I would like to offer an apology. My annoyance was with wikia’s mobile formatting, which is universal across all wikia sites. Had I known that the disappearing text was caused by a quirk in the mobile site’s parsing of certain templates rather than the static website infrastructure, I’d have put this forward as not “detestable garbage” but “does anyone know how to fix this?”. The efficiency with which repairs were made after I caused a ruckus speaks volumes about our wiki editors’ abilities. Is there some hub of wiki activity where I could have taken this complaint, or do we rely on a decentralized crew of guerilla editors?
Scandal has increased to 4 - Shocking!
Connected: the Forum is dropping…
@Estelle: I realise this. I was just pointing out that the specific problem they were raging about wasn’t the fault of wikia or fandom.
And that contacting an admin (or doing a forum-post) and just letting people know that there is an issue and asking if somebody can help is a more sensible approach than just ranting. At least for us admins this came totally out of the blue.
dov (= adnoam on the wiki/reddit) and me are the only currently active admins for the FL wiki. You can reach us either via our wikia-walls, reddit or here.
However, a lot of things can be done by any (registered) user and there are quite a few of those here and over at reddit.
I thought it was going to be dreadful news along the lines of "Wikia misled me into abandoning SMEN 76!!!" or "Wikia now silently mine bitcoins" at first, but at least no real harm is done :P
[quote=Anchovies]
I still don’t like wikia, though. Since they reorganized and took on the Fandom branding they’ve been annoyingly pushy about their non-wiki content, which is strewn with direct advertisements and with no-doubt-paid promoted links to other sites. I’m personally of the opinion that we should take our wiki and our web-traffic over to gamepedia, where the Sunless Sea wiki has got on just fine.[/quote]
I’d like to offer my humble opinion that wikia is detestable garbage, precisely for cases like this: you don’t own your wiki anymore, wikia does. I know Nethack tried to migrate away from wikia - due to the same complaints everyone has, namely them pushing their own content on you, non-removable ads to other wikis and content, etc. - and wikia admins absolutely refused to let them touch the existing wiki content in any way, meaning that instead of a migration it was more of a cloning. Supposedly they do it "for the users" - the argument being that the content is still there, people should be able to browse it, and if some admins and maintainers want to pick it up they should be able to - but clearly they just want to preserve the content on their site to ensure their continue to get visitors looking for it. As a user, I’d much rather get told immediately that the site is unmaintained and out of date, than waste time browsing it before eventually finding the real, active one. The problem is compounded by the fact that a newly established wiki will obviously rank much lower than the old one in search results, meaning people will keep stumbling on the abandoned site, in a vicious circle that can take months, or years, to break.
What this means is that once you start using a wikia wiki, instead of e.g. hosting your own using mediawiki, you’re then stuck forever with whatever branding, layouts, crappy wiki engine, and advertisements wikia wants to push on you.
Perhaps this isn’t very on-topic for this forum, but this is a wikia thread, and I’m honestly surprised by how many big projects still choose wikia for their wiki hosting, so I thought I’d rant a bit.
If there is one thing that warrants wikia/fandom’s immediate attention, it is trying to migrate from it and removing content on the existing wiki. Mostly the latter.
The best game-specific wikis I know - bulbapedia, Zelda Wiki, and the Sunless Sea wiki, all use Gamepedia with consistently good results. Has there been any talk among the FL wiki editors of a migration? And, since we’re on the topic, what of the echo bazaar wikidot page? Is it less active, or largely abandoned?
The wikidot wiki is mostly abandoned and largely out of date. It does occasionally have historical information of note the other wiki does not. Things like retired items and qualities.
I would like to include my voice in the anti-wikia chorus. The mobile version is horrendous - video ads strewn throughout, slow, and nigh un-navigable. The standard version is 100% not-at-all-better, though aggressive ad-blocking helps. Which I can’t do on my tablet, so there’s a lot of waiting for ads. And accidentally clicking them.
Which would be slightly less awful if they vetted the ads. Too often the banner across the top is a malicious fake.
“Fandom” - A malvertising and clickbait platform with some wiki content.
You will have to ask them on the wikia directly. Porting content isn’t as big a hurdle (they have support for exporting content and gamepedia can help), but the bigger hurdle is making sure visitors go to the new wiki. Wikia likes removing and banning admins and making sure visitors aren’t redirected to any new replacement.
The most important thing is if the contributors even want to move tho. Talk to them there. edited by Morkan Kassington on 7/15/2017