Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!
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I don't think Wikia needs much introduction: it hosts pretty much every dedicated wiki for every game, TV, or book series. You've most likely visited it recently.
But by god, is it bad! It has more trackers, ads (both "internal", i.e. to other wikis, and external), and other bullshit than anything else I've seen.
This is a single page load on Chrome, with adblock and cache disabled:
5.5MB, 494 requests and 36 seconds of processing for a few paragraphs of static text.
Seeing as how all (or at least most) of their content seems to be available under the CC-BY-SA license, it should be perfectly legal for someone to create a read-only mirror of the articles without all that bullshit and steal all their views. Not saying you can't have any ads, having enough to pay for hosting and a bit of compensation is reasonable.
I know this forum is filled with developers and entrepreneurs eager to find new projects, has a high PageRank, and by the 1% rule it's seen by thousands of lurkers, so if someone sees this and gets inspired, you'd be doing the internet a favor. If not, well, it's always nice to share a rant.
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@anonymous234 As a Path of Exile player, I can confirm that Gamepedia is no better.
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@anonymous234 said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
it should be perfectly legal for someone to create a read-only mirror of the articles without all that bullshit and steal all their views
Do you remember when the web was littered with clones of dmoz - because 'free link directory'! Every seo-spammer and his uncle jumped on the bandwagon.
Search engines became very good at filtering out that sort of duplicate crap.
Read-only clones of wikia content (however well-meaning) would fall in the same territory - they'd quickly be filtered from search engine results, very few people would find them.
I think the only way to compete on google would be to start a new site with original content - but then everything counts against you because so much effort has already been put into wikia (no established fan site is going to jump ship and start-over).
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I met some of the guys who run Wikia a few years ago. Nice guys but... yeah. I wish their Web site wasn't trash. In pretty much any browser, if I keep a Wikia tab open, the tab's eventually going to crash (and sometimes there are audio/video ads that will start playing full minutes after the page has loaded). God.
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@heterodox said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
eventually going to crash (and sometimes there are audio/video ads that will start playing full minutes after the page has loaded). God.
Ugh. Video ads are pretty terrible.
They're even worse when they apparently appear only on the mobile view (not checked with wikia, just pointing fingers at unnamed_site) and suck out gigs out of your data plan, merely because the tab was open...
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And this is why Wikia is on the no-js list.
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@anonymous234 said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
I know this forum is filled with developers and entrepreneurs eager to find new projects
Wat? No. We're all too busy on our own pet projects. My current project eats up way too much of my spare time, and if I let it, it could probably consume decades.
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@groaner said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
My current project eats up way too much of my spare time, and if I let it, it could probably consume decades.
Mine's at 15 years so far... (open sourced the code 14 years ago)
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MediaWiki is that alternative. I know of at least one Wikia community (Touhou wikia) that relocated to a hosted MediaWiki. Now, you'll need your own domain and host, but you'll have a good level of control over your site.
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@japonicus Hmm, true.
- My hope was if you made a working site, and then advertised it on a bunch of popular sites (reddit, Hackernews... maybe even buy some AdWords if you really care) and people actually liked it, you could hopefully "get the ball rolling" with the popularity, and therefore the PageRank.
- A simple mirror would have to be read-only, because if you allowed writes you'd create a "fork" of the pages and confuse everyone. You could just link to the original edit page on Wikia. However if you were really brave, you could make a real Wikia competitor by combining both ideas: mirror all wikis read-only, allow creating new independent ones, and when it gets popular enough allow "migrating" the Wikia wikis.
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@anonymous234 said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
having enough to pay for hosting and a bit of compensation is reasonable
Does wikia even make enough to cover that? Seems like this the cycle for all community based sides (e.g. Imgur):
- Old site sucks, is slow bloated and full of ads
- We make new one
- Oh shit we're popular
- We need ads and something to keep people active on our site
- Oh shit everyone's leaving us for the new minimal site
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@bb36e said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
Does wikia even make enough to cover that? Seems like this the cycle for all community based sides (e.g. Imgur)
Both ad revenue and bandwidth scale with viewers in the same rate. They should be as profitable as a news site, for example.
Imgur probably has a harder time because it's only images. The time you spend looking at a image compared with the bandwidth it consumes is a much worse ratio. Even so, imgur put much less ads on your face.
I think Wikia owners are just greedy fuckers.
And if search engines block a copy of them, I know at least I would bookmark the mirror, and if I put a link I would use the mirror and etc. I think the mirror would have a chance, as people would like it better than the original, that's different from other clones that are usually worse than the originals.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
They should be as profitable as a news site, for example.
So... not at all?
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@blakeyrat I should have said a blog, because a news site has to pay for reporters and writers. I believe popular blogs are profitable.
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@sockpuppet7 Yeah there are quite a few profitable blogs, but I doubt any blog's made as much as PewDiePie, just sayin'.
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@blakeyrat said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
@sockpuppet7 Yeah there are quite a few profitable blogs, but I doubt any blog's made as much as PewDiePie, just sayin'.
Of course. Choosing whether to order the game online or drive to the fucking GameStop is a momentous decision with great importance for everyone. Far more weighty than any silly talk about racial epithets.
Filed Under: And you cannot underestimate the significance of shrieking in terror at a robotic teddy bear, either.
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@scholrlea said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
drive to the fucking GameStop
Is this still a thing? Dedicated video game stores have pretty much disappeared around here.
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@zecc Yeah, GameStop is still all over.
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@masonwheeler Well around here, it's all over for GameStop. Must have been a translation error.
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@zecc So what you're saying is, where you live it's more like GameStopped?
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@masonwheeler said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
@zecc Yeah, GameStop is still all over.
There was a mall near me that had two video game stores that each got bought out by Game Stop at different times. For years the mall had both Game Stops running before they finally closed one. Plus there was another location in a plaza across the street from that mall.
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@the_quiet_one You live in Lynnwood? :P
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@masonwheeler said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
@the_quiet_one You live in Lynnwood? :P
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@scholrlea No, with 2 Ns. It's near Seattle, and the mall there fits the description perfectly.
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@masonwheeler said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
mall there fits the description perfectly.
Huh, I don't remember ever noticing the one across the street, but the only times I went to that strip mall were to the Buffalo Wings or Red Robin, and maybe Fatburger. I never noticed two Game Stops in the mall, but that's not why I went to the mall (which I rarely did, anyway — drove by it hundreds of times, and went to various externally accessible business (Sears auto center, movie theater, Panera) occasionally, but hardly ever inside the mall proper).
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@hardwaregeek Yeah, it's right across from the Fatburger:
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@masonwheeler Yeah. That's how I knew which strip mall it was in; I was originally thinking of the one across Alderwood Mall Parkway, because I drove by that one a lot more often, but I didn't see it there on street view. Then I remembered, oh yeah, there's a strip mall on the other side of the mall, too.
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@sumireko NethackWiki also successfully fleed Wikia.
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@masonwheeler said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
Fatburger
I thought this was a slur, but someone actually named their company that.
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@coldandtired said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
@masonwheeler said in Someone please make a wikia.com alternative!:
Fatburger
I thought this was a slur, but someone actually named their company that.
They are great burger joints. Highly recommended.
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@anonymous234 Reminder that Jimmy Wales runs Wikia. Don't forget Jimbo needs dem $ tho.