Sorry guys, but the X-Wing Wiki just got hit with Fandom's mandatory "improvements" and it's a disaster. We've lost our wealth of old comments (edit: they brought back old comments, but we had to disable article comments because the discussions feature is so poorly designed). Lots of our pages, templates, and features are outright broken (This got a bit better when we restored some stylesheet stuff but there's still a bunch of work to do). The page editor is broken (edit: this comes and goes). The wiki activity feed I use to monitor changes and comments is vastly inferior to before. And it doesn't include the new commenting system, so if someone asks a question, the only way for me to know is for me to trawl the hundreds of wiki pages looking for a new post (edit: Main reason we had to disable article comments until Fandom someday adds the necessary tools).

Fandom is very devoted to and proud of these changes and does not respond to questions like "Will comments ever show up in the activity feed? When will x or y be fixed?". They think this is good enough. They're rolling these changes through other wikis too and it's a disaster for a lot of them. And still Fandom ignores the complaints and keeps applying the changes instead of fixing things first.

Over the years I've tried very hard to make the wiki a useful tool, and to be on the wiki answering questions regularly, especially for new users. But at this point I'm kinda helpless, there's nothing I can do. Fandom humped us hard and we won't be walking again for a long time.

Maybe never. I may be at the limit of what I can and will stick around to fix & tolerate. The mountain of work ahead of us is made so much harder by the objectively worse tools now available.

Screw Fandom.

edit: so I'm taking a wait and see approach for a few days, or weeks, to see if Fandom can be bothered to fix some of this stuff. I don't want to haggle with it and discourage myself further while their editor and other tools aren't working. Maybe with time they'll get their crap together.

Sorry to hear that. It was a good resource that I used often. I've seen this happen with other forum sites as well where the system is "upgraded" and makes years of valuable information practically useless.

Sad to hear, the wiki was very useful.

Sad to hear, the wiki was very useful. I see html tags randomly pop up on pages. Looks like they didn’t know what they were doing when they did the “upgrade”

So comments are slowly getting ported over... things all over the wiki are still broken though. And the new comment system is terrible .

Hopefully we'll get some help eventually. I don't have the time or energy to battle their bad conversion, and the tools have gotten so much worse it's demoralizing.

I've never liked fandom websites much, but this is a bummer

One resource I've found useful as an alternative for card data, history and availability is https://xhud.sirjorj.com/xwing.cgi/

It doesn't have comments though, only the wiki serves that need

Your work is greatly appreciated.

It's horribly demoralising when something like this trashes all the hours, days, and years of work you've put in.

@Wazat , I'm really sorry to hear that. It has been such a great resource for me and many other players. I know when I was just getting started in the game (in 2.0), you helped answer so many of my stupid little questions, and rule loop hole ideas. You were always so timely with your responses. I know that you put a lot of work into the wiki, and I'm really sorry that it's pretty much gone now. I know we all will mourn the loss of one of the greatest resources known to x-wing.

This is terrible news. I've always hated everything Fandom has done. It just keeps getting worse it seems. This is a great loss. Sorry to hear it @Wazat . Would it be worth it to move to a different wiki platform?

18 hours ago, Wazat said:

Screw Fandom.

That sucks, but thanks for all your work!

Are there any reasonable alternative platforms where the wiki could be forked to? Gamepedia (though that is owned by Fandom IIRC)?

Fandom has been making things worse and worse over the years for all wikis...

Gamepedia being owned by fandom is a problem, as they're talking about merging the two to be the same thing. Same underlying software, and maybe merging duplicate wikis on the different sites into one. I remember the Divinity Original Sin wiki was talking about that not too long ago.

Just now, Wazat said:

Gamepedia being owned by fandom is a problem, as they're talking about merging the two to be the same thing. Same underlying software, and maybe merging duplicate wikis on the different sites into one. I remember the Divinity Original Sin wiki was talking about that not too long ago.

Oh, ****. Not a real option then, too risky, too temporary.

Are there any other free alternatives? Hosting a wiki would probably be expensive.

Just now, Woorloog said:

Oh, ****. Not a real option then, too risky, too temporary.

Are there any other free alternatives? Hosting a wiki would probably be expensive.

Well, there's Google Sites, but last I used it I wasn't super impressed with the tools. Years ago but I'm still a bit grumpy. But yea it'd be free. Also it's not a true wiki; no wiki markup etc. Last I used it, it was like an inferior version of Google Docs. Now I like Google Docs quite a lot, but the Sites stuff was much harder to use and I was often thrown off by the disconnect. The new Sites tools may be better (haven't tried them since the conversion), but they were pretty rotten to work with when I was doing the wiki for the RPG campaign I ran some years ago to flesh out the world and give the players a reference site. I wouldn't want to make a giant wiki like X-Wing there. I also don't know how Google responds to high traffic, I never looked it up. My RPG group of half a dozen people and the occasional onlooker definitely didn't push any boundaries.

And Google Sites probably don't have internal templates etc so it'd be harder to define pilot/upgrade costs in one place, or do other complicated internal work to save labor editing things on a hundred pages every time there's a points/etc update. Actually the points/etc templates system is one of the few things in our Fandom wiki that's still working... along with the Compare Ship tables, amazingly.

There's also Fextralife, but I'm not super-familiar with how good they are to contributors, moderators, etc. I know that when using it for Divinity Original Sin 1 & 2 stuff, I've had to enable adblock on their site to block the violently aggressive auto-playing videos on every page that were distracting and headache-triggering. But I've also had to do similar types of adblock-component-murder to wikia/fandom to be able to tolerate its nonsense, so maybe that's not a big deal. Anyone know anything about Fextralife?

But even given other true wiki options, the effort of getting literally hundreds (if not thousands?) of pages grafted over to a different platform is very high . Plus there's the internal work of getting the templates etc working on the new platform and adjusting for what's not supported/supportable. Wikia used to be pretty good; who knows what to expect moving forward. And who knows what to expect from something like Fextralife. We'd want to look into whether they're doing something similar, or known for causing their wikis grief by making huge sweeping changes that break stuff. And even if it looks good, it's potentially a planet's scale of work to transfer everything over, compared to the mountain of work to fix things on Fandom and tolerate their crap.

I dunno, I'm kinda tired at the moment. I don't wanna think too deeply about it for now. 🤷‍♂️

6 hours ago, Wazat said:

Well, there's Google Sites,

There's also no guarantee that google sites will exist in a few years. Google are infamous for pulling down well-used free (i.e. not making money for google) services

So here's where we stand as of today:

1) Old comments have been ported over and aren't lost, but all comments etc are now using the "Discussions" feature, which is a drooling mess. We have no tool for monitoring comments, so if someone asks a question on the wiki, we have no way to know about it unless we want to visit all 1200-ish pages and scroll to the bottom to look for new posts. Same deal with vandalism. You can't do any wiki markup or templates in the posts, and it's not connected to the wiki in any way (unlike the old article comments, it's a totally separate feature with no integration with the rest of the wiki). Very half-baked feature. Maybe someday they will add rudimentary tools; I wonder why they couldn't do that before converting everyone over. Make things usable first!

The person helping me (intermediary between their dev team and us contributors) suggested turning off article comments until the team adds some basic tools. That's... unfortunate, since that's the main way people engage with us to get questions answered or request suggestions. He seemed surprised that Discussions have no tools for finding comments and managing vandalism etc. Yea, me too.

2) We half-fixed the infoboxes so now they appear in the right place (no border but it's a start), so pilot and upgrade pages look a bit better. I now need to go through the laborious and uncertain work to convert to wikia's new infoboxes, which I remember being very clumsy and limited and not playing well with the concept of optional data (e.g. not everyone has force charges).

3) Maybe tabviews will be fixed soon? Still waiting on that. In the mean time the Products page is broken, and we may need to just not use tabs anymore.

4) I'm still hostile to the very poorly designed Recent Changes page, when Wiki Activity was so much more usable. Recent Changes doesn't include Discussions, and it's visually much harder to read and assess than was Wiki Activity. Fandom's hostility to things many contributors used on a daily basis and loved... baffles me. It's like nobody on their team actually manages any wikis, at least not real, non-toy wikis with lots of pages and visitors etc. 😠

5) Things have sped up a bit from "5 - 15 seconds to load a page and its images" to being reasonably quick. I haven't tried editing pages today but hopefully that's fixed. Surprisingly the Compare Ship tables have worked fine throughout this process, other than looking a bit ugly because of the stylesheet changes.

So things are half-functional with maybe hope of getting better in a couple of areas (speed, tabview, infoboxes), and only the most distant hope of other things improving someday in the indeterminate future (Discussions).

yey 🎉

Back when Fandom killed the nice plain "Monobok" skin for Wookieepedia so that they could shove more ads down our throats, I lost quite a bit of respect for them. Sorry to hear that they've screwed their users again.

Dang, sorry to hear that @Wazat , that’s very frustrating. But I have to admit that I’m mostly disappointed that you didn’t name this thread “Episode I: The Fandom Menace.”

(jokes aside, thanks for all the hard work you put into the wiki! It has been an invaluable tool that I confess I’ve often taken for granted.)

Hmm that's really a shame. I've used the 1.0 wiki a lot since I started playing (and buying) 4-5 years ago. It's simply the best resource to look up things like which upgrade comes in which expansion.

Edit: I know it's a dumb hack but how about using some script to go over all pages to find any new comments? I guess it would not take long too cook up something in Python. The only question: is there some kind of index or page list that contains every page?

19 hours ago, Polynomial-C said:

Hmm that's really a shame. I've used the 1.0 wiki a lot since I started playing (and buying) 4-5 years ago. It's simply the best resource to look up things like which upgrade comes in which expansion.

Edit: I know it's a dumb hack but how about using some script to go over all pages to find any new comments? I guess it would not take long too cook up something in Python. The only question: is there some kind of index or page list that contains every page?

Comments through discuss are a bit strange in that they're their own entirely separate world and almost totally disconnected from the rest of the wiki and even the main Discuss section, and I don't know what the script would need to search for. If that kind of centralized access is available, I imagine some dev would expose it as an actual feature to us admins. Well, imagine. I fantasize about a lot of missing competencies on Fandom's part, but instead they strut their innumerable inadequacies with shocking pride.

But assuming no central access, to scan 1200-1400 pages each day and look for new comments, you'd need the script to trigger the same behavior as when we've scrolled to the bottom of the page, or however else we can get discussions to load up for that specific article, and then scan those entries against our database of last timestamp for that article, or posts in the last 25-ish hours, etc. That's a good deal of effort and, importantly, likely slow to run since discuss is not a great feature on the speed end sometimes (other days it's fine?). In fact, assuming we didn't trigger some alert on Fandom's servers and get our IP banned, I wonder if it would complete in 24 hours on the slower days. Most likely it would, but at this point I have no right to be optimistic, haha.

Even assuming it works, it'd be a lot of effort to act as a crutch for Fandom being terrible. I'd rather just disable article comments and direct visitors to the main Discuss forum (link at the top of the page), while we wait a month or year or whatever to see if Fandom ever get their crap together. If it takes too long though, I'll just be long gone. I have far better things to do than wait for Fandom to deign to make its site properly usable again.

Oh man... what a cluster for sure. Fandom has never made me happy for sure.

Progress Update:

We've disabled Article Comments, so we're just having everyone use the terrible Discuss feature instead. We'll have to see if Fandom ever fixes article comments to be remotely manageable.

We're making progress on fixing infoboxes, which are hacky-fixed now but we're working on doing it properly. Products page is in a temporary "usable" but ugly state until we come up with a design to replace the tabs.

Not sure how many of our regular contributors have stuck around. A couple have let me know this may be their breaking point, and I don't blame 'em. But at least we're making some progress on fixes thanks to Moviesign (who works for Fandom) helping.

I wonder if it would just be easier to try to crowdfund a mediawiki website completely separate from Wikia.

The Wikia staff really seem to want to make everything as terrible as possible in the name of a few extra advertising pennies per wiki and it shows. I remember hearing Wookieepedia almost had a fork, but wookieepedia is so big that hosting costs would have been massive.

That is not as much of an issue with the X-Wing minis wiki...

Speaking of wiki-disaster, it seems like a lot of card images folks are trying to link to are busted. Le sigh.

Yea, almost as a core personality trait, Fandom likes to break things. Can never tell if it's malice or incompetence.

For what it's worth, there may be some trickery people can do to the url like trimming off the end, to get consistent results.

Instead of https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/xwing-miniatures-second-edition/images/5/5b/Swz16_boba-fett.png/revision/latest?cb=20180703025248

Do this: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/xwing-miniatures-second-edition/images/5/5b/Swz16_boba-fett.png (trim everything after the file extension)