Fandom has since become one of my least favorite websites, simply because of the ads, and the “Honest Trailers” videos that automatically show up (and follow you) regardless of the topic of the page you’re on, not to mention that their mobile site is pure garbage. It’s just pure garbage, alright.
And I’m a person who browses Logopedia regularly, which is still hosted on Fandom. Boo. Thank goodness the Minecraft Wiki left that.
I’m not arguing that tho. Im not arguing what makes random different from social media sites.
For example news sites are also littered with ads. Porn sites, littered with ads. Blog sites, littered with ads. Google searches even come up with search result ads.
It’s everywhere man, I’m just arguing that fandom is no worse than anywhere else.
But yes, switching to respectful amounts of ads or none at all if possible is preferable to what fandom is right now.
My original comment is just pointing out that I don’t really think anyone actually cares that much about this stuff, and that I personally dont like all these negative echo chambers everywhere.
Everyone’s obviously valid in venting and what not, but I figured I’d point out my viewpoint too while we’re at it 🤷🏻♂️
It’s embarrassing that huge and ongoing successful games can’t shell out to host official wikis, but instead leave it to the community to either pay out or pocket (not happening) or pick whichever crappy provider they can find willing to host it for ads.
A good wiki needs to have mosly text, a modest amount of pictures, no self-hosted video, and low computing needs. While an unpleasant expense for a private individual, it doesn’t cost a company much to host.
Looking it up, there is WikiWikiWeb implements Federated Wiki, which Wikipedia describes its primary features as:
adds forking features found in source control systems and other software development tools to wikis. […]The software allows its users to fork wiki pages, maintaining their own copies. Federation supports what Cunningham has described as “a chorus of voices” where users share content but maintain their individual perspectives. This approach contrasts with the tendency of centralized wikis such as Wikipedia to function as consensus engines.
Gonna look more into Federated Wiki today, because this sounds super interesting to me c:
I don’t think a built-in wiki should be a priority for Lemmy. The sysadmin of an instance.com instance can host a separate web app as a standalone wiki at wiki.instance.com.
For example, you could host an mdbook at this subdomain to serve as a docs-style wiki.
While I agree that it’s rather sad for developer not hosting their Wiki, I really never had any problem with the old hoster of the Minecraft Wiki. I certainly didn’t perceive it as a “crappy provider”. It did exactly what it needed to and there weren’t any intrusive adds or at least not to my attention. But maybe I’m just really good at ignoring adds myself.
Edit: Or mabye my add blocker did help, hard to tell since I haven’t seen the internet without it since years now.
Ya, not all are the level of Fandom. The old one for Minecraft was somewhat tolerable without an ad-blocker. I don’t really feel it is fair to blame the providers either - even Fandom. They are stepping up to offer something nobody else feels like paying for.
While fandom sucks (although I think it used to be fine before the redesign many years ago) and game companies/publishers are cheap, I still think 3rd party wikis is going to better, even shitty ones like fandom, because guess what?
Just like every other ‘live service’ (or even just old games!?! if you’re Ubisoft) everything will be fine and dandy until one day some suit decides to shut down the wiki to cut down on costs and all that information and community work gets flushed down the toilet.
With that said, instead of them making some wiki website, it’s nice when games lets you look up information in the game itself, without having to open the web browser and going to some wiki.
Arenanet provides a Wiki for Guild Wars 1 and 2. They are both amazing and the second one even integrates into GW2. When GW1 came out it started as a community service but Arenanet took it in officially.
Honestly, without the wiki and the massive work by the community I’d be very lost in GW2.
They should have gone the terraria way of handling a wiki before. Terraria has a functional wiki because it’s its own thing. I am not even sure the fandom websites is meant to be read given the amount of ads that litterally cover the whole page.
The Terraria wiki is hosted on wiki.gg, which the Minecraft wiki editors strongly considered (reading through the discussion, it seemed like a strong second choice behind Weird Gloop/RuneScape wiki). But wiki.gg really has a lot of the same problems as fandom, just to a lesser degree. Still has a fair amount of ads, still has wiki.gg branding on the website, and most importantly in the discussions I read, they wouldn’t be able to use a domain the Minecraft wiki owns (as in it wold have been at minecraft.wiki.gg rather than minecraft.wiki). The big problem with not having their own domain is that if things ever go south with wiki.gg (for example if they get bought by Fandom), they would be starting from scratch as far as SEO/discoverability goes, same as they are now.
Weird Gloop (the host for the RuneScape wikis) offered fewer ads, a comparable hosting infrastructure, and the ability to use their own domain, as well as a lot of experience forking from fandom successfully, which sounds like it was really valuable to them.
I only just switched over to firefox + UBO on my phone, and it’s so much better. I had just assumed that the beautiful ad-free experience I get on my PC wasn’t available on phone, but by jove it is.
U matrix is also a great option, it takes original to the max and lets you automatically allow list or deny list specific domains and their components (html, css, JavaScript, cookies, frames, and xhr(i think that was the last option not sure)
It also lets you block mixed content, referrer information and a lot more. It’s been incredibly helpful
Setup a Pihole and never face this issue again. Blocks ads at dns level which doesn’t get everything but gets the majority of ads.
All you need to do is make sure to keep the lil guy updated. You can even view your traffic and see which ads aren’t getting caught and manually add those domains.
Lastly, you play minecraft in steam? What is wrong with you 😝
Going to a site with a terrible autoplay pseudo-podcast that refreshes on every new page is basically the MySpace experience. It’s incredibly difficult, by the way, for small projects to have their wikis deleted and wiki site staff are less than helpful. Always nice for a defunct wiki to rise to the top of search results when the project website hosts quite a bit more identically formatted information but without random penis based articles. I love that.
It's reached the point (or had a couple of years ago, which was the last time I went to a wiki hosted there) that it's virtually impossible to even read an entry, since there are so many ads that the actual text of the article spends more time off the screen than on it.
They use ai to generate inaccurate pages, cover up text with egregious ads and refuse to remove content written by dissatisfied, migrating users but mostly just make unusable websites in general (I’m sure there’s even more reasons to boycott however)
And before that the majority of their content was scraped from other, well-meaning sources. They just have great SEO, don’t mind copy+pasting, and hope that the network effect makes them to de facto source for [insert topic] while serving you ads.
Their website is also extremely laggy with all the boatloads of ads they keep covering their pages with. The ads really got extremely out of control and made the entire website completely unusable for me - at least it’s possible to bypass that with BreezeWiki for now…
minecraft.wiki
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