the possibility of it moving to or becoming a fandom.
Can't see it ever happening, it's obviously not a service driven by revenue. The Dota2 non-esports wiki recently migrated from Fandom to Liquipedia too
These are hosted by weirdgloop.org ... but as far as I can tell without a common known good domain it's hard to know if you're looking at a "good" wiki or "bad".
There is a browser extension called Indie Wiki Buddy that keeps track of who the best wiki for each game is. And for the ones that do insist on using fandom, it can redirect to breezewiki which is a lite and respectful rehoster.
Some donations, some ads, and contracts (one so far) with companies that benefit.
It all looks very Wikipedia-like. I wonder if the WMF could be persuaded to throw some of their massive pile of cash in this direction, in the public interest? But then Weird Gloop would probably have to be a non-profit.
Ha! I didn't know that. I'm unclear on whether he actually has any influence at WMF or just serves as a fluffy mascot, but yeah, maybe not such a good idea.
MediaWiki is actually pretty easy to set up on a web server, speaking as someone who's now done it twice. You plop the files into htdocs, make sure PHP is set up, set up vanity URLs if you want to, and then… well, that's it. The final step is to go to the site, fill in the setup form, download the settings file it gives you and upload it. It doesn't even need an external database, it can use SQLite; if email setup is annoying, it doesn't even need that. And it's the most powerful and flexible wiki software out there: if there's something you want a wiki to do, MediaWiki can do it, but it also isn't too bloated out of the box, so you can just install plugins as and when you need them. Thoroughly recommend it.
Making MediaWiki survive non-trivial amounts of traffic is much harder than simply setting it up. It's not an impossible task for sure but there's no one click performance setting.
Specifically, managing edge and object caches (and caching for anonymous viewers vs. logged-in editors with separate frontend and backend caches) while mitigating the effects of cache misses, minimizing the impacts of the job queue when many pages are changed at once, optimizing image storage, thumbnailing, and caching, figuring out when to use a wikitext template vs. a Scribunto/Lua module vs. a MediaWiki extension in PHP (and if Scribunto, which Lua runtime to use), figuring out which structured data backend to use and how to tune it, figuring out whether to rely on API bots (expensive on the backend) vs. cache scrapers (expensive on the frontend) vs. database dump bots (no cost to the live site but already outdated before they're finished dumping) for automated content maintenance jobs, tuning rate limiting, and loadbalancing it all.
At especially large scales, spinning the API and job queues off altogether into microservices and insulating the live site from the performance impact of logging this whole rat's nest.
While that's not wrong, the wiki loop of frequent or constant, unpredictably cascading content updates, with or without auth and sometimes with a parallel structured data component + cache and job queue maintenance + image storage + database updates and maintenance becomes a significant burden relatively fast compared to a typical CMS.
Do it. The costs shouldn't be borne by a single entity, they should be spread across the community of users. Onboarding and lag are two big hurdles to overcome, as you will inevitably have to put editing behind a transaction.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadIf I'm looking for a specific piece of info that ends up being on a fandom wiki, it's quite a turn off.
What makes it worth it is if there’s a page specific to a game you like and you spend a good amount of time there reading stuff. That’s a long tail thing though.
> (hint: it’s all about the domain). If we ever start going down the same path as Fandom, everyone can just leave! I would love to see other wiki platforms start to do this, because I think it’s the only way you really solve the problem.
So yes, the wikis have their own domains for this exact reason.
The linked post (at j3s.sh) appears blank to me, so if others have the same problem here’s an archive link: https://archive.ph/kwt1b
original post is at https://j3s.sh/thought/stop-using-fandom.html
I love the idea of fan wikis, but Fandom is basically the worst possible implementation of that idea.
I don't get it. If I'm looking up a specific year in the star trek universe, say 2381, to see what happened, why would I want 14 minute video on "a history of star trek".
Then why would I want it again when I check the next year
If it were a youtube style video advert I could understand it.
SEO has ruined the Internet.
Fextralife notably stopped streaming almost a year ago after Twitch announced that embedded views would no longer be counted. The solution is in the incentive, but unfortunately on the modern internet those generally don't favor the user.
I assume the irrelevant video is included to give Fandom more video ad space to sell.
I know that running a website isn't free, so I understand the need for ads. Fandom is just a terrible version of it.
I have serious doubts about this step in the spiral. IIUC, people who use ad blockers are still vanishingly few, and therefore the loss of ad impressions should not be that large.
But that's just nonsense, if a website can get more revenue from more ads, they are gonna put more ads right away, they aren't gonna wait until their revenue drops under some magic number before they do.
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.
As someone who once edited those wikis, I certainly hope they did. Who wants to work for free to enrich some private equity firm?
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.
Just wish there was a more centralized / good alternative to promote rather than just wrecking fandom.
Prior to my discovery that fandom was bad and a lot of wikis were moving away, I was following so many instances of out dated info in games I was playing due to not realizing that the wiki was no longer maintained since the active contributors had moved elsewhere and updates/patches to the game had rendered the info moot.
I am aware of a few game communities that purposefully poison the fandom version of the wiki with inaccuracies that are non-obvious and time-consuming to verify (so they aren't just auto-reverted).
Same goes with just about every wiki that has a counterpart that's not on Fandom.
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)
And ironically, I already hated fandom before I'd seen it without an ad blocker! Just for the large sidebars and ugly flyouts and whatnot. It really feels like a contender for worst site on the internet.
maybe at that moment, you did.
Still, I'm glad for some competition. However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?
Practically, you can pay SEO experts to help you keep your rankings up.
I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.
This to me is a different argument, though admittedly reasonable to arrive at through the language of "paying Google for placement".
> I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.
I mean, yes. Though I should hope I needn't preamble any statement about <company> with how cynical I am about their intentions... It's not relevant here because I'm not arguing on the grounds that 'Google would be ethical and kawaii if they didn't accept payment for organic search ranking'--I'm saying that from a business standpoint it wouldn't make sense.
https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousa...
Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.
Yes, per this post:
> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.
...
> If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi[1]
1: https://weirdgloop.org/contact
Cook is very passionate about wikis - as is the rest of the team - and the RS wiki has long been regarded as one of the best gaming wikis on the internet; no contest. If you run a wiki - talk to Weird Gloop. The blog isn't bullshit and they genuinely want to help.
I think it's awesome that they're helping more wikis move away from Fandom after the success of the Minecraft wiki moving.
They also are running a wiki for Andrew Gower's upcoming game as well.
I really hope I hear about other wikis making the move in the near future. Fandom deserves to die out.
The RS Wiki is the single website I've whitelisted in my ad blocker. And despite needing ads to cover costs - they made sure to ask the community first about adding them and what alternatives to funding might be possible. It was really a last resort and they are obsessive about making sure the ads are non-intrusive, single banner, not in primary real estate, and not harming the wiki experience. If any ads cause problems they completely pause running ads until the ad host resolves the issue. Although I'm usually signed in - so never see ads anyway as they only show for users who aren't signed in.
I was curious about this so I poked around both and I think I disagree. Both load very fast for me and are snappy and look pretty nice. The one difference is that the Runescape wiki has a single ad in the sidebar or at the bottom, below the content footer. While the Fandom wikis have 3+ ads, far larger, one of which covers content until interacted with (like being closed). For me, Fandom's ad approach absolutely falls within "offensively bad," while the Runescape ad approach reminds me of early 2000s, "here's an ad to pay the bills. We've tried to keep it well out of your way."
So I'd opine that it has less to do with the quality of mediawiki, and more about how much money both Wiki hosts are seeking to gain from the existence of these resources.
Fandom makes it extremely difficult (nigh impossible) to do something as simple as access the page of an image asset.
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.
Interestingly, DCSS's best source of info is the IRC bots/learndb.
Minecraft has this somewhat also, with some people sticking on various versions because of mods, or play style, or combat, etc.
For example, one huge change was going from a 2D map to a 3D one, another was how world generation was done.
See "Eras" here for the big ones: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Release_information
Another example is the various Dungeon and Dragons wikis that allow you to toggle between versions, since it has existed for 50 years now.
Games with "always on" or auto-updaters avoid this.
I agree we should be focused on the users, but I think the solution there is not to leave them on various outdated software, but to make it so easy for them to be on the new thing that they are happy with frequent updates.
And I feel pretty strongly about this because I've met people whose entire lives are about keeping old, broken stuff limping along so that pathological bureaucracies can never get their acts together. Sure, it's a living, but it's also a colossal waste of human potential.
I think the theory is people edit more if pages load lightning fast. I can attest to that, especially if you use tools for partially-automated mass edits like https://github.com/wikimedia-gadgets/JWB
> 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.
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 ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit.
We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.
"then the MBAs got involved" is a cop-out, it's a systemic issue.
That's still an extremely blunt point. While we can imagine some alternative world where we all live in a communist utopia and the internet is the great free place it was in its early days, it's not so easy to build such a society. All the attempts I'm aware of either didn't scale (small, local communes) or were large-scale disasters resulting in the deaths of millions.
What we have now is no paradise, but it's not a disaster either. It's balanced on the razor's edge of disaster, however.
However you're right that "capitalism" encompasses many potential different varieties and actors. For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.
Family owned businesses can be sold to private equity just like any other. Instant Pot was a family owned business started by the inventor and it was famously sold to private equity who then proceeded to raid its assets and bankrupt the company.
In contrast, I've never heard a complaint about a previously-respected product run by a private-equity firm that became ruined after it was taken private by a closely-held family business.
If I were to propose a cause, it would be the normalization of internet stuff being “free”.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18ll7y6/i_have_you...
Basically, sell everything of value to make a quick buck is the guiding principle of our economy at present. It's the best way to get rich even though it ultimately makes society way worse off long term. We have to solve this on a fundamental level or things like Fandom will just keep happening.
@zoeysmithe I'm sorry for the mass downvotes though, I think you are basically right. I still think it's worth noting private equity ownership because while we can't really choose what economic system we're in, we can often choose to work with people who care about more than just profit.
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.
[1]: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-03-...
Most of the updates I've made on Fandom were of this nature.
If I could do things over again, on today's internet, I like to believe Weird Gloop is the type of organisation we would have built rather than ending up inside Fandom's machine. I guess that's all to say: thank you Weird Gloop for achieving what we couldn't (and sorry to all who have suffered Fandom when reading about Minecraft over the years).
[1] That's a bit of a cop out, we did have options, the decision to sell was mostly driven by me being a dumb kid. In hindsight, we could have achieved independent sustainability, it was just far beyond what my tiny little mind could imagine.
If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.
Now, one could reasonably ask why Mojang/Microsoft didn't (and I'm assuming don't) foot the bill for the manual that is an essential part of their game.
[0] https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website)
sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?
By definition, very few wikis will have to deal with becoming one of the most popular websites. (And as you say, at that point one should be able to figure out funding.)
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.
Rent VPS or managed hosting or host wherever you want, proxy it with Cloudflare on the free plan, Cloudflare caches it.
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.
I moved a few of my personal websites to AWS's CloudFront and it cost me like a buck a month, way cheaper than maintaining a virtual server to do it. Except that somebody somewhere decided to try their DDOS tool on one of them for a few hours in the middle of the night, and I got a bill for $2541.69.
Eventually they credited it, but it was not a fun ride, and decided that I was done using a CDN with misaligned incentives: https://sfba.social/@williampietri/111687143220465824
What kind of conspiracy is this? As if anyone charging for bandwidth hopes to get their infrastructure attacked
> putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company
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?
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.
Funny how they somehow managed to make it worse.
Or the complete plot of “Harry Potter”, as seen in this 20 year old artifact:
https://harryfansowned.ytmnd.com/
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 likely to bet it won't suffer the same fate.
I skimmed around a bit on the website to try to get an answer to if it is an non-profit, but didn't find anything obvious that says yes/no.
[1] https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited
Regardless, I wish you luck for the future! May you not go down the almost inevitable enshittification hole.
Because the entire system encourages it. The market rewards growth FAR more than it rewards a consistent dividend payout. (See: companies growing 40% YoY command a significfantly higher earnings multiple than those growing 10% YOY). So imo this is a like saying "people could decide to just invest money and then not seek the best returns possible." Also remember these shareholder are seldom John Smith principled human retail investor. It's firms whose entire purpose themselves is to seek maximum return.
"The owners of a privately traded company could decide to"
Meanwhile this DOES actually happen sometimes. See: Valve. We all know there's ways Valve could put up really great growth numbers for about 2-3 years while completely destroying all of the things that make Steam so god damn compelling to users that they can command the same cut as Apple, on an OPEN platform (vs Apple fighting utterly tooth and nail to keep iOS 100% airtight locked down). But they don't.
"For example, zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes"
TBC most founders/CEOs are NOT majority voters in their companies. They answer to the board. Most company founders lose voting control. The fact that Zuck is still in control is incredibly unusual and is a testament to how fast Facebook has grown that he's been able to keep hold of the reins.
And when he took over Twitter in 2022, he immediately dissolved the board and fired the executives who were on it.
(Steam does try to do part of the job of the OS though, taking control over updates and even deciding what is acceptable on their platform and what is not.)
In fact, the relatively new concept of a "public benefit corporation" is (at least in part) an effort to allow for-profit entities to pursue goals other than shareholder enrichment. However, some have criticized public benefit corporations as being entities that simply strengthen executive control at the expense of shareholders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
About Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.:
Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich 459; 170 NW 668 (1919),[1] is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. It is often taught as affirming the principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, although that teaching has received some criticism.[2][3] At the same time, the case affirmed the business judgment rule, leaving Ford an extremely wide latitude about how to run the company.[citation needed]
The general legal position today (except in Delaware, the jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies are domiciled and where shareholder primacy is still upheld[4][5]) is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive.[citation needed] Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
> zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes and if other shareholders don't like it they can kick rocks
This is only true in cases where zuckerberg's actions are not intended to benefit his interests at the expense of other shareholders'. I think in the Ford case, there was not a majority of shareholders who wanted to expand the business and increase wages at the expense of profit, So it was essentially two minority shareholders fighting.
* ETA: I meant "growth" here, not profit
Employees should buy out investors if they want to keep operating for their own personal profit.
This wasn't exactly the question. The question was about growth. A company could be very profitable without growth (say, they own a mine which produces $40 million worth of ore each year with expenses of $10 million with no end in sight) or can have growth without profit (Open AI is a great example, or for history, the first 5 years of Facebook.)
I know most of stock investing is about capital gains and not dividends, but I think GP was saying it's inherently impossible to have growth forever.
On a financial level I get why people prefer to invest their money in a stock that goes up rather than one that pays them 8% a year consistently in dividends, but it seems unfortunate that somehow it seems like we aren't allowed to just have sustainable companies that don't depend on infinite growth to stay in business.
> The company primarily relies on three streams of revenue: user donations, serving ads on select Weird Gloop wikis, and a contract with Jagex that includes a fee to cover hosting and administration costs.
The only difference is that Weird Gloop is the little guy. Competition is good! That might be a good enough reason to choose them if you're in the market for wiki hosting!
But the moral posturing won't last if they become dominant, unless they set up incentives fundamentally differently than Fandom did, which doesn't seem to be the case.
As long as advertising is one of their revenue sources, the user experience will get crappy as soon as the network effects make it hard to leave. The cycle continues.
Venture capital/private equity is what causes this. We've been poisoned to believe that websites should exist purely to achieve hyperscale and extract as much money as possible. When you look at the real physical world there are tons of small "mom and pop" businesses that are content with being self sustainable without some special corporate structure to legally require that.
Maybe websites could be the same?
[1] a variable in whether something can be enshittified, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#History_and_d...
Observant users might notice the removal of any Weird Gloop branding but otherwise the only way people would know if the wiki itself announces the move or performance of the wiki becomes noticeably worse.
And Weird Gloop won't do what Fandom does and keep a zombie copy of your wiki online. So you won't be competing with Weird Gloop wiki traffic to reclaim your traffic. In fact, the obligations they agree to forbid it.
Reading the Minecraft.wiki Memorandum: https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...
Upon termination by either party, Weird Gloop is obligated to:
- Cease operating any version of the Minecraft Wiki
- Transfer ownership of the minecraft.wiki domain to the community members
- Provide dumps of Minecraft Wiki databases and image repositories, and any of Weird Gloop's MediaWiki configuration that is specific to Minecraft Wiki
- Assist in transferring to the community members any domain-adjacent assets or accounts that cannot reasonably be acquired without Weird Gloop's cooperation
- This does not include any of Weird Gloop's core MediaWiki code, Cloudflare configuration, or accounts/relationships related to advertising or sponsorships
This sort of agreement means Weird Gloop is incentivized to not become so shit that wiki would want to leave (and take their ad revenue with them) because they've tried to make leaving Weird Gloop as easy as possible.
And besides, it's not like non-profits are exempt from restructuring and becoming worse. There is no silver bullet.
If any of the wikis we host want to leave, we'd provide them with a database dump. The admins would have to configure all of their own MediaWiki stuff of course, but I figure that's a pretty reasonable switching cost.
Other people just have very different values and the direction of an organization reflects this.
- For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out.
- You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation.
- Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages.
Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on.
The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs.
If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money.
One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic...
At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...
The calculus on this probably changes dramatically as the RPS scales up, though. Not doing work will always be better than doing work in the long run. It's just that it's a memory/time trade-off and I wouldn't take it for granted that it always gives you the most cost-effective end result.
Application level caching (memcached/redis/apcu) is super important even at a small scale.
Most of the time (unless complex extensions are involved or your wiki pages are very simple) mediawiki should be io-bound on converting wikitext -> html (which is why caching that process is important). Normally if db is healthy, db requests shouldn't be the bottle neck (unless you have extensions like smw or cargo installed)
I adopted mediawiki to run a knowledge base for my organization at Microsoft ( https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/I... ).
As I was exploring self-host options that would scale to our org size, it turned out there was already an internal team running a company wide multi-tenant mediawiki PLATFORM.
So I hit them up and a week later we had a custom instance and were off to the races.
Almost all the work that team did was making mediawiki hyper efficient with caching and cache gen, along with a lot of plumbing to have shared infra (AD auth, semitrusted code repos, etc) thst still allowed all of us “customers” to implement whatever whacky extensions and templates we needed.
I still hope that one day Microsoft will acknowledge that they use Mediawiki internally (and to great effect) and open-source the whole stack, or at least offer it as a hosted platform.
I tried setting up a production instance af my next employer - and we ended up using confluence , it was like going back to the dark ages. But I couldn’t make any reasonable financial argument against it - it would have taken a a huge lift to get a vanilla MW instance integrated into the enterprise IT environment.
Last i heard though they were moving off it.
There was some rumours that they were unhappy about mediawiki's response to patches they submitted (they made a bunch around accessibility). However i looked through their patches at one point when this rumour started flying around and it looked like most were merged. Those that weren't generally had code review comments with questions or pointing out mistakes which were never replied to. I sort of suspect the patch thing was some sort of internal excuse because the team involved wanted to make their own thing.
Regardless, im really happy they decided to open source their extensions and it was nice to see that they put in effort to upstream core patches.
The efficiency for scale of mediawiki is hard to beat.
I just assumed they were still there based on momentum.
That said, Digital Ocean is doing their customers a disservice by making the Premium Intel and Premium AMD SKUs look similar. They are not similar. The performance gap is absolutely massive.
And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this:
I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare;
but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas where you click on picture of hydrants, I hate this even more and think: move to Cloudflare already, so I can stop doing this nonsense!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007370
As for "more user-friendly captchas" - I have seen some of those (like AliExpress' slider) but I doubt they will work as well as hydrants. And with new AI startups (1) slurping all the data on the web and (2) writing realistic-looking spam messages, I am sure anti-bot measures would be more important than ever.
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 :(
For example I configured my osdev wiki (mediawiki based) so that the history and other special pages get the Cloudflare test but just viewing a page doesn't trigger it. OpenAI and other bots were generating way too much traffic to pages they don't need.
Blame the bots that are DDOS'ing sites for the captchas.
Aside from that: is DDosing actually illegal (under US law)?
(In other news, the Internet Archive got DDoSed today :(
Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.
Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.
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 now.
The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.
Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.
Disappointing for people just carelessly giving Buttflare the keys to the kingdom and effectively excluding alternative Browser users without considering other options.
It's been a long time since I switched to Cloudflare. Looking through my email archive, it was December 2015. I uncovered an old discussion[0] about the switch, but it only seems to highlight that the server is slow.
But I think it speaks to my lack of skill in this area. I have no actual professional training in system administration, and entirely autodidactic in this area. Though it sounds like Weird Gloop can also provide guidance in these matters rather than simply taking on the hosting. I won't deny that at times I have felt defeated, and that may truly have been my reasoning for switching to Cloudflare.
Though this post and response so far have given me hope.
[0] https://theinfosphere.org/Table:Server_news! (the exclamation point is part of the URL, in case HN ignores it)
350k/ day likely means sometimes it's 3.5 million, all smashed into a 30 minute period of time, because some nitwit linked to my site.
And then, I get paged about "my site being down" and I have to stop hanging out with my friends or family and fiddle around with things I don't want to fuzz with. Or maybe it just breaks and doesn't self heal and it is offline for a week until I notice it and fix it, and by then people all think the site's gone.
Anyhow, sure, maybe people not wanting to devote their lives to devops fanfic is something that can "just be solved with this simple trick cloudflare hates" but maybe not.
I imagine 90% of the traffic (or more) is anonymous users, which can be cached, doesn't Varnish handle that without breaking a sweat?
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're going to might have less time with your studies. As an incentive I can point to a few things that might make the move easier
> 1. We have cool new software - gaming.wikia.com lets users do more blog-like contributions in addition to wiki editing - new social networking tools on the wiki - see our test server at http://sports.box8.tpa.wikia-inc.com/index.php?title=User:[R...
> 2. We could also hire you to help moderate the strategy wiki and other wikis if you need some beer and pizza money :-)
> 3. or we could offer to pay all the hosting costs and share some of the ad impressions/revenue with u
> If nothing else, I'd love to chat by phone and get to know you better.
> Let me know if that'd be ok :-)
It’s so upbeat too. I can totally see someone that doesn’t know better being taken in.
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.
Although I most assuredly was a kid.
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.
Doesn’t it make more sense that a media have site would have been paying through the nose for bandwidth, hence the callout for cloudflare which would have made that cost free?
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.
> 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.
That's not what static means in the context of hosting. Static means you upload files by FTP or WebDav or some other API and that's it. Something like hosting on S3. If users can log in, even if they usually don't, it's nothing like static any more.
Sometimes people add things to their sites that are incompatible with caching, which will make hosting costs go way up.
For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error.
It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.
One game I recently got which has great exploratory potential is Shapez 2. The in-game help is amazing.
While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors.
Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.
I do remember downloadable (and maybe also bundled with game magazines ?) game tricks encyclopedias in the Windows help file format.
Video game magazines would regularly publish short walkthroughs and maps, as well as tips on common places to be stuck in popular games, and cheat codes.
Guidebooks were found in stores next to the games, they were typically slim, full-color affairs full of screenshots and production art, with complete lists of all the stuff you could do in the game. Full walkthroughs, item statistic charts, locations of the 52 Secret Gears you need to collect to build the Wind-Up Sword to achieve the secret ending, etc, etc. Here's a photo of someone's collection of a bunch of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/originalxbox/comments/12rsvll/seems...
What kind of decisions got you in that position? Hard to phatom.
I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them.
[1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o
Like maybe if a request for an image doesn't result in a 304, instead of sending a 200 response you redirect to lower res versions, or just 429 out. How much throttling do you do? And do you let bots still run full speed for SEO reasons or do you do something else there?
I wonder how much the effect of lots of people having a redirect extension has. If google sees people click on the fandom result and not come back, do they treat it as a good result when in reality people are redirecting to poewiki via the extension?
The situation improves every league, particularly since now there are quite a lot of items, skill gems or skill tree node passives/notables missing from the fandom wiki. It's much better than in the past when you could outright search "<skill> poewiki" and not have the poewiki result anywhere.
But it still feels like there's a long way to go, and it's a shame because it further increases the knowledge gap between experienced players who might know to seek out the poewiki, and new players (or very casual players) who might not.
It hints also at the power of the "old web" and it's historic power over google rankings.
Could you imagine if someone declared a successor to wikipedia and edited all the pages to redirect?
Sometimes you just have to put the effort into making the new better, and it's a hard long slog especially against a well funded incumbent.
But like all problems in PoE, PoE2 will fix it. ;)
> But like all problems in PoE, PoE2 will fix it. ;)
Isn't that the game for which Sannikov came up with his new global illumination algorithm? [1] (Apparently yes)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3so7xdZHKxw
Not a huge loss, although it still feels like a bitter ending after I spent years sprucing up a bunch of their wikis.
It was and remains a worthwhile trade-off to ensure folks got to the right wiki though.
I've configured it to lower results from *.fandom.com and am really happy about it.
(I'm guessing it does technically exist online, but access to it is limited to closed beta players (under NDA) for now ?)
https://www.poe2wiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_2_Wiki
(As a contributor for the wiki for PoE1 I really should have tried the obvious link... less obvious on the phone though !)
Yes, they will monetize the content, but they'll also manage it because it makes them money. Content on fandom is probably going to still be available 10 years later. It's the same with DeviantArt, it's worse now than it has ever been, but artwork uploaded 10 years ago is still available, and it will probably still be available 10 years later. You could also say this about Youtube, Google, and many other platforms.
I hope the emerging alternatives prove to be successful, but so far I still don't see a reliable alternative for Youtube, Google, or DeviantArt (or even Twitter, Reddit, etc.). In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a replacement win in the long run. Maybe I'm just too young.
https://www.wiki.fextralife.com/
Comments sections on wikis there for e.g. FromSoftware games can tend toward rebarbativity, and the ads can be annoying, but in my recent experience the information troves compiled for big games such as Elden Ring are an indispensable resource.
Truth be told, it appears that Weird Gloop/mediawiki has a bit of a monopoly on wiki platforms that don't suck.
The initial Dark Souls wikidot was excellent. Fextralife bullied and threatened them into closing down. At this point, people don't move on because of habit, but the quality for the Elden Ring wiki is dramatically bad. Information is outdated, poorly maintained, actual fixes are being reverted by their own, paid editors, other wikis are suspiciously often the target of attacks and deleted content.
But I haven't experienced problems with information in the guides. Off the top of my head: for Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Hollow Knight, I don't recall a single time when the info was flat out wrong. In the case of comments pointing out something incorrect or incomplete, it had already been fixed by the time of my reading.
It also highlights an important difference between why wikis can be useful. If I want information about Elden Ring as a game, Fextralife is pretty good (with some ublock filters to kill the stupid chat), but it does that at the expense of information about Elden Ring as a fictional world. That's not usually why I'm looking up Elden Ring information, but it sometimes is.
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 random person paying the bill for eternity for a game they themself moved on from long ago.
Yeah, it has ads, but someone has to pay the bill. I'll take the ad-ridden wiki that exists over the idealized one that went offline seven years ago when the interest died out.
This becomes a metaphor for the internet in general.
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.
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 intentional measures like changing forking policy, and the community having to fight against network effect/SEO) they enshittify to squeeze out profit. Result is a worse site than if Fandom/etc. had never existed.
Relatively optimistic about movement towards structures that resist this kind of exploitation.
[1]: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis
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.
Most of the costs are those that scale up/down by activity - MediaWiki itself is free/open-source and the wiki's content is contributed for free by volunteers.
Also, keep in mind I'm not saying that each wiki needs to be individually self-hosted. Can be a host the size of WeirdGloop but made up of smaller game wikis, for instance.
> I'm more concerned about the rest of the wikis like the example I gave where I'm googling for game mechanics for a dead game.
Prospects for long term information accessibility are pretty terrible on sites aggressively squeezing out all the profit they can. See Reddit eliminating archives and third party clients and then cutting off all search engines that don't pay, or mass deletions of user content by sites like Photobucket/Imgur/etc.
> You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that.
With significant difficulty, fighting against both Fandom's policies and SEO/network effects. The OP lists "wiki communities need to be able to freely leave their host" as the primary rule for "How to not turn into Fandom 2.0".
> You have to stick around for another decade so people can find that information long after you've lost interest
Hence ability and willingness to pass on the torch is critical - so that the information doesn't die with one person or company.
— Something becomes popular.
— A $POPULAR_THING Wiki is swiftly created, some freelancers are hired to create article stubs. Links to it spread through other popular wikis.
— People trying to learn something about that topic get a lot of search results directing them to that new wiki. They assume that it's some kind of “community”, try to participate, and never realize that they're making love to an inflatable doll. Real activity, links and clicks now force the pages to stay on top, and attract even more naive visitors.
Of course, it's not specific to that site. “Social” sites often make people believe that they “interact” with thousands or millions of others, when in fact they shout into an empty box, and watch the movements of a primitive mechanism.
[1]https://liquipedia.net/
https://getindie.wiki/
https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited
Some donations, some ads, and contracts (one so far) with companies that benefit.
It all looks very Wikipedia-like. I wonder if the WMF could be persuaded to throw some of their massive pile of cash in this direction, in the public interest? But then Weird Gloop would probably have to be a non-profit.
At especially large scales, spinning the API and job queues off altogether into microservices and insulating the live site from the performance impact of logging this whole rat's nest.