2y ago

Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site

www.pcgamer.com Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site

Citing "lack of transparency from Fandom [...] loss of features [...] and toxic company culture."

Here's hoping they migrate to wiki.gg as Terraria's contributors have a while ago.

Gaming @beehaw.org

alyaza [they/she] @beehaw.org

2y ago

Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site

www.pcgamer.com /official-minecraft-wiki-editors-so-furious-at-fandoms-degraded-functionality-and-popups-theyre-overwhelmingly-voting-to-leave-the-site/

341 74

Games @sh.itjust.works

simple @lemmy.world

2y ago

Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site

www.pcgamer.com /official-minecraft-wiki-editors-so-furious-at-fandoms-degraded-functionality-and-popups-theyre-overwhelmingly-voting-to-leave-the-site/

163 15

Gaming @kbin.social

EnglishMobster @kbin.social

2y ago

Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site

www.pcgamer.com /official-minecraft-wiki-editors-so-furious-at-fandoms-degraded-functionality-and-popups-theyre-overwhelmingly-voting-to-leave-the-site/

85 28

162 comments

please, fandom is one of the worst sites on the internet
- When the old school RuneScape wiki moved to a self hosted solution it was night and day the quality difference. I’d argue that OSRS (and probably regular RS) have some of the best wikis in gaming.
  https://osrs.wiki
  
  From what I've heard, the RS3 wiki was even better, but for sure both are fantastic. Prime examples of how wikis should work. They're even fully integrated into the game.
  
  Yeah, the RS3 wiki is genuinely fantastic. Daily updates, calculators for virtually every activity, and you can search it directly from the game’s chat box.
- Fr. Recently the Satisfactory wiki moved off of fandom and it is already so much better. More wikis need to drop fandom.
- But somehow fextralife is even worse.
- I installed Firefox with uBlock Origin on Android primarily because fandom hosts the Forgotten Realms wiki and it's intolerable.
- The four horsemen of the video game Google search apocalypse are Fandom, IGN, Polygon, and GameRant
- It used to be so decent, but man, it turned to crap. I hardly recognize what it once was.
- @Kovu @simple
  I've literally installed an extension to block out fandom results while searching and redirecting to self-hosted fanwikis instead. I hate that ad filled website.

I'm pleased to hear that they're moving. Fandom's had a monopoly on the community-created wiki space for far too long, and it's had a dire effect on the usability of so many wikis. It's like they're trying to make their site everything but a easily usable resource for community wikis.
On a related note, I highly recommend the "Indie Wiki Buddy" extension for Chrome and Firefox. When non-Fandom/Fextralife wikis are available, it'll direct you to those instead; and when they're not, it'll allow you to view the Fandom wiki through a much more usable mirror.
- If this was available for FF on Android I would be a happy man. Thank you for your comment though. I installed on my laptop!
  
  You can install any extension you want, but it's a bit of a process. https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozilla-firefox-android/
  
  Use android dev or a fork like Fennec, set your own addon collection, then install any addon on mobile by adding it to your collection. Bit more annoying than it should be, but once set up allmost as convenient as on desktop

Going to Fandom is like visiting a annoying dying person because they hold the hidden information.

Path of Exile did the same thing, going from fandom to https://poewiki.net. And thank god they did, fuck fandom
- Satisfactory recently left fandom as well.
- I'm hoping fallout does as well. Ever since the two fallout wiki merged, I feel like the experience of looking for info on the wiki has been hobbled by fandom.
- Is poewiki just the MediaWiki software (IIRC, the name of the software that runs the official Wikipedia) hosted on their own server? For official wikis it can be feasible, for user-made ones it would surely be more difficult than just using Wikia / fandom / etc...
  
  Yup, it is.
  And yeah, it is more difficult than just using wikia/fandom/etc, but it also provides such a better experience. Not all game communities will go to that length, but PoE players are a different breed ¯(ツ)_/¯

Stardew Valley did the right thing by self hosting a wiki, makes it both official and independent
- Several have, including the old school RuneScape wiki!
  Now there's two, and one is far more content full

I hope the Fallout and Final Fantasy wikies also migrate out from fandom. Back when they were wikia, they were a lot better. It feels that the search function on fandom is so bad that half the time you're better off going on google and slapping your search there instead.
- Even Wikia was a bloated mess back in the days. Fandom made it worse.
- The Independent Fallout Wiki is a thing. I can't vouch for its value though; I haven't really used it.

Fandom is barely usable at this point. I feel like they're just relying on no one wanting to put in the effort of coordinating a migration elsewhere.
- It was never usable, to my mind.
  
  I admit, all of my fandom.com experience is post wikia-buyout, but just after they bought wikia and before every wikia.com became a fandom.com site, it was still good.

Lol, they moved out from Reddit and now they moved out from Fandom.
But their solution could be as simple as make their own wiki.
- Imagine if we already had all the tools needed, and all that's missing is a bit of hosting and a bit of moderation. If only there was a company with some extra cash behind this… haha.
  But it's seriously time people retake some kind of control over their online activity. All these "services" looking at every occasion to screw their user is getting annoying.
  
  Yeah I think people need to separate "popular" from "profitable" in their minds because while I do spend a lot of time on the internet, most of it isn't for anything I'd be willing to pay for, and if it's just an excuse to show me ads, I'm not interested.
  We see the shit you're doing, we don't like it, and while it might boost some numbers in the short term, it also primes users for the next alternative that won't just be embraced because it's new and shiny, but specifically because it's not the site that used to be great but thought they could abuse their users' time and attention for greater profits.
  Like at this point, Reddit could do a full 180 and allow 3rd party apps to return, improve their own UX through their site and official apps, and give up on the IPO entirely, but I still won't be likely to return because all of that just sounds too good to be true and I like it better here than Reddit has been for years.
  I don't really want to be someone's product anymore. And if that breaks the whole Internet's business model, then so be it.
  
  You can use MediaWiki, the official Wikipedia software (it's open source)...
- I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't forced some Teams/SharePoint mandate on them
  
  This isn't about Mojang. This is about a wiki that is mostly maintained by fans but endorsed by Mojang as the official wiki. If MS tries to force some bullshit Teams or SP solution via Mojang and official branding, the fans will likely abandon it in favor of an unofficial one not hogtied to some BS MS ecosystem.
- That has worked well for valve. TF2 wiki is incredible
- It is interesting that there is a wiki of the game in Spanish, probably not official though(it says official... but who really knows).
  wikiminecraft.es

I make it a point to actively avoid Fandom. They're fucking horrible. Luckily for the type of games I'm interested in there's alternatives available (for eg doomwiki, halopedia, UESP)

Fandom has been a pretty terrible experience for awhile now. I hope they find a better home.
- They should move to Neocities

uBlock Origin makes it way better, but still, you shouldn't have to use that in the first place
- This makes fandom much better by outright blocking the entire site and redirecting you to alternatives instead
  If they have a proper wiki that is not a fandom one for the topic, it redirects you there, otherwise it lets you use a proxy like antifandom to access the data without going on the fandom website

Just whatever you do, do not use Google docs to share information that belongs to a wiki. That's is by far the most annoying option and 100 times worse than just having to deal with a fandom wiki.
- I agree, it'll also make a mess out of your "shared tab" on your drive. Me opening a document from som random doesn't mean that I want it to bury the documents that has been actively shared with me, from my wife for instance.

The RuneScape wikis did this several years ago, might even be a decade at this point. The actual developer studio, Jagex, helps pay to keep them online and independent because of how damn good they are and how useful it is for everyone, including developers, to reference.
Microsoft (or Mojang? I don't know anymore) would be well served to do the same here honestly.
- The RS Wiki is amazing and should be the shining example for wikis. As shitty as Jagex can be, they did a really awesome thing to help keep it going.
- OSRS wikis are too fucking good man. They have completely spoiled me.
  
  Same. Hell the exact numbers it has for drop rates has spoiled me even comparing to the RS3 wiki.

Good, Fandom's wiki's are garbage.

"But ever since the acquisition contributors and editors have been uneasy about Fandom's big money owners applying the nipple clamps and, ..."
The article is worth reading just for that paragraph, if nothing else.
- "There is also deep disquiet among wiki editors over a recent controversy with the McDonalds wiki, in which Fandom replaced the existing Grimace page to a paid-for McDonalds advertorial, without the consent or knowledge of the McDonalds wiki editors. No I'm not making this up."
  Then again, this one came in in a close second.
  
  "42 Minecraft wiki contributors and editors have voted to tell Fandom to fork off"
  And this comes in at number three.

I'm an editor for a community wiki that moved off fandom a few years ago to Mireheze. When the recent discussion about Miraheze shutting down happened I briefly inquired about where we would migrate to, expressing my hope to not return to fandom, and was quite thouroghly assured that fandom is not somewhere that would even be considered returning to. I don't think I've had a single positive experience on a fandom wiki ever, or at least not in over 8 years, with issues ranging from intrusive ads, to the comment section pop in making scrolling inconsistent, to even something as simple as it universally looking fucking ugly, I can't wait for people to leave and am actively cheering on its slow death as a website.

A lot of people are moving to wiki.gg l. It has so many more features
- I love wiki.gg. Such a pleasant site to use.
- Dead Cells wiki is great there. Far better than fandom
  
  Deep rock galactic wiki looks much better on wiki.gg also

Fandom is a huge headache to even navigate, I couldn't imagine what it’s like to maintain it

Fandom has always been massive garbage, thank goodness

- Exactly this.
  When a company can't expand its market share anymore they will make the product cheaper, worse and more expensive.
  For tech this means filling the product with bloat, upping the prices for consumers, and lowering their payouts to creators (subcontractors).
- What's wrong with Spotify?
  
  Did I miss the reference to Spotify?

Looks like the add-supported-free-stuff business model really is collapsing.
- If ad companies would be paid according to customer conversion rate instead of how many ads they spam everywhere, it would collapse within a financial quarter.
  Thinking that people support a brand or product that constantly annoys them is next-level stupid, but it's their main strategy. Google's conversion rate is less than 4% and instead of realizing that spamming trillions of ads on every site is causing that abysmal rate, they double down and get off to bigger "reach".
  Also, Google lied to customers of their TrueView ads and just presented people muted autoplay ads instead. Here's an analysis about that.
  https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads
  tl;dr the only one benefitting from ads is Google.
  
  As aptly explained by writer Cory Doctorow:
  Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I am an admin on another wiki that used to be on Gamepedia before the Fandom buyout. We forked immediately. I have also been self hosting a wiki for another game since early 2017. Completely worth it. Fandom has always had terrible user experience, and frankly they do not care about their users at all. Maybe their community-level staff do, but definitely not the higher ups. I've chatted with them directly when we were planning to fork. They're only in it for the money, not for the good of the editors or readers. They make ridiculous changes that are great for advertisers but completely subvert the user experience and actual content on the page. They've also let go a lot of their staff for nonsensical reasons. I really hope the Minecraft wiki goes through with the fork, and that more and more wikis follow. It's absurd how much of a monopoly they have, given how awful their service is. I for one will be happy to visit the Minecraft wiki again, as someone who plays occasionally, but not often enough to be keeping tabs on all the new features and updates. But I boycott Fandom wikis on principle so I haven't been there in years.

Does anyone know how wiki.gg makes money? Wiki hosting side without stable income will just get bought out by bigger player or turn bad like fandom
- Wiki gg does have ads, but they're pretty unobtrusive and are only videogame related.

It's funny, many wikis moved off then-wikia to Curse's Gamepedia family and then they just merged back again, kinda sad :(

The old Minecraft Wiki was so great. I was pissed when I heard they got bought by Fandom...

Fandom is so utterly annoying with those unrelated videos. Really annoying website.

An ActivityPub wiki would be nice
- Don't think it's really necessary. The different wikis don't really need to talk to each other. But an open source Gamepedia-like wiki software would be great. Maybe it exists already.
  Wiki.gg is very good though.
- Idk if that makes any sense tbh. I guess it could work though. I don't really see the application.
  
  Ability to contribute to all wikis and to federate content from the wikis across one another without having them all owned by one company like fandom.com
- I hadn't considered that previously, but I think that is a great idea!

Thank god, fuck that site. I hope they move to wiki.gg
- Is wiki.gg meant for only developer-sanctioned wikis?
  
  That question is above my pay grade, sorry. All I know is when I use the wiki on wiki.gg it's a good experience overall.
  I did see a form where you can request a game to be added, but beyond that I'm fairly ignorant.

Fandom is unusable garbage.

I would love to see a federated wiki platform form somehow, as centralization has honestly been pretty terrible for both wikipedia and wikia/fandom.
- Federated wiki does not sound like a good idea, as in, all articles coming from different servers. But we don't have to go that far; hosting a wiki is quite straightforward. If you're already paying for hosting, you might as well just use the tools readily available. But for "fan" wiki, you'd require a strong enough core to handle that part while other contributes.
  
  I think it would work like how it does here, where you can access/edit all the pages on independent wikis hosted on different servers with one account identity. Federation is about getting both the advantages of centralized services and independent operations (sometimes disadvantages too), and I think outside of forums, fan wikis are probably the best sites for a federation structure. After all, wikia/fandom already kinda operates like this.
- I thought all your comments were related to the Barbie movie
  
  Oh come on, I am capable of way more than just being a marketing genius on Lemmy, and running one dumb repetitive joke into the ground like a shitty reddit novelty account isn't very funny, unlike my new movie, "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.
  (But seriously though, comedy is about timing more than anything else.)
- Wikipedia?
  
  Yeah... A lot of it is just reddit-like powermod activities and the insane bureaucracy and rule lawyering there if you go to any remotely controversial talk page. You would not trust info on Wikipedia if you saw how the sausage is made on the talk pages.
  Look up this guy called Ryulong for example.

UESP is one of the best parts of Elder Scrolls games; forever may it reign

Fandom is so bad I just blocked the domain. Chatgpt gives me info quicker and more precisely on older titles anyway.

I give my full support to this.

If they don't migrate to a wiki running on a Minecraft CPU virtual VPS, I riot.

As a matter of fact, there are opportunities here for other companies that don't have general wikis for gamers to create a better hosting service. They have not done this and I don't understand why. Steam could easily do this, I think. Just imagine Steam creating a wiki for games, with links to the best guides, etc. It would be a modern version of GameFaqs (which still exists) but improved. When I do a search on a game and I get Fandom in my results, I tend to skip over it and look for something better without ad bullshit. I would think that other gamers tend to do the same thing. I mean, it's that bad, even for a user without a registered account (like me).

Fandom wikis are such bloated trash that I will always look elsewhere for info.

fandom wikis half the time are trash and redundant

Is there such a thing as a Fedewiki? We can call it Craig.
- I don't know that I really want it called Craig
- Craig's Wiki?
  
  named
  !spoiler Craig Fedewiki , like the software guy with the great hair

Fandom is unusable garbage.

I really hope that they do, Fandom is annoying as heck to use with the constant advertising and unnecessary sidebar that pops up a big window on mouseover etc. In fact, I hope all fandom wikis leave Fandom and migrate elsewhere.

Runescape's fandom wiki has long been abandoned, and the SEO makes it horrible to constantly have to scroll passed it when looking for the official wiki results. I would vote that they get a time machine and never use Fandom in the first place. Barring that, I'm torn between my sticking with Fandom until it gets worse, and just cauterizing the wound and switching to wiki.gg now. wiki.gg has by far the least-intrusive ads (which I only really see on my phone when I somehow get shunted into Chrome).

I despise fandom, hope they do end up getting the hell outta there

https://miraheze.org/ is a great wiki hosting community
- Miraheze recently almost closed down: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230615-Statement
  
  The update post: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Miraheze_is_Not_Shutting_Down
  
  Oh no. That's tragic. It looks like they are on a direct path to shutting down later this year.

MediaWiki is great but Git-based wiki are more distributable and easy to back up. A trustworthy platform taking care of infrastructure is all contributers like these look for
- None of the git wikis I've seen had the same level of detail and customizability though

The only good fandom wiki out there is the Terraria wiki. Change my mind.
- I believe terraria has migrated to wiki.gg
  
  I think you might be right. Both are getting edited but gg more often this year than fandom.
- uesp
- The OldSchool Runescape and RuneScape 3 wikis are hands down the best wikis out there. They abandoned fandom years ago.
- Dustloop is one of the greatest video game wiki

Since when does bulbapedia have usability issues?

Does Microsoft do anything there? Just wondering if they have any editor or something or all are non related to Mojang/Microsoft.

Fandom brings back so many memories. I remember when they used to have active chats. It was like discord before discord was around.

I use Pi-Hole and never noticed it was a crappy site. It's always been flawless for me.
- Even with ad blockers fandom is garbage
  
  100% AGREED.

I might have to boycott pcgamer too with those annoying popups...
- Use the Ublock Origin extension if you aren't, I'm getting no popups with that.
  
  I remember installing PC adblock just for Wowhead because even though they have great info (just about all the quests and dailies in WoW) they have so many ads and video popups. Haven't really looked back since.
  I haven't gotten around to doing adblock for my phone, and so whenever I do visit those sites, I get really annoyed by everything.
  
  I am! I still got a newsletter popup thing in the middle of trying to highlight and copy some text.

162 comments