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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3879 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.

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