Hacker News Reader

Comment by Veuxdo | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated topic: what is to be done about these terrible "wiki" sites that dominate search results about games?

The wikis for the souls games are extremely useful and accurate - I've used them when I got stuck and it made the game even more fun!

Are you actually talking about those wiki sites or different ones?

I assume it's about the wikis that are just ad-filled copies of other wikis.

No, they're not. Fextralife especially is filled with information that's often wrong or misleading.

My complaints on Fexelea could fill a book. She started that site with help, including the building of said site, from people on PSN. She then stole from reddit rampantly, but forswore ads so people didn't complain much. But she monetized her youtube channel and would only post videos (often 4+ hours with no timestamps- which was also against her own site's rules), when people complained she began allowing 'approved uploaders' (read- kicking her down her percentage). Wasn't long before ads were all over the place. Around the time Bloodborne was released she gamed SEO with names of pages with lorem ipsum and the oage itself would read 'coming soon', or 'be the first to add to this page' while other site already had the information.

Recently she began begging for funding with banners a la Wikipedia.

That site can suck a big one.

I didn't know about all that backstory, thanks for sharing that. Another reason to not use it.

Nothing. It is for now the best way to display information about games that involve lore, character customization, etc,.

What alternative do you propose? A blog styled as a Wiki? Ultimately, it's the same thing.

Sadly probably nothing it's just the natural cycle of things.

fextralife became popular as the go to wiki for soul-type game by copy pasting data from the original wikis and using aggressive marketing oriented tricks to get put above on google while using various autoplay to get views on twitch. Now they are here to stay and look like they made lot on effort on Elden including a nice map.

But now the cycle continue, extremely efficient scrapper are copying their data and putting them on oddly similar website, all saying the exact same thing. The most impressive whoever made these also make it auto translate into many localized websites. And the most annoying is if any of the original pages have mistakes then in a less than a week the web is covered with this false data.

Fextralife is great, they are a crowdsourced guide site that’s immaculately arranged and styled. There’s none of the sluggish javascript bullshit that newer game wiki sites have, just fast loading text with the occasional image. A few ads but no constant barrage of autoplay videos in the corners and pop ups.

The thing to be done about Fextralife is “wonder if I should give them money after once again using them to make my trip through a mysterious game easier”.

IGN’s sluggish, messy wikis, on the other hand...

IGN displays the cookie popup on every page load so they're useless.

I preferred wikidot for soulsborne games but they don't seem to have elden ring. Most other sites give you a few "how to become overpowered" guides and maybe locations of a few items. So sadly fextralife it is.

why terrible? those wikis are super helpful

infested with huge video ads and are terrible on mobile. slow and bloated even with ublock.

It didn't have to be this way! Wikipedia used to host all of this information before they switched from a policy of inclusionism to deletionism [1]. Now, it's all been relegated to for-profit hellholes like Fandom/Wikia. I dream of the day that someone stands up a new nonprofit, forks Wikipedia, and takes it back to the good old days.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

The autoplay videos are often videos of their affiliated streamers on Twitch as well, which artificially increases the "viewers" count of said Twitch streams (thousands of viewers just browsing their wikis). You'll notice fextralife streamers near the top of Twitch by a significant margin on some of the latest trendy games (New World and more recently Lost Ark).

I wound up blocking all those with uBlock Origin personally.

Most game wikis are so awful on mobile I just don't bother. Its infuriating.

If it's about the fextralife wiki and its horribel twitch inclusion on every page, ublock can suppress those divs and the last line rewrites the css rule to be full-screen (if that helps)

To add to your filters:

eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com##.simulation-hero-heading.section-heading-light.section-heading.ad-sidebar

eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com##.sidebar-top-border

eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com###sidebar-wrapper

eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com###wrapper:style(padding-left: 0px !important)

probably better to block the source if possible rather than to use a cosmetic filter

live.primis.tech$domain=fextralife.com

Also, I had to disable Firefox's Enhanced tracking protection in order for the video to show in the first place (ads too). The addon 'I don't care about cookies' seems to remove the ads after ETP has been disabled too.

I only learned about this wiki couple of days ago. Obv looking for the elden wiki. Not really a fan of fextra, as someone else confirmed here about their shady wiki origins which I didn't even know about.

One possibility is to move the wiki to different hosting that doesn't stuff ads everywhere. It can be done, and I've seen it done successfully. Fandom actually lets you export the full data for the wiki, migrating the community is harder than migrating the data.

I mean if people were willing to pay for content they might not need to throw ads every which way?

Fun fact, Jimmy Wales (Co-founder of Wikipedia) also is the co-founder of Fandom which is a for profit company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)

And it turns my computer into a nice little space heater.

It's fine as it is, a game wiki is often the go-to resource for tips and tricks for that specific game.

If you are really annoyed, you can always add -wiki to the search query.

Their formatting is cluttered, sure, but they can be quite useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com