Yes, please let us get away from them. If you've ever browsed Twitch, you'll see them with tens of thousands of viewers... but when you join the channel, engagement is sparse.
The reason this happens is because they embed their Twitch stream into every. page. you. visit. This is slimy, annoying, and slows the loading.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3292958
The old fandom wiki is quite dead but it's impossible to get rid of it, alas.
Plus they have RuneLite cooperating with crowdsourcing things like droptables and drop rates. (And of course mods often will outright tell them what certain droprates are or how they function).
Despite the OSRS wiki being legitimately the best website I use every day, it's leadership has been sounding the death knell every few months, always to an alarmingly quiet response.
They have no money, have no revenue generator, and have a full staff that needs to be paid. The last post they put to the community mentioned moving back to fandom (crazy) or injecting ads at a pretty insane volume.
So yes, fandom sucks. But also, a "normal" wiki takes expertise, and usually, compensation.
In reality, we are doing fine on revenue, and more than covering the full-time labor costs by serving one ad to about 35% of users (really more like 20% after you account for ad blockers). It's still a bit icky compared to doing something donation-based or working directly with the studio, but neither of those would pay the bills. It turns out that a pretty small amount of advertising pays the bills just fine, which really puts into perspective how insane Fandom's monetization is.
You can read more specifics/numbers in my post here: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Mid-2023_business_update
You're telling me with all the fancy algorithms and their zillions of engineers they can't manage to notice that an entire subdomain hasn't had any updates to it's pages in 2 years and that every single person that clicks the search result ends up doing another search 20 seconds later?
The embedded Twitch stream is there purely as a way to artificially boost viewer counts on their channel. Almost every time a new game comes out, you can go to its Twitch page and see Fextralife at the top with tens of thousands of viewers, with a dead chat because almost nobody is actually watching, it's all from the embed. Twitch-endorsed pseudo-viewbotting to farm ad revenue is a growing trend, there's even several systems on Twitch itself that encourage it, like the drops system.
https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/Project:CD#Forking_from_Fandom
(n.b. I'm an admin there.)
(n.b. 2, we've collaborated with MCW on several occasions)
https://starcitizen.fandom.com/
And a recent post on reddit about the wiki's funding appears to have gotten their patreon up to $140 compared to $110 server costs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/16bo02n/star_c...