BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable | Hacker News Reader

BreezeWiki makes wiki pages on Fandom readable

breezewiki.com

139 pointsLorenDB67 comments

The minecraft wiki has moved off of fandom, fandom just overtakes it in SEO.

Linking to the fandom wiki like you do on this site probably helps fandom more than you're hurting it. Just help wiki maintainers move to better platforms.

That's what Indie Wiki Buddy is for. https://getindie.wiki/

It was added back in 2022, when it was still official. This project is just not very active anymore. https://gitdab.com/cadence/breezewiki/commit/8b200d621ab6fa4...

if you open any of the links for Minecraft, TARDIS, or Zelda, you'll see there's a gigantic banner placed by BreezeWiki that directs you to the new wikis. unless you mean that the links themselves are bad for SEO, which is unlikely

There is still some activity on the fandom wiki. So for any casual observer, it doesn't look abandoned.

NetHackWiki (somewhen around 2010 or 2012?) moved off fandom when it was still called wikia. It took several years to overtake the older wiki in search results even though the old one was completely abandoned and vandalized by humans and bots, and active engagement by users to change links to the new wiki location all over the internet.

Expect a marathon not a sprint.

The Warcraft Wiki also has the same issue: fled off of Fandom and is getting out-SEO'd by Fandom on basically all results.

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Warcraft_Wiki:About

    Sorry! Fandom isn't allowing BreezeWiki to show pages right now.

Looks like it just got blocked :(

  It's just been revoked

Curious, what was the reasoning behind the block - or its revocation?

It made fandom actually usable

Shitty websites make all their money from ads. That's why the page is stuffed full of ads. If you don't see the ads, they don't make any money from you, which isn't a big deal until nobody sees the ads and the site makes no money and goes bankrupt (as they rightfully should).

And before anyone says anything about poor little indie websites needing money to survive: fandom is not one. Fandom is an advertising business. They're in the business of maximizing revenue by showing you as many ads as possible, not just a few to support their server costs, and businesses like this should be treated with extreme prejudice.

I can understand that; but why revoke the ban then?

They can only ban it when they detect that you're using it. It's a cat and mouse game.

I still don’t get it. So they detected the usage and banned the app, what happened that made the ban disappear?

Are you saying the app is using a different scraper? This I would get. But earlier comment[1] mentions ban revocation - this is what surprises me.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43530821

My experience is sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Been this way for a few months.

Because of my heavy adblocking and other extensions that make nasty sites look perfectly clean and usable, I often forget that other people don't see the same website that I do.

Fandom sites are terrible even with ad blocking.

Hence other extensions like uMatrix and "Cleaner Fandom" extension.

IIRC it work when you disable Js

Self-hosting breezewiki -- even on the same machine that you browse from -- gets neatly around the way fandom wikis block the breezewiki public nodes. I've got it self-hosted and now I never see that damn fandom interface.

We need a browser or extension that does this stuff automatically in the browser, so it looks like a normal browser request.

By "this stuff" I mean BreezeWiki, Invidious, Nitter, whatever that one for Reddit was called.

Can't work for twitter because they block logged out requests (unless you're logged in)

There's already an extension called LibRedirect that can do this.

Fully in the browser is unfortunately impossible/unworkable due to CORS (basically the same technique that prevents someone from easily faking a bank login page to leak your details/allowing for XSS attacks prevents you from doing this locally).

We're essentially reliant on these serverside solutions to proxy requests because that's the easiest way to do cross-origin requests without making whatever browser deity you annoyed that morning suddenly angry at you. (Extensions can mark domains to be allowed to run on, but this is restricted by the manifest, allowing for really easy whack-a-mole by server authors, not to mention the fact that each update would need signing from Mozilla/Google.)

Irritatingly, the same mechanism that's used to stop fraudulent sites can also be used as an easy deterrent against deshittification interfaces.

Of course it's possible. CORS is a way for a browser to sandbox one site from another. When you are the browser, or an extension, you don't sandbox yourself from doing things you want to do.

Sounds like an easy way to solve both problems. Does it cache the fandom site, pull it all down, or it's just a redirector / re-theming front-end and makes calls out to fandom for each page load?

I skimmed the docs looking for an architecture overview, but couldn't see an answer to this. The low resource requirements cited for the docker container install suggest it's just doing page-loads and re-rendering them.

EDIT: So I've now set this up as via docker on my nomad cluster, and it's just proxying the pages and searches to and fro. It's a bit heavy - sitting at about 410MB while idle, but doesn't feel like there's any performance impact compared to hitting upstream directly.

Thanks for the shout out to Miraheze, a free wiki host with no ads. We really appreciate it.

We’re about to celebrate our tenth anniversary in a couple months. I hope many Fandom wikis can come join us by then.

The Path of Exile community ran far away from Fandom. Everyone should.

I've built a standalone genre-based wiki at kpopping.com, I can't believe fans let these bullshit companies run our communities. They're some of the most disgusting sociopaths imaginable. My niche is even worse though because we have websites that want to be fextralife.com when they grow up... Malware ads and porn for #1 google results with millions of views.

Congrats! Keep up the good work.

I've been a hater of Wikia/Fandom for so long that it's been nice seeing people finally turn on them in a bigger way in the past few years. I've ran an independent wiki for a pretty long time, and it was amusing to watch the backlash grow over time, and see our humble little community get featured on Indie Wiki Buddy.

The very first wiki I remember garnering a lot of backlash was the Touhou Wiki, quite a long time ago. It was an amusing case because they decided to leave relatively soon after Wikia forced the ad-ridden theme on everyone, but Wikia decided they were too big to leave, banned the admins and appointed new ones. The community revolted and set the wiki on fire, eventually requiring admins to step in and roll back the vandalism.

Since then, they've just gone further and further mask-off regarding how they blatantly abuse their SEO position, extract money from user-generated content, and manipulate teenagers attracted to the perceived prestige of running "the" definitive wiki about some subject they're interested in. It's very depressing. I'm glad that wiki farms make it easy for people to run community wikis, but I'd rather everyone learn how to set up Mediawiki on crappy cPanel shared hosting again than have Fandom be the future. I think the company most responsible to kill them is Google, because their broken-ass search engine is the primary reason why Fandom works. I know that this is a hard problem to solve, but in my mind it's easy: start punishing large-scale SEO abusers like Pinterest and Fandom. It's five fucking years too late to start now, but that timer isn't resetting. Once you cut off their advantage over independent websites, and force each wiki to at least stand out on its own, it will definitely deal a fairly big blow to the machine they've built.

I'm sure it's been pointed out by others in the comments, but rather than BreezeWiki, you might want to consider Indie Wiki Buddy, which will redirect you to independently-ran wikis instead. (Or you could use both. Whatever floats your boat.)

https://getindie.wiki

It's disgusting what google has done to the internet the past five years.

I built my own genre-based wiki from scratch for kpop at kpopping.com (not a mediawiki) and my niche has been completely destroyed by google. They've promoted sites that leak nudes of minors and put porn ads on their wordpresses masquerading as wikis to first positions. Fandom would be an improvement for my niche.

Alas we are fooked.

If I see a fandom wiki it’s an automatic won’t visit

Not that it matters even if you did ... on my phone the page is overtaken by ads that open more ads and it's unusable.

Back when I had an iPhone 6, visiting Fandom sites was completely unusable because it had ads that automatically spammed the app store open. I had to be fast just to close the tab or the app store would get forced open again, regardless of whether I did anything or not.

I needed the info on the wiki page I was using though, and got around the issue by disabling the app store through parental controls.

Apple allowing that app store opening nonsense single-handedly made my decision to go to Android.

Android just became mostly closed-source. It won't be long until it's the same way.

I have some fandom wikis that I visit. My adblockers block all the ads and I use Safari's "hide distracting items" feature to block the other annoyances. Makes the site pretty usable but you have to care a lot about the content to bother with it.

Mostly getting errors about BreezeWiki not being allowed to access Fandom, but the idea is sound and much needed.

Fandom and Fextralife are a blight on gaming.

``` Exception raised in Racket code at response generation time: json-pointer-value: contract violation expected: json-value? given: #<eof> in: the 2nd argument of (-> (or/c json-pointer-expression? json-pointer?) json-value? json-value?) contract from: (function json-pointer-value) blaming: <pkgs>/json-pointer/eval.rkt (assuming the contract is correct) at: <pkgs>/json-pointer/eval.rkt:64:18 context...: /usr/share/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/blame.rkt:346:0: raise-blame-error /usr/share/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/arrow-higher-order.rkt:375:33 /home/cadence/breezewiki/src/search-provider-fandom.rkt:19:0: search-fandom /home/cadence/breezewiki/lib/thread-utils.rkt:27:20 ```

The extension I use to redirect fandom wikis also includes an option to go to various breeze wiki proxies, which is a convenient way to do that.

I work for wiki.gg, if anyone edits a Fandom wiki that's considering forking and wants to know more, send me an email (in bio)

Is there any easy way to make a local backup of a Fandom wiki? I have found some unmaintained scripts which might have worked at one point, but it seems like the only option on the table is to scrape and parse everything.

Beautiful.

I noticed the layout breaking on some pages, e.g.: https://breezewiki.com/Battleheartlegacy/wiki/Necromancer - the table extends beyond the horizontal edge of the page, at least on mobile.

Still a more user friendly place than fandom/wikia and I am now going to use BreezeWiki instead.

Fandom is one of those sites I want to like but just can't. How can the developers of that site be satisfied with their work?

Because their intention is to make money off other people's content with ads, and lots of ads.

So I'd say their satisfied

Probably burnishing their resumes to join DOGE next :D

You should help create a startup that makes a Lisp chip and help resurrect Lisp Machines. They can help bring true power to AI via their symbolic AI, everything in the system being Lisp code, and thus extensible, and more.

Doesn't seem to work with non-English wikis?

At least https://rpg.breezewiki.com/ru/wiki/ doesn't work.

A great idea in theory, but I would just prefer doing what a lot of wikis are doing now and just leave fandom, breeze seems to be getting pretty heavily rate limited for me anyways.

When i try this I get:

> Sorry! Fandom isn't allowing BreezeWiki to show pages right now.

Personally I think it should be illegal for webshites to use any legal or technical means to block people from deshitifying their webshites.

Awesome, you can also use it with LibRedirect (https://libredirect.github.io/)

I'm going to have to look at this. In the meantime I've banned fandom results from my search engine.

I prefer not to contribute traffic to fandom pages at all, directly or indirectly.

Racket is giving an error.

As long as nothing happens to Memory Alpha

fandom => spamdom.

Fandom sucks. Scraping and republishing their content sucks harder. Disgraziato.

  Except as expressly permitted by the Company (for example with respect to the use of text content that is submitted to particular Fandom communities as permitted as set forth at our licensing page), you may not modify, publish, transmit, reproduce, scrape, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, adapt, aggregate, sell, transfer or in any way exploit any of the content, in whole or in part,  -- https://www.fandom.com/terms-of-use

https://www.fandom.com/licensing

> Except where otherwise permitted, the text on Fandom communities (known as “wikis”) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0 (Unported) (CC BY-SA).

> To grow the commons of free knowledge and free culture, all users editing or otherwise contributing to wikis that use the CC BY-SA license agree to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-distribute and re-use their contributions freely for any purpose, including commercial use, in accordance with the CC BY-SA license. Such use is allowed where attribution is given and the same freedom to re-use and re-distribute applies to any derivative works of the contributions.

Using any automation to copy from Fandom is prohibited, and they do not provide backups of images and other media. This means that any attempt to copy a wiki to another host is either a manual process that could take days of downloading, or violation of the computer abuse act and a federal crime.

And then they won’t delete your wiki if the community asks for it. Fandom is hostile to forks.

Isn't that what a DMCA takedown is for?

Using automation to scrape lots of sites is prohibited but the AI crawlers seem to get away with it?

Can my browser not be an AI crawler?

> or violation of the computer abuse act and a federal crime.

I thought the linkedin scraping case set the precedent that anonymous scraping was legal?

Maybe it is, I’m old and remember old stuff. Also the rules maybe apply differently under Trump, who knows.

ArchiveTeam have an automatic process to upload wikis to archive.org, and it works fine for Fandom hosts.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Wikibot

I don't know if you noticed, but we're at war. You do not win a war by following rules set by the enemy.

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