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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3878 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 14, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there a mirror site or something for fandom?

I want to wiki-dive. Maybe even edit stuff. What I don’t want is the endless stream of auto playing videos, quizzes, banners. Ads are one thing. All this cross-promotion garbage is another.

If there’s a site that pulls the actual content of fandom pages, without the detritus, I want to know about it. Hell, I’ll settle for some sort of reader app.

For anyone not familiar with this experience, its much much worse than you are imagining. Many 'free' wikis are entirely unusable and aggressively seek to circumvent adblocker plugins or simply deny access to the wiki if it detects one. They also load all the ads first so you can't see the text content until all the animated ads (10+ is normal) on the page load. The answer I've found is simply to escalate the arms race even further. On my home network I use a Pi Hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-hole) which casts the ads off into the ether before they ever get to the client machine. For mobile I use the adblock browser.

Not only that, but the Fandom site tends to suck up fan wikis that weren't previously hosted there. They truly are a blight on the internet.

Yeah, seconding "Fandomcom"'s user experience being unusually atrocious. It's been driving me up the wall because I've been burning time on Sun Haven, and almost all of the data for it is either on fandomcom sites or video, to the point where I just gave up trying to check anything from mobile browser.

I know ARK at least has its wiki.gg equivalent, and FFXIV was always off-wikia to start with, but there's a lot of spaces that don't have anything close.

Have you tried just blocking everything you don't like with uBlock Origin? There are probably prettier filters out there somewhere, but i got it down to what felt like a reasonable website experience by just cutting out everything I even slightly disliked using "block element" on right-click.

Ping @netstack

Let me see if I can compile my uBlock Origin blocklist for fandom.com:

fandom.com##.global-navigation

fandom.com###mixed-content-footer

fandom.com##.page__right-rail

fandom.com##.is-loading.top-leaderboard.ad-slot-placeholder

fandom.com###WikiaBar

fandom.com##.notifications-placeholder

fandom.com##.pathfinder-wrapper

fandom.com##.wds-global-footer

fandom.com##.global-footer

fandom.com##.page-side-tools__wrapper

fandom.com##.global-navigation__top

fandom.com##.page-footer

fandom.com#$#.resizable-container{width:100% !important;}

fandom.com#$#.resizable-container{max-width:9999px !important;}

fandom.com#$#.main-container{margin-left:0px !important;}

fandom.com#$#.main-container{width:100% !important;}

Enabled with those filters, vs. standard (and it's even worse than it seems. You can't see the mid-page ads yet, the top one seems to have randomly failed, and the video to the side didn't start either.)

My God.

I think I've been woefully underutilizing uBlock. It gets the ad domains by default, but I rarely blocked elements other than screen-covering modals. Seriously, thank you for this game-changer!

https://imgur.com/a/8Fy1JDV

Jesus, how many youtube videos do you watch at the same time?

One.

The rest are more like bookmarks.

Was going to mention that. I don't see any ads on fandom.com.

I tried feeding this question into three AI search services (metaphor, phind, and perplexity), and the third gave me https://breezewiki.com which at least claims to be what you want (i haven't tried it).

It was mention in the seventh google result, so it's not obvious the AI search services did anything beyond permuting google's results.

Breezewiki is good. And in general, OP might want to look into https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension

There's also https://getindie.wiki/ specifically for the fandom wiki problem.

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