Hallelujah. Fandom I think is the single most unusable site I have any reason to visit; every time there's a Show HN about a service to 'simplify' a webpage, Fandom is the site I test it on.<p>A history recap for those who do not know:<p>2013: Minecraft Wiki migrates from a self-hosted solution to Gamepedia run by Curse. This was a good decision at the time, because Curse was pretty trusted in the community; Minecraft modding centers around CurseForge the way Skyrim does around Nexus.<p>2016: Twitch buys Curse. The Curse Launcher is rebranded as the Twitch Launcher and turned into a desktop Twitch client that also does Minecraft modding. The wikis are initially unaffected. This sucks.<p>2018: Twitch starts breaking up Curse, and sells off Gamepedia to Fandom. This also sucks because Fandom starts inserting more ads, but the ads are manageable compared to Fandom proper.<p>2020: Gamepedia wikis are migrated over to Fandom proper, for SEO. Overnight the site becomes completely unusable. This sucks much worse, and actually manages to damage Twitch's brand (because a lot of people think they're involved, due to it still being called the Twitch Launcher) and they shutter the launcher and sell off CurseForge (the modding part) to Overwolf.
Excellent. I hope to see more games following suit away from the bloated messes of fandom/fextralife. At times they feel unusable on mobile. And I don't think a single user has wanted to see the embedded twitch streams when they're just trying to get some information quickly.
For some background, the old wiki was hosted on Fandom. All the major volunteer contributors are moving to minecraft.wiki, but the old page will almost certainly stay up, frozen in time, throwing trackers and ads on kids not savvy enough to locate the new link.<p>It is interesting to me how many games, Minecraft in particular, rely on wikis - they're very different experiences, sometimes almost unplayable, if you don't read up on how to make progress.
Here's a good summary of controversy surrounding Fandom and why fandoms tend to leave: <a href="https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-wikis.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-...</a><p>And it doesn't even really touch on how Fandom, sometimes, refuses to delete the old wiki for traffic purposes, and leaves it up as a "zombie" wiki that smothers the new wiki due to SEO, or the more serious conflicts between some admins and contributors in some other specific fandoms.
I still maintain an independent Futurama wiki from Fandom. Back when they were called Wikia, they wanted to merge with our wiki, but I insisted on a no ads policy. So talks basically went nowhere. They still have a Futurama wiki, and ours is still online. Though, these days, it's mostly other editors filling in the content, I am just a system administrator at this point.<p>I am still happy with our decision, because Wikia/Fandom has since then just gotten worse.
The RuneScape Wiki and OldSchool RuneScape Wiki left Fandom in 2018, for similar reasons: <a href="https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia</a><p>I think the move has been really successful. They've managed to add lots of exciting game-specific features to the wiki, like tracking requirements for a quest, or historical item prices. It also didn't seem to take long for the new wiki results to rank above the Wikia/Fandom results on search engines.<p>Good luck to the Minecraft wiki and its contributors!
Fandom (I really prefer their old name, "Wikia") is a great concept. Deal with hosting the wiki so you can focus on content. The problem is that they need to make money, and to do that, they do it with some of the most obnoxious ads on any reputable site on the modern internet. Using their site on a mobile browser is one of the worst web experiences I've ever had. Autoplaying video ad banners on the top with a smaller ad banner on the bottom while I scroll past an ad in the middle of the article.<p>I'm all for seeing wikis leave them because it'll be a huge usability win. Fandom can still fill the gap for small niche wikis that don't want to deal with hosting and such, but larger established wikis using their own platform will be great.
NetHack did this when Fandom was still called Wikia. Luckily, the new forked site won search engines over easily and nethackwiki.com easily comes on first results if you search for NetHack stuff.<p>Unlike NetHack, the Minecraft Fandom site is probably a lot more lucrative in ad revenue.<p>I randomly was checking on Fandom's wikipedia page and noticed: "On October 3, 2022, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures."<p>I had no idea they've been collecting sites like infinity stones. I guess ads pay handsomely? Ugh.
Starfield is currently undergoing a bit of a wiki arms race. There's at least four that I know of, plus an honorable mention:<p>• <a href="https://starfieldwiki.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://starfieldwiki.net</a><p>• <a href="https://starfield.fandom.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://starfield.fandom.com</a><p>• <a href="https://starfield.wiki.fextralife.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://starfield.wiki.fextralife.com</a><p>• <a href="https://www.starfielddb.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.starfielddb.com</a><p>• <a href="https://www.ign.com/wikis/starfield" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.ign.com/wikis/starfield</a> (this is the honorable mention)<p>None of them are complete, and all have vastly different ideas on how it should work and look. Want to know what the best shield generator is? Some wikis will have their own page on them, others just have it stuffed into a table called "starship components", maybe divided by category.<p>---<p>Whats interesting is that Ward Cunningham saw all these problems YEARS ago, and started pushing for a federated wiki experience. Doesn't seem to have caught on outside a very small niche circle, sadly. IMO because the various wikis that implement the federated wiki are lacking a lot of features that other wiki engines provide
The Path of Exile wiki made a similar move a few years ago. Fandom was such a limitation for the community and the ads and page speed were awful. Now the Minecraft wiki will have to spend effort beating the Fandom site on SEO so that people get directed to the actually updated wiki. For Path of Exile there was a browser extension that would hide the Fandom from search results and redirect you to the new community wiki.
It's currently my 5th result for "minecraft wiki" on Kagi, after I decided to penalize fandom.com's ranking on a whim.<p>(Also, the 2nd result is an official Mastodon post which mirrors this announcement, so it would be easily discoverable. Not too bad!)<p>(For Google, it's the 7th result for me, below three different versions of fandom.com).
>Our new host has better built out infrastructure that makes the site load significantly faster than Fandom, especially in different parts of the world and with slower internet connections<p>I'm reading this over the ultra-slow[1] airplane satellite wifi. The wiki loaded reasonably quickly. I don't even want to try opening any fandom wiki (it probably wouldn't load at all). Congrats!<p>I had to search for this information a bit, but looks like the new wiki is powered by MediaWiki. I wonder if there's a market for fandom alternative that would offer easy to onboard instances to various groups (so they don't get locked into fandom early).<p>[1] Because I bought the cheapest plan, of course.
UESP is the gold standard for wikis.<p><a href="https://uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page</a>
Crazy thing is that Fandom is (now) owned by Jimmy Wales!<p>Can you imagine if this kind of advertisement came to Wikipedia? Would make the fundraising banners look like nothing.
I wish more wikis would take this step - Fandom (ex-Wikia) has become so ad-infested that I honestly avoid looking up stuff there as much as possible (which is a shame, because lots of fans put a lot of work into building those wikis).
The problem is 'Fandom' (a gross brand name I would refuse to say without airquotes) always has better SEO. The Elder Scrolls has an excellent independent wiki, UESP, but normal people click the first Google result and have no way of knowing it isn't the 'right' wiki
I've always wondered why a wiki needs to monetize so hard. Most of their content easily cacheable and produced by volunteers, plus the technology hasn't really changed in 20 years. The whole site could probably be maintained by a single dev and a few admins. It seems natural that these sites are going to eventually be replaced because of this. Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue.
Previously: "Minecraft Wiki considers move away from Fandom to new platform" <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36648325</a>
Its shocking how unusable Fandom is if not using an ad-blocker. I don't know why developers just don't host their own mediawiki installation.<p>The Paradox Studios wiki's are the best: <a href="https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Wiki" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Wiki</a>
I always wondered why the wiki was so complete yet so shitty at the same time. I though MS was extracting value via ads. I was wrong.<p>In MCs case a wiki is such integral part of the game it should almost be integrated.
Terraria also moved, in a similar move.
<a href="https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki</a>
The same announcement on their official Mastodon account if you prefer (or if the Twitter link ever becomes difficult/impossible to access): <a href="https://wikis.world/@MinecraftWikiEN/111121512237906439" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://wikis.world/@MinecraftWikiEN/111121512237906439</a>
"The new Minecraft Wiki will be hosted by Weird Gloop, the company that hosts the RuneScape wikis."<p>OSRS set the bar pretty high:
<a href="https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/</a><p>Clean, concise, and accurate.
WoWWiki (now called Wowpedia) is thinking about leaving Fandom too [1], which is interesting when you consider their past.<p>Back in the day, WoWWiki started as its own thing before it shifted over to Wikia (what we now know as Fandom).<p>Wikia was even worse than Fandom today. They had this set layout that didn’t work for many of the wikis they brought in. This led some folks from the community to branch out and create Wowpedia, which was on its own again.<p>Later, Wowpedia joined Curse's Gamepedia, kind of like Wikia but not as in-your-face.<p>But here’s the twist: in 2018, Fandom/Wikia bought Gamepedia. So, Wowpedia landed back with Fandom. At some point, they decided to archive WoWWiki so there is only Wowpedia now.<p>----<p>My personal opinion in general about this topic is that Fandom is a very bad host (Wikia used to be worse, to be fair), but the worst is having two competing wikis.<p>At least in this Minecraft's case, it looks like the majority of contributors moved together.<p>The situation of WowWiki/Wowpedia at the time was just sad, a lot of hard work went down the drain.<p>And speaking of which, isn’t the Terraria Wiki going through something similar right now?<p>Out of two wikis:<p><a href="https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki</a>
<a href="https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria_Wiki</a><p>I can't figure out which one’s busier right now. I understand that terraria.wiki.gg now is the "official" one, but if you check out their recent change frequencies, they seem pretty close.<p>I can’t help thinking there's a lot of duplicated effort here too.<p>[1] <a href="https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Forum:Vote_to_Leave_Fandom" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Forum:Vote_to_Leave_Fandom</a>
This is their link to their more detailed reasoning: <a href="https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki:Moving_from_Fandom" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki:Moving_from_Fandom</a>
>Unfortunately, because Fandom does not close wikis that have moved away, the old Fandom wiki will remain in place and continue to appear in search results.<p>Wow that's vendor lock in right there.<p>Fandom should have features to make the wiki read only, disable new posts, also a feature to pin a permanent banner for announcements, in this case for announcing the new home/link.<p>That will be a much better migration path.
A similar situation happened with the Spanish Pokémon wiki. (now WikiDex) [1]<p>And if you look for "fandom" in the wiki's search, it redirects to an entry about a location in the game called "Castelia Sewers". [2]<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/WikiDex:WikiDex_ya_no_forma_parte_de_FANDOOM" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/WikiDex:WikiDex_ya_no_forma_par...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/Cloacas_Porcelana" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.wikidex.net/wiki/Cloacas_Porcelana</a>
Url changed from <a href="https://twitter.com/MinecraftWikiEN/status/1706004078206103965" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/MinecraftWikiEN/status/17060040782061039...</a>, which points to this.<p>Submitters: "<i>Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.</i>" - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
In all seriousness, what fuck is going on in Fandom? It has soooo much ads!<p>I just turned off my ad blocker and literally only 21% of the page is content and the remaining is ads. After 2 seconds, it got replaced by a full screen ad. What? How? What are the people at fandom thinking? This is completely unusable without adblockers!<p>Don't believe me, here are the screenshots I just took: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/sNg3IlJ" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://imgur.com/a/sNg3IlJ</a>
Nice. Before this, I was using BreezeWiki[0], which is frontend for Fandom.<p>[0]: <a href="https://breezewiki.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://breezewiki.com/</a>
Reminder that all Mojang and Minecraft accounts were deleted last Tuesday.<p>The fact that they are removing a the ability for people to access a game they paid for is unacceptable and should be illegal.
I have a low end to play Minecraft, hence I could choose either play or browse fandom (Linux, Firefox) because fandom so much slowed down it. However other sites seem okay. So in this way I'm glad the Minecraft wiki is faster now. Need to check the performance. However the money does not come from the sky. I understand you have to have ads on your site to haven't it funded and I wonder who funds minecraft.wiki
Fantastic, I'm really interested in how it goes since the fandom wiki might be the single largest fan wiki project I've ever seen. I'd be surprised if they ever hit parity, but assuming people don't keep updating fandom (why would they?) then it'll be _the_ resource in no time at all.
Doesn’t the domain name clearly infringe on Microsoft’s trademark? Even as someone who is knowledgeable, I can see this causing confusion. As useful as this is, I don’t see site lasting for very long at the current domain without an agreement from the trademark owner.
the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure's wiki left fandom in 2019: <a href="https://jojowiki.com/Special:WikiForum/Leaving_Fandom" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://jojowiki.com/Special:WikiForum/Leaving_Fandom</a>