Forum:Leaving wikia
well i think its time for the sims wiki to consider leaving wikia/fandom as the direction being taken by wikia is not suitable for a wiki.
recently they have brought in new notifications that make the place seem like facebook and they are very pushy with advertising. you can't view the sims wiki on an iphone anymore without an ad interrupting your viewing.
now they are doing portable infoboxes and everybody hates it. they even ban people from wikia if they dare speak up or interfere.
i love the sims wiki and think it deserves better than fandom. i think you should get some servers in, install mediawiki and fork the database from wikia and start a new.
you can find cheap servers on lowendbox.com. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.169.85.202 (talk • contribs) 21:52, May 14, 2017 (UTC) - Please sign your comments with ~~~~
Discussion
This is not the first time where we have considered forking from Wikia. An example of one such discussion can be found at Forum:New Wikia layout discussion. There are benefits to forking, sure, but do they outweigh the countless consequences? Not saying that I like Wikia's recent developments — quite the opposite, actually — but unfortunately Wikia's best business practice is opening their doors to seem like a great choice and then "trapping" users so they can't escape without paying the consequences. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 02:24, May 15, 2017 (UTC)
- Oh, and for the person curious about the "banning people for 'interfering'", w:Thread:1237595 and w:User blog:Ciencia Al Poder/Portable Infoboxes, the first step into Wikia taking control over our content make for some good reading. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 02:28, May 15, 2017 (UTC)
- Wow, talk about drama!
- To respond to the initial proposal though, unfortunately my answer to the question "should we leave Wikia?" (err, excuse me, "should we leave Fandom powered by Wikia?") remains the same: "I see leaving Wikia as dooming TSW to certain death."
- Forking TSW to a new site would split the editor base of the wiki, with some, especially those more familiar/comfortable with (Fandom powered by) Wikia, choosing to stay, and others who are disgruntled with the direction that (Fandom powered by) Wikia has taken choosing to leave. This is to say nothing of the wiki readership, which is directed here largely by the wiki's established reputation within the greater Sims community and through search engines; a migrated TSW on a new platform would have to compete for readers with the current TSW, and the new TSW would likely lose in the process. The problem of migration is exacerbated by the fact that TSW currently has very few active admins (I, for instance, had not edited in well over a month prior to this post) to manage the transition, and those admins would have to take on additional technical and management responsibilities that they may or may not have the expertise, time, or energy to deal with. This is to say nothing of the costs of running a website, either. The technical and financial hurtles are two very strong arguments in favor of utilizing a wikifarm instead of starting an independent website; Wikia handles these issues so we don't have to. Even if TSW were to migrate to another wiki host that would assist in the technical management of the site and provide free hosting, we would lose out on a significant chunk of readers and editors. -- LiR talk · blog · contribs 07:01, May 15, 2017 (UTC)