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1mo ago

Vampire Survivors devs launch official wiki "free of ads, banners, and all of the junk that gets in your way"

www.gamesradar.com Vampire Survivors devs launch official wiki "free of ads, banners, and all of the junk that gets in your way," joining Stardew Valley and Terraria in community wikis with minimal intrusions

The devs behind the viral roguelike are directly partnering with the community on this wiki

Gamedev @lemmy.world

www.gamesradar.com /games/roguelike/vampire-survivors-devs-launch-official-wiki-free-of-ads-banners-and-all-of-the-junk-that-gets-in-your-way-joining-stardew-valley-and-terraria-in-community-wikis-with-minimal-intrusions/

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62 comments

Good! Hopefully more devs follow suit and pull traffic away from Fandom.
Also hopeful that they manage to fix the SEO on the site, as Fandom is still the top result for "Vampire Survivors wiki".
- Try the browser add-on Indie Wiki Buddy.
  It suggests a better wiki when you browse one on Fandom.
  edit: there is an open issue to add the official Vampire Survivors wiki: https://github.com/KevinPayravi/indie-wiki-buddy/issues/1102
  
  Just to add on to this, in those unfortunate cases where there really is only Fandom, you can use an extension like LibRedirect which will redirect any Fandom pages to a breezewiki instance, which is a stripped down, privacy respecting, no BS front end for Fandom.
- Same with the Terraria wiki. Afaik the fandom wiki is mostly abandoned and people moved to the much better gg wiki.
  
  The Oxygen Not Included wiki made the jump a few years ago and the gg wiki seems to finally be better referenced
- Why make a Wiki when a shitty Discord server with a clunky search function is easier to set up? Of course it‘s also much less useful, more work to maintain in the long run and a never ending source of drama, but most devs don‘t think that far because they kinda only do it to build a community anyway. Being a source of information is just slapped on but enough reason for them to not set up a wiki or proper forum it seems. Ugh.
- I assume Google prioritizes the wikis that bring in the ad dollars. Not sure if any amount of SEO can change that.
- Well, GGG hosts their community wikis since years too...

We did the same for The Talos Principle Wiki.
The community is hosting its own MediaWiki rather than rely on Fandom.
- The Monster Hunter community just did the same: https://monsterhunterwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
  Folks finally got tired of the several horrible options and did it themselves. There’s also a discord for coordinating contributions if so inclined.
  
  Honorary mention of Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, which existed as a fan documentation hub since the mid 90s.
- Same for us with the Cyber Knights: Flashpoint wiki. More devs should learn that self-hosting a community wiki for their game is not that hard.

Good to see we're finally fighting back against Fandom
- Fandom is icky. A few years ago, my mom was getting scammed by some conspiracy guy from LinkedIn who offered her a “job.”
  These dudes set up their own fandom wiki to try to make their bullshit seem real. I can’t remember the name of the people involved but one guy was claiming that he was owed 300 trillion dollars by the government. (Can’t remember the exact number but it was astronomically high. More money than exists kinda high)
- A lot of devs of "wiki games" have been doing this lately.
  Digital Extremes/Warframe did it a month or two back. And a lot of people have speculated that https://wiki.warframe.com/w/WARFRAME_Wiki:Stakeholder_Analysis and the old fandom equivalent "explains" it but that is inherently tinfoil and biased speculation.

I avoid using fandom like it’s contagious. It’s so cluttered, when my blockers on images don’t load half the time. It’s a slow site.
It’s really the worst, I’d rather scrub through a YouTube video to find the answer I’m looking for rather than go to a fandom site.
- You might like the indie wiki buddy extension, it can automatically redirect you to a independent wiki when you go to fandom (if there is one), remove fandom search results, and redirect you to a 'breeze wiki' page if there's no fandom alternative
  (Breeze wiki is an alternative frontend for fandom, much like invidious for YouTube. It guts all the ads and banners and garbage, and gives you a much simpler wiki page)
  
  If you browse a lot on mobile and cannot install extensions, all you have to do is replace the "fandom" in the fandom wiki URL with "antifandom"
- I've often been like "I don't know why people complain about Fandom, this is fine". And then I saw what the site looks like without uBlock. Sweet merciful heavens. Hey, there's some ads. Let's cram some ads in the ads. Some prime blank space? Shove some annoying video things in there. Autoplaying. See that navigation bar over there? Let's make it pointless. (If you come to the article via web search, surely you want to read about some completely random stuff in another game!)
  Fandom is garbage, Fextralife is garbage (and at this rate will probably be bought by Fandom one day). Indie wikis rule.

Best thing that happened to path of exile too, the devs provide the wiki platform for the community
https://www.poewiki.net/
Very based
- Same thing happened with minecraft.wiki too, people finally got fed up with fandom's bullshit
  
  Same with doomwiki.org and a bunch of others.
  
  That's not the same, Mojang isn't affiliated with the wiki at all.
- The Guild Wars 2 (and 1) wiki is also hosted directly by the devs. It's even accessible via chat command.
  https://wiki.guildwars2.com/
  
  The fact that in GW2 you can just type
  /wiki subject
  and get taken to the wiki page for subject is such an amazing and obvious command I'm surprised more games don't do it.
- Warframe just did it too. Fantastic move.

Based dev. Fuck fextralife and fandom
- fextralife
  Sometimes it feels like fextralife is filled only with stub articles.
  me: "Hmm, I wonder about [a thing] in [a game]"
  fextralife's entire article: "[A thing] is a thing in [a game]"
  brilliant, thank you.
- Wat?! Fandom has ads?! Never saw these. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

They have taken the survivors.wiki domain.
I wonder if they are planning spinoffs with other themes?
Edit: typo
- Accountant Survivors coming in October.
- survivors.wiki *
  
  Thanks

I wouldn't be surprised if the initiative comes from the OG dev of the game, who is Italian: the efforts we go through since 1996 (all I can remember) to avoid ads and popups are of biblical proportions.
I can remember my father taking the PC away from me as soon as he saw I was exposed to one, going "I can take that away, it will be a minute". It wasn't a minute.

Love this, and the site looks great. Wonder what software that is. Is it just mediawiki?
- Yes.
  
  Ah, perfect, thank you. I was particularly interested because I just recently dabbled with mediawiki and ended up going with dokuwiki.

Just wanted to point out that wiki.gg is out there as a replacement. There's even a wiki.gg Redirect plugin for Firefox that takes you to the right place, if you hit a Fandom link.
- and then wiki.gg gets bought, as other wikis got. No thanks.
  Write content in a community mediawiki maintained by the community instead.
  
  Instructions unclear.
  Locked it behind a Discord community instead. 🤡
  
  For anyone looking for a wonderful example of this, check out the RuneScape wiki. It’s hosted by a company that is partnered with the game maker, and is fully maintained by the community. It is the single most expansive and in-depth wiki I have ever seen. It is truly the gold standard for what a wiki should aspire to be.
  It has everything you could need to play the game, all the way down to automatic calculators (with built in character lookup functionality, using the game’s high score leaderboard system) to tell you things like how many of [x] resource you’ll need to get [y] experience, or what your estimated return on investment will be for turning [x] resource into [y] product.
  The game has over 250 quests, (and not just basic fetch or kill quests like most MMO’s have) and the wiki has in-depth walkthroughs (including in-game screenshots) for every single one.
  You can even open the wiki directly from the game. There’s a “Wiki” button on the chat box, so you can search the wiki directly via chat, and it opens in your desktop browser.
- Relative to a fandom wiki: I guess? Although you are inherently going to have the same content theft problems where the vast majority of modern wikis are just ripped from the game guides that games media are still paid to prepare.
  Relative to an official wiki with developer backing? No, it is not a replacement.
  Also: I would generally be very wary of any of the plugins to redirect you since they have VERY broad permissions to... hijack your browser traffic. If you are keeping up to date and monitoring them you are probably fine but that feels like a great example in waiting to find out a bad actor pushed some code last week...

This pleases me.

ublock origin and firefox.
no ads, no popups. game wikis are a breeze to use for me.
- Breezewiki?

Very nice! This would've been helpful when I was platinuming the game last year.

Very nice to see. Might start playing again to 100% it (yet again) now that there's an actual useful wiki for it. Always love to see pure media wiki usage. I wish we could just scrub Fandom's one now.

Another step was made to reclaim the free internet! I bought dlc inside the game and I'm glad I did.

shouldnt this be built in the game anyway?
- It's still a wiki, I.e. user/community written content.

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