Lurker > MrMallard

And that's all I really had to say tbh. I was gonna make this post on April Fools day, after they purged me for six months beforehand, and have it be my last post on CE - I have nothing but antipathy for this place, and now that the run-off from the politics board has infested the place and CE has gone private, I see no reason to stay.

I care enough to say goodbye, I guess, so who the fuck am I kidding - but I really want to emphasise that the final moment came when I saw a dude either miss the most blatant, dick-in-your-face trolling attempt I've seen in years due to their own piss-poor reading comprehension, or they decided that roleplaying as a moron who pretended to fall for other people's trolling in the hopes of getting the original troll to keep saying incendiary dogshit. Like there are people in their thirties who genuinely want to blur the line between looking like an idiot and simply being one, and it really put the years I spent trying to get through to someone - anyone - in perspective. I really wasted years of my life on this shithole.

Regardless, I did meet some cool people. Johnny Nutcase is a cool guy, and his usual drinking compadres are pretty good too. Teep is a mensch, anyone who doesn't get along with Teep doesn't get along with me. CyricZ is just a genuinely cool, friendly person; I've spoken with him a fair few times, and he's just a great guy imo. Shit, I even broke bread with bok choi after initially fucking hating that guy (we're talking like eight years ago now, I've known him for like six or seven at this point. Not saying anything about like tinychat days, that shit was before my time and it's a chapter of history I choose to intentionally stay ignorant of because the Bok of today is the Bok I'm friends with, not the guy he was back then).

So yeah, I wasted my life here and so are you all. Get help and get better. I can't really claim that I'm doing either, but fuck dude I'm trying. Enjoy RI 2.0 or whatever the fuck

Here's the other screenshots btw:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/4/447f9e1d.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a4197869.jpg

1: Consider using non-Fandom wikis. Fandom websites tend to be shot to the top of your average search, but there are some significant game wikis which don't exist under the Fandom umbrella, and offer significantly better functionality on all devices with little/no ads.

I found a long list of non-Fandom wikis on some webpage:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/f/f1115f20.jpghttps://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/4/447f9e1d.jpg

(longer list incoming)

And upon noticing that Bulbapedia was not on that list, I looked them up and found that they were a part of an independent wiki network called the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, or the NIWA Network:

https://www.niwanetwork.org

This network has wikis for the Golden Sun games, F-Zero, Kingdom Hearts, even a Mii wiki.

I would also like to put forward the Old-School Runescape wiki, which exists separate from Fandom's own offerings and which offers additional functionality like displaying the in-game price of a tradable item on the Grand Exchange, and allowing you to view the day-to-day financial history of that item from its introduction in the game through to today:

https://oldschool.runescape.wiki

2: When you are using a Fandom websites, use an ad blocker. It won't fucking work on their wikis, but I'm sure as shit not seeing any ads on GameFAQs lmao

I don't know donkey dick about how secure it is, but I use the DuckDuckGo browser on my phone. There's also been a big push to use Firefox over Chrome, considering that Chrome/Chromium as a platform has been going after ad blocking applications and making them incompatible with the browser/s. uBlock Origin is apparently the gold standard for ad blockers right now, and I've heard it works on mobile as well as desktop.

3: Consider creating a new wiki independent of Fandom's influence, or contributing to any of the existing independent game wikis that already exist.

Vampire Survivors has a handful of options if you want to look stuff up, but the first thing you're going to find on Google is the Fandom wiki for the website. The second option is the IGN guide, which is fairly fleshed out - I've actually been happy enough with IGN's guides lately, at least in comparison to the bloated, ad-ridden nightmare of your average Fandom wiki visit. Maybe the IGN guide is enough - but if you're sufficiently nutty about Vampire Survivors (and why wouldn't you be? It's insanely fucking addictive), maybe consider finding a place with cheap/free hosting, learn some HTML or some back-end code for a pre-existing wiki template (Wikipedia uses free, open-source software that other wikis like Bulbapedia also use), and make your own site. Link it on the subreddit, share it around some Discord servers. You might be able to create a beloved resource for fans of the game to use.

And I wanna shout out @CyricZ for a second, because dude makes Yakuza/Like A Dragon guides that are so good he's gotten acclaim across the broader internet for the quality of his work. I wanna ask - do you contribute to any Yakuza/Like A Dragon fan resources like wikis and stuff outside of GameFAQs? And if you don't, would you ever consider leaving GameFAQs and/or making your work available on other platforms?

Because ultimately, when it comes to fan wikis, the information and passion for the property comes from us. The fans. Fandom got in after Wikia made a sizable dent in the wiki market, offering free hosting for second-rate wiki experiences that barely held a candle to the functionality of a website like Wikipedia. They snuck in, bought the company, put all of the wikis in a chokehold and fucking BOMBARDED their new "property" with ads. Wikis like the Doom wiki had a hard time breaking away, because Fandom made it as hard as possible for them to walk away with all the work they'd put into the wiki for years.

Instead of blithely accepting this cynical attempt to milk our efforts and our engagement for filthy lucre, maybe we could consider making new wikis. They can be trashy and small and incomplete to begin with, but with enough time and passion, anything can rival what Fandom is putting out. A sufficiently detailed Wikipedia post about a pile of dog shit that existed for five days before getting stepped in, smeared across the pavement and subsequently cleaned up by a council worker would be better than the bloated, busy, borderline unusable wiki pages that Fandom provide to th public.

But barring that? You can easily block ads on several Fandom-owned platforms, GameFAQs included. You now have a list of independent video game wikis to use, including wikis that are forked from Fandom and which have been expanded and preserved through the efforts of its users. You can express your general discontent with Fandom fairly easily - shit, even swapping out Fandom for IGN is probably better for everyone, even with IGN's shortcomings. It's gotta be better than visiting the digital equivalent of a gonorrhea infection, clouding your shit with puffed-up, bloated waste that makes it harder to use the equipment you've got.

I got a bit corny in the end, calling for people to make their own wikis, but that doesn't change the fact that it's easy to stop supporting Fandom in small ways. In ways that siphon just the tiniest amount of revenue from their chokehold on the attention economy, in ways that they can't fucking stop you from doing and which they can't punish you for doing. Fandom can't stop you from using other resources - I just gave you a long list of independent game wikis, some of which are really, really fucking good and genuinly trump the Fandom experience. They can't tangibly kick you off their platform for blocking ads. Talking about blocking ads on here might go against the ToS for all I know, but I'm not planning to stay beyond this post so why would I care? Either way, I've given you something to consider.

And they can't take your creativity or passion from you. They can try to affect platforms for you to express your creativity and passion, but we're all capable of contributing to a better system than whatever malignant corporation has decided to buy their way into fan spaces and ruin them from the inside out.