8 ms·

As the person ultimately responsible for the Minecraft Wiki ending up in the hands of Fandom, it is great to see what Weird Gloop (and similar) are achieving. A

As the person ultimately responsible for the Minecraft Wiki ending up in the hands of Fandom, it is great to see what Weird Gloop (and similar) are achieving. At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run and so it didn't feel too much like selling out, because we needed money to survive[1]. 15 years later, the internet is a different place, and with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective. If I could do things over again, on today's internet, I like to believe Weird Gloop is the type of organisation we would have built rather than ending up inside Fandom's machine. I guess that's all to say: thank you Weird Gloop for achieving what we couldn't (and sorry to all who have suffered Fandom when reading about Minecraft over the years). [1] That's a bit of a cop out, we did have options, the decision to sell was mostly driven by me being a dumb kid. In hindsight, we could have achieved independent sustainability, it was just far beyond what my tiny little mind could imagine.

jagermo 2y ago
holy crap that minecraft wiki is fast now. I actually stopped going to fandom because it was so slow.
stonemetal12 2y ago
Thanks (seriously). Fandom may not be great, but you could have said I don't want to foot the bill, turned off the servers and walked away. Then the community would have lost every thing. Leaving it with Fandom gave Weird Gloop something to start with instead starting from scratch.
- beAbU 2y ago
  I can't imagine that this would have happened, like ever. The wiki was basically essential reading prior to starting to play Minecraft, especially in the early days. I think most the crafting recipes were documented by the developers themselves during those days. If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    citricsquid wasn't a Mojang employee. This whole thing is and always has been community-run [0], so the "they" in "if they killed the wiki" is not the same as the "they" that was selling Minecraft. Now, one could reasonably ask why Mojang/Microsoft didn't (and I'm assuming don't) foot the bill for the manual that is an essential part of their game. [0] https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website) https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website)
preciousoo 2y ago
You and your team made (a good portion of) my childhood. I remember spending nights studying all the potion recipes and enchantment odds. Thanks for all you did
oreally 2y ago
> with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective. sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?
- pjc50 2y ago
  Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!
  - diggan 2y ago
    > Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option. Otherwise, if you like the experience of not paying per GB/TB, go for a dedicated server with unmetered connection that has the same price every month, regardless.
    - KomoD 2y ago
      You don't need to pay anything to run TBs through Cloudflare, you could use the free plan. Rent VPS or managed hosting or host wherever you want, proxy it with Cloudflare on the free plan, Cloudflare caches it.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      It's more like: if you have a website that (sometimes) gets a lot of traffic, do you want Cloudflare to cache it and serve it with very few hits to your cheap server, or do you want your compute costs to expand to cope with the requests?
      - diggan 2y ago
        > do you want Cloudflare to cache it and serve it with very few hits to your cheap server, or do you want your compute costs to expand to cope with the requests? Usually you have something like a platform/tool/service that is mostly static requests that could be cached, with some dynamic requests that couldn't, as they're CRUD requests or similar. If your struggling to serve static content, then do go ahead and slap Cloudflare on top of that bad boy and probably your visitors will be a bit happier, instead of upgrading from a cheap VPS. If you're struggling to serve the dynamic requests, Cloudflare/CDN won't matter because these things actually need to be processed by your backend. So instead of trying to shave 50ms off from my simple static requests with a CDN, I'd much happier to optimize for all the requests, including the "dynamic requests" that need to hit the backend anyway. I'll still go for a dedicated server with proper connection and performance rather than a shitty cheap VPS with a CDN in front off it.
ryukoposting 2y ago
I remember reading the Minecraft wiki back in the early 2010s, back when Fandom was still Wikia. It would have been much more appealing at the time than it is today - not just for the reasons you list, but because Wikia actually kicked ass in the early 2010s. It was sleek, modern, and easy to use. And today, it isn't.
- epiccoleman 2y ago
  Every time I wind up on some garbage Fandom page I reminisce about the good old days of Wikia. I remember many a fun night trawling through pages while playing Fallout or Skyrim or whatever - all the information you could ever need, right there at your fingertips. It's an ethos you don't see so much on the modern net.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    It’s funny that people are now looking back at wikia fondly because at the time most folks thought it was full of ads and shit. To the point where Curse/Gamepedia managed to get serious market share by not screwing with the community in the same way at the time. Funny how they somehow managed to make it worse.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      How did Curse end up making money?
      - iamacyborg 2y ago
        Lots of ads across their wiki and other community websites and D&D Beyond was remarkably successful.
      - yifanl 2y ago
        I assume they didn't, which is why they were bought by Twitch.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
jchw 2y ago
In all fairness, running modest to large MediaWiki instances isn't easy. There's a lot of things that are not immediately obvious: - For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out. - You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation. - Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages. Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on. The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs. If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money. One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic... At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...
- account42 2y ago
  A lot of things should be solved by having (micro)caching in front of your wiki. Almost all non-logged in requests shouldn't even be hitting PHP at all.
  - jchw 2y ago
    In my experience this hasn't been necessary yet on anything I've ran. I know WMF wikis run Varnish or something, but personally I'm trying to keep costs and complexity minimal. To that end, more caching isn't always desirable, because RAM is especially premium on low-end boxen. When tuned well, read-only requests on MediaWiki are not a huge problem. The real issue is actually just keeping the FPM worker pool from getting starved, but when it is starved, it's not because of read-only requests, but usually because of database contention preventing requests from finishing. (And to that end, enabling application-level caching usually will help a lot here, since it can save having to hit the DB at all.) PHP itself is plenty fast enough to serve a decent number of requests per second on a low end box. I won't put a number on it since it is obviously significantly workload-dependent but it would suffice to say that my concerns with optimizing PHP software usually tilt towards memory usage and database performance rather than the actual speed of PHP. (Which, in my experience, has also improved quite a lot just by virtue of PHP itself improving. I think the JIT work has great potential to push it further, too.) The calculus on this probably changes dramatically as the RPS scales up, though. Not doing work will always be better than doing work in the long run. It's just that it's a memory/time trade-off and I wouldn't take it for granted that it always gives you the most cost-effective end result.
Dwedit 2y ago
Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for attempting to read a web page.
- theamk 2y ago
  Cloudflare dropped captchas back in 2022 [0], now it's just a checkbox that you check and it lets you it (or does not). And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this: I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare; but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas where you click on picture of hydrants, I hate this even more and think: move to Cloudflare already, so I can stop doing this nonsense! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007370
  - eviks 2y ago
    but there are more user-friendly captchas than the hydrants, which on average could be better that a total block on the tablets?
    - theamk 2y ago
      total block on _old_ tablets - Android 4.4 specifically, and I am sure many people on HN would be horrified to see those anywhere close to internet. New tablets are fine. As for "more user-friendly captchas" - I have seen some of those (like AliExpress' slider) but I doubt they will work as well as hydrants. And with new AI startups (1) slurping all the data on the web and (2) writing realistic-looking spam messages, I am sure anti-bot measures would be more important than ever.
  - fwip 2y ago
    The checkboxes are also captchas.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 2y ago
Svip 2y ago
I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years. Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Svip 2y ago
  A bit of a follow up to this; after a bit of thought, I am considering reaching out to Weird Gloop. I do not feel I am able to give The Infosphere the care that it deserves. And with Futurama back on Hulu, we are naturally seeing an uptick in activity. We have a very restrictive sign up in place, because I don't have time to moderate it anymore. It keeps the spam down, yes, but also new users away. Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.
  - stavros 2y ago
    What kind of costs are associated with something like this, and what sort of visitors are you getting? I'm wondering what kind of infrastructure you need.
    - Svip 2y ago
      Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours. Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now. The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month. Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.
Arch-TK 2y ago
You say you were a kid when you sold it. I could have sworn you weren't from conversations we had on IRC at the time. Although I most assuredly was a kid.
- fwip 2y ago
  "Kid" doesn't really have a hard cutoff. When you're 15, 12-year-olds are kids. When you're 30, 20-year-olds are kids.
- citricsquid 2y ago
  I was a teenager at the time. I'm in my mid 30s now, it feels like I was a kid back then.
sammy2255 2y ago
[flagged]
- misode 2y ago
  The Mediawiki software is not a static webpage
  - tredre3 2y ago
    Mediawiki is trivial to cache, though. For all intent and purposes most hits will be cache hits, and thus "static" content. I'm also shocked at the tens of thousands per month, it can't possibly be hosting alone. It has to be that the maintainer had a generous salary or something.
    - nemothekid 2y ago
      Seriously? How does that even make sense to you? The OP had an asset generation 10k+ a month in profit and was so squeezed for cash he had to sell it. Doesn’t it make more sense that a media have site would have been paying through the nose for bandwidth, hence the callout for cloudflare which would have made that cost free?
    - citricsquid 2y ago
      I could have the numbers wrong, archive.org is down otherwise I would check as we shared information publicly at the time. As far as I recall, we weren't taking money from the websites, we were spending on infrastructure alone with more than $10k in spend in the final month before the sites were acquired. I think it is easy to forget how much more expensive running things on the internet was back then along with the unprecedented popularity of Minecraft. Once archive.org is back online, I'll track down numbers.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      Not everyone is a professional web hoster with requisite knowledge on how to setup caching properly. Mediawiki involves edits that users expect to propagate instantly to other pages. Sometimes this can easilt result in cache stampedes if not setup carefully. MediaWiki supports extensions. Some of the less well architectured extensions add dynamic content that totally destroies cachability.
why_at 2y ago
One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it. For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error. It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.
- christianqchung 2y ago
  I don't really know how exploratory most games are compared to old Minecraft. Some games like Stardew Valley have certain things that are much easier to do because of third party wikis but I don't think the same is true of a lot of games in the same way it was for Minecraft.
  - LeifCarrotson 2y ago
    I picked up Stardew Valley a few months ago for the first time, and consciously chose not to use the wiki. I'm obviously way behind where I would be had I used the wiki, but it's been fun figuring out what works by myself. One game I recently got which has great exploratory potential is Shapez 2. The in-game help is amazing.
- mhink 2y ago
  > One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it. While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors. Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.
Nux 2y ago
> At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run. What kind of decisions got you in that position? Hard to phatom.
Washuu 2y ago
Hey Criticsquid!~ $￣︶￣*$) It's Azxiana[1]. I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them. [1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o
hinkley 2y ago
One of the things on my todo list is to spend some solid time thinking about load-shedding, and in particular tools and methods for small or hobbyist projects to practice it. Like what do you turn off on the site when it's the 15th of the month and you're already at 80% of your SaaS budget? Like maybe if a request for an image doesn't result in a 304, instead of sending a 200 response you redirect to lower res versions, or just 429 out. How much throttling do you do? And do you let bots still run full speed for SEO reasons or do you do something else there?
RGamma 2y ago
To be fair a lot of wikis' and internet cultural places' continuity woes would be mitigated by making it easier to decentralize hosting or at least do a git pull. Wikis especially don't tend to be that large and their S/N is quite high, making them attractive to mirror.

jagermo 2y ago

holy crap that minecraft wiki is fast now. I actually stopped going to fandom because it was so slow.

stonemetal12 2y ago

Thanks (seriously). Fandom may not be great, but you could have said I don't want to foot the bill, turned off the servers and walked away. Then the community would have lost every thing. Leaving it with Fandom gave Weird Gloop something to start with instead starting from scratch.

beAbU 2y ago
I can't imagine that this would have happened, like ever. The wiki was basically essential reading prior to starting to play Minecraft, especially in the early days. I think most the crafting recipes were documented by the developers themselves during those days. If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.
- lolinder 2y ago
  citricsquid wasn't a Mojang employee. This whole thing is and always has been community-run [0], so the "they" in "if they killed the wiki" is not the same as the "they" that was selling Minecraft. Now, one could reasonably ask why Mojang/Microsoft didn't (and I'm assuming don't) foot the bill for the manual that is an essential part of their game. [0] https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website) https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website)

preciousoo 2y ago

You and your team made (a good portion of) my childhood. I remember spending nights studying all the potion recipes and enchantment odds. Thanks for all you did

oreally 2y ago

> with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective. sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?

pjc50 2y ago
Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!
- diggan 2y ago
  > Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option. Otherwise, if you like the experience of not paying per GB/TB, go for a dedicated server with unmetered connection that has the same price every month, regardless.
  - KomoD 2y ago
    You don't need to pay anything to run TBs through Cloudflare, you could use the free plan. Rent VPS or managed hosting or host wherever you want, proxy it with Cloudflare on the free plan, Cloudflare caches it.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    It's more like: if you have a website that (sometimes) gets a lot of traffic, do you want Cloudflare to cache it and serve it with very few hits to your cheap server, or do you want your compute costs to expand to cope with the requests?
    - diggan 2y ago
      > do you want Cloudflare to cache it and serve it with very few hits to your cheap server, or do you want your compute costs to expand to cope with the requests? Usually you have something like a platform/tool/service that is mostly static requests that could be cached, with some dynamic requests that couldn't, as they're CRUD requests or similar. If your struggling to serve static content, then do go ahead and slap Cloudflare on top of that bad boy and probably your visitors will be a bit happier, instead of upgrading from a cheap VPS. If you're struggling to serve the dynamic requests, Cloudflare/CDN won't matter because these things actually need to be processed by your backend. So instead of trying to shave 50ms off from my simple static requests with a CDN, I'd much happier to optimize for all the requests, including the "dynamic requests" that need to hit the backend anyway. I'll still go for a dedicated server with proper connection and performance rather than a shitty cheap VPS with a CDN in front off it.

ryukoposting 2y ago

I remember reading the Minecraft wiki back in the early 2010s, back when Fandom was still Wikia. It would have been much more appealing at the time than it is today - not just for the reasons you list, but because Wikia actually kicked ass in the early 2010s. It was sleek, modern, and easy to use. And today, it isn't.

epiccoleman 2y ago
Every time I wind up on some garbage Fandom page I reminisce about the good old days of Wikia. I remember many a fun night trawling through pages while playing Fallout or Skyrim or whatever - all the information you could ever need, right there at your fingertips. It's an ethos you don't see so much on the modern net.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  It’s funny that people are now looking back at wikia fondly because at the time most folks thought it was full of ads and shit. To the point where Curse/Gamepedia managed to get serious market share by not screwing with the community in the same way at the time. Funny how they somehow managed to make it worse.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    How did Curse end up making money?
    - iamacyborg 2y ago
      Lots of ads across their wiki and other community websites and D&D Beyond was remarkably successful.
    - yifanl 2y ago
      I assume they didn't, which is why they were bought by Twitch.
  - Aeolun 2y ago

jchw 2y ago

In all fairness, running modest to large MediaWiki instances isn't easy. There's a lot of things that are not immediately obvious: - For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out. - You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation. - Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages. Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on. The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs. If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money. One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic... At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...

account42 2y ago
A lot of things should be solved by having (micro)caching in front of your wiki. Almost all non-logged in requests shouldn't even be hitting PHP at all.
- jchw 2y ago
  In my experience this hasn't been necessary yet on anything I've ran. I know WMF wikis run Varnish or something, but personally I'm trying to keep costs and complexity minimal. To that end, more caching isn't always desirable, because RAM is especially premium on low-end boxen. When tuned well, read-only requests on MediaWiki are not a huge problem. The real issue is actually just keeping the FPM worker pool from getting starved, but when it is starved, it's not because of read-only requests, but usually because of database contention preventing requests from finishing. (And to that end, enabling application-level caching usually will help a lot here, since it can save having to hit the DB at all.) PHP itself is plenty fast enough to serve a decent number of requests per second on a low end box. I won't put a number on it since it is obviously significantly workload-dependent but it would suffice to say that my concerns with optimizing PHP software usually tilt towards memory usage and database performance rather than the actual speed of PHP. (Which, in my experience, has also improved quite a lot just by virtue of PHP itself improving. I think the JIT work has great potential to push it further, too.) The calculus on this probably changes dramatically as the RPS scales up, though. Not doing work will always be better than doing work in the long run. It's just that it's a memory/time trade-off and I wouldn't take it for granted that it always gives you the most cost-effective end result.

Dwedit 2y ago

Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for attempting to read a web page.

theamk 2y ago
Cloudflare dropped captchas back in 2022 [0], now it's just a checkbox that you check and it lets you it (or does not). And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this: I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare; but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas where you click on picture of hydrants, I hate this even more and think: move to Cloudflare already, so I can stop doing this nonsense! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007370
- eviks 2y ago
  but there are more user-friendly captchas than the hydrants, which on average could be better that a total block on the tablets?
  - theamk 2y ago
    total block on _old_ tablets - Android 4.4 specifically, and I am sure many people on HN would be horrified to see those anywhere close to internet. New tablets are fine. As for "more user-friendly captchas" - I have seen some of those (like AliExpress' slider) but I doubt they will work as well as hydrants. And with new AI startups (1) slurping all the data on the web and (2) writing realistic-looking spam messages, I am sure anti-bot measures would be more important than ever.
- fwip 2y ago
  The checkboxes are also captchas.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
2y ago

Svip 2y ago

I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years. Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Svip 2y ago
A bit of a follow up to this; after a bit of thought, I am considering reaching out to Weird Gloop. I do not feel I am able to give The Infosphere the care that it deserves. And with Futurama back on Hulu, we are naturally seeing an uptick in activity. We have a very restrictive sign up in place, because I don't have time to moderate it anymore. It keeps the spam down, yes, but also new users away. Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.
- stavros 2y ago
  What kind of costs are associated with something like this, and what sort of visitors are you getting? I'm wondering what kind of infrastructure you need.
  - Svip 2y ago
    Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours. Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now. The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month. Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.

Arch-TK 2y ago

You say you were a kid when you sold it. I could have sworn you weren't from conversations we had on IRC at the time. Although I most assuredly was a kid.

fwip 2y ago
"Kid" doesn't really have a hard cutoff. When you're 15, 12-year-olds are kids. When you're 30, 20-year-olds are kids.
citricsquid 2y ago
I was a teenager at the time. I'm in my mid 30s now, it feels like I was a kid back then.

sammy2255 2y ago

[flagged]

misode 2y ago
The Mediawiki software is not a static webpage
- tredre3 2y ago
  Mediawiki is trivial to cache, though. For all intent and purposes most hits will be cache hits, and thus "static" content. I'm also shocked at the tens of thousands per month, it can't possibly be hosting alone. It has to be that the maintainer had a generous salary or something.
  - nemothekid 2y ago
    Seriously? How does that even make sense to you? The OP had an asset generation 10k+ a month in profit and was so squeezed for cash he had to sell it. Doesn’t it make more sense that a media have site would have been paying through the nose for bandwidth, hence the callout for cloudflare which would have made that cost free?
  - citricsquid 2y ago
    I could have the numbers wrong, archive.org is down otherwise I would check as we shared information publicly at the time. As far as I recall, we weren't taking money from the websites, we were spending on infrastructure alone with more than $10k in spend in the final month before the sites were acquired. I think it is easy to forget how much more expensive running things on the internet was back then along with the unprecedented popularity of Minecraft. Once archive.org is back online, I'll track down numbers.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    Not everyone is a professional web hoster with requisite knowledge on how to setup caching properly. Mediawiki involves edits that users expect to propagate instantly to other pages. Sometimes this can easilt result in cache stampedes if not setup carefully. MediaWiki supports extensions. Some of the less well architectured extensions add dynamic content that totally destroies cachability.

why_at 2y ago

One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it. For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error. It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.

christianqchung 2y ago
I don't really know how exploratory most games are compared to old Minecraft. Some games like Stardew Valley have certain things that are much easier to do because of third party wikis but I don't think the same is true of a lot of games in the same way it was for Minecraft.
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  I picked up Stardew Valley a few months ago for the first time, and consciously chose not to use the wiki. I'm obviously way behind where I would be had I used the wiki, but it's been fun figuring out what works by myself. One game I recently got which has great exploratory potential is Shapez 2. The in-game help is amazing.
mhink 2y ago
> One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it. While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors. Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.

Nux 2y ago

> At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run. What kind of decisions got you in that position? Hard to phatom.

Washuu 2y ago

Hey Criticsquid!~ $￣︶￣*$) It's Azxiana[1]. I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them. [1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

hinkley 2y ago

One of the things on my todo list is to spend some solid time thinking about load-shedding, and in particular tools and methods for small or hobbyist projects to practice it. Like what do you turn off on the site when it's the 15th of the month and you're already at 80% of your SaaS budget? Like maybe if a request for an image doesn't result in a 304, instead of sending a 200 response you redirect to lower res versions, or just 429 out. How much throttling do you do? And do you let bots still run full speed for SEO reasons or do you do something else there?

RGamma 2y ago

To be fair a lot of wikis' and internet cultural places' continuity woes would be mitigated by making it easier to decentralize hosting or at least do a git pull. Wikis especially don't tend to be that large and their S/N is quite high, making them attractive to mirror.