The minecraft wiki has moved off of fandom, fandom just overtakes it in SEO.
Linking to the fandom wiki like you do on this site probably helps fandom more than you're hurting it. Just help wiki maintainers move to better platforms.
if you open any of the links for Minecraft, TARDIS, or Zelda, you'll see there's a gigantic banner placed by BreezeWiki that directs you to the new wikis. unless you mean that the links themselves are bad for SEO, which is unlikely
There is still some activity on the fandom wiki. So for any casual observer, it doesn't look abandoned.
NetHackWiki (somewhen around 2010 or 2012?) moved off fandom when it was still called wikia. It took several years to overtake the older wiki in search results even though the old one was completely abandoned and vandalized by humans and bots, and active engagement by users to change links to the new wiki location all over the internet.
Shitty websites make all their money from ads. That's why the page is stuffed full of ads. If you don't see the ads, they don't make any money from you, which isn't a big deal until nobody sees the ads and the site makes no money and goes bankrupt (as they rightfully should).
And before anyone says anything about poor little indie websites needing money to survive: fandom is not one. Fandom is an advertising business. They're in the business of maximizing revenue by showing you as many ads as possible, not just a few to support their server costs, and businesses like this should be treated with extreme prejudice.
Because of my heavy adblocking and other extensions that make nasty sites look perfectly clean and usable, I often forget that other people don't see the same website that I do.
Self-hosting breezewiki -- even on the same machine that you browse from -- gets neatly around the way fandom wikis block the breezewiki public nodes. I've got it self-hosted and now I never see that damn fandom interface.
Sounds like an easy way to solve both problems. Does it cache the fandom site, pull it all down, or it's just a redirector / re-theming front-end and makes calls out to fandom for each page load?
I skimmed the docs looking for an architecture overview, but couldn't see an answer to this. The low resource requirements cited for the docker container install suggest it's just doing page-loads and re-rendering them.
EDIT: So I've now set this up as via docker on my nomad cluster, and it's just proxying the pages and searches to and fro. It's a bit heavy - sitting at about 410MB while idle, but doesn't feel like there's any performance impact compared to hitting upstream directly.
Fully in the browser is unfortunately impossible/unworkable due to CORS (basically the same technique that prevents someone from easily faking a bank login page to leak your details/allowing for XSS attacks prevents you from doing this locally).
We're essentially reliant on these serverside solutions to proxy requests because that's the easiest way to do cross-origin requests without making whatever browser deity you annoyed that morning suddenly angry at you. (Extensions can mark domains to be allowed to run on, but this is restricted by the manifest, allowing for really easy whack-a-mole by server authors, not to mention the fact that each update would need signing from Mozilla/Google.)
Irritatingly, the same mechanism that's used to stop fraudulent sites can also be used as an easy deterrent against deshittification interfaces.
Of course it's possible. CORS is a way for a browser to sandbox one site from another. When you are the browser, or an extension, you don't sandbox yourself from doing things you want to do.
A great idea in theory, but I would just prefer doing what a lot of wikis are doing now and just leave fandom, breeze seems to be getting pretty heavily rate limited for me anyways.
I've built a standalone genre-based wiki at kpopping.com, I can't believe fans let these bullshit companies run our communities. They're some of the most disgusting sociopaths imaginable. My niche is even worse though because we have websites that want to be fextralife.com when they grow up... Malware ads and porn for #1 google results with millions of views.
I've been a hater of Wikia/Fandom for so long that it's been nice seeing people finally turn on them in a bigger way in the past few years. I've ran an independent wiki for a pretty long time, and it was amusing to watch the backlash grow over time, and see our humble little community get featured on Indie Wiki Buddy.
The very first wiki I remember garnering a lot of backlash was the Touhou Wiki, quite a long time ago. It was an amusing case because they decided to leave relatively soon after Wikia forced the ad-ridden theme on everyone, but Wikia decided they were too big to leave, banned the admins and appointed new ones. The community revolted and set the wiki on fire, eventually requiring admins to step in and roll back the vandalism.
Since then, they've just gone further and further mask-off regarding how they blatantly abuse their SEO position, extract money from user-generated content, and manipulate teenagers attracted to the perceived prestige of running "the" definitive wiki about some subject they're interested in. It's very depressing. I'm glad that wiki farms make it easy for people to run community wikis, but I'd rather everyone learn how to set up Mediawiki on crappy cPanel shared hosting again than have Fandom be the future. I think the company most responsible to kill them is Google, because their broken-ass search engine is the primary reason why Fandom works. I know that this is a hard problem to solve, but in my mind it's easy: start punishing large-scale SEO abusers like Pinterest and Fandom. It's five fucking years too late to start now, but that timer isn't resetting. Once you cut off their advantage over independent websites, and force each wiki to at least stand out on its own, it will definitely deal a fairly big blow to the machine they've built.
I'm sure it's been pointed out by others in the comments, but rather than BreezeWiki, you might want to consider Indie Wiki Buddy, which will redirect you to independently-ran wikis instead. (Or you could use both. Whatever floats your boat.)
It's disgusting what google has done to the internet the past five years.
I built my own genre-based wiki from scratch for kpop at kpopping.com (not a mediawiki) and my niche has been completely destroyed by google. They've promoted sites that leak nudes of minors and put porn ads on their wordpresses masquerading as wikis to first positions. Fandom would be an improvement for my niche.
Back when I had an iPhone 6, visiting Fandom sites was completely unusable because it had ads that automatically spammed the app store open. I had to be fast just to close the tab or the app store would get forced open again, regardless of whether I did anything or not.
I needed the info on the wiki page I was using though, and got around the issue by disabling the app store through parental controls.
Apple allowing that app store opening nonsense single-handedly made my decision to go to Android.
I have some fandom wikis that I visit. My adblockers block all the ads and I use Safari's "hide distracting items" feature to block the other annoyances. Makes the site pretty usable but you have to care a lot about the content to bother with it.
Is there any easy way to make a local backup of a Fandom wiki? I have found some unmaintained scripts which might have worked at one point, but it seems like the only option on the table is to scrape and parse everything.
Fandom sucks. Scraping and republishing their content sucks harder. Disgraziato.
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And then they won’t delete your wiki if the community asks for it. Fandom is hostile to forks.