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Comment by cookmeplox | Hacker News Reader

I think you can love what we're doing with the wikis, but also be candid that it's not an optimal reader-facing domain name. It was never really intended to be that - it's literally just named after a random item in RuneScape I discovered

But it ended up being the only reasonable place we owned where we could put Fortnite, Overwatch and Valheim wikis that wouldn't get crushed by this new Google jail situation. Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first. Chicken and egg.

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Thank you so much for what you do.

> Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first.

So why not get such domain, wait out until it is let out of Google Jail and then put all the wikis on subdomains?

I imagine you would quickly gain trust and people would immediately recognize the links and know that this is the place to go. As opposed to the current state where the wikis have separate domain names and for each game we need to learn which one is the "good one".

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Second question: Any thoughts on liberating non-gaming wikis from fandom, such as TV show wikis?

Re the first question, you have to park at least one wiki on said domain for around a year, during which Google will refuse to show other page other than the main page. That's just not really a realistic option is it.

Per the article they don't.

> There’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, though - based on our experiments so far, it seems like once we establish these new wikis fairly well on Google, it should be safe to move them off weirdgloop.org back to whatever the appropriate name was, while keeping the existing Google juice that the subdomain picked up. I’m hoping that in 6 months or so we can just 301 redirect overwatch.weirdgloop.org to overwatch.wiki, use Google’s change of address tool, and put these wikis to where they should have been in the first place.

I mean, at that point isn't it better for the community to just leave the wiki on overwatch.wiki instead of overwatch.<generic domain>?

For the hardcore Overwatch community perhaps, but not for the general gaming community, especially if WG is about to grow further and host more and more wikis.

For people who regularly get into new games its much easier to learn just one easily distinguished domain with the high quality wikis.

overwatch.weirdgloop.org works better than overwatch.wiki in this sense, apart from the complaints about the odd name up in the comment chain.

> it's literally just named after a random item in RuneScape I discovered

Well, at least you didn't go with fossilised dung.

https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Fossilised_dung

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