[citricsquid]

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.

[preciousoo]

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

[Svip]

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.

[Svip]

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.

[echelon]

Their growth people emailed me again and again and tried to do the same with StrategyWiki decades ago.

Here's one of their emails:

> [Redacted] mentioned that your site was very cool - and that you're heading off to college. As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame) and we are trying to become THE resource for all gamers

> I was wondering if you'd consider moving over to wikia now that you're going to might have less time with your studies. As an incentive I can point to a few things that might make the move easier

> 1. We have cool new software - gaming.wikia.com lets users do more blog-like contributions in addition to wiki editing - new social networking tools on the wiki - see our test server at http://sports.box8.tpa.wikia-inc.com/index.php?title=User:[R...

> 2. We could also hire you to help moderate the strategy wiki and other wikis if you need some beer and pizza money :-)

> 3. or we could offer to pay all the hosting costs and share some of the ad impressions/revenue with u

> If nothing else, I'd love to chat by phone and get to know you better.

> Let me know if that'd be ok :-)

[babypuncher]

The Infosphere has always been one of the best fan wikis out there, thank you for your hard work (and for not selling out to Fandom)

[ryukoposting]

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]

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.

[mossTechnician]

Wikia is a great example of enshittification - provide great value to users, then take it away from users and hand it to other businesses (eg advertisers), then take it away from businesses too.

Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.

[stonemetal12]

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]

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.

[Washuu]

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

[why_at]

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.

[mhink]

> 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.

[christianqchung]

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.

[BlueTemplar]

With emphasis of both free and easily accessible ones... can you still even buy third party game guides in book form ?

[oreally]

> 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?

[citricsquid]

More than a decade has passed since then so I am stretching my memory. At peak we were serving in the region of 10 million page views per day which made us one of the most popular websites on the internet (Minecraft was a phenomenon and every Minecraft player needed the wiki). We were probably the highest traffic Wiki after Wikipedia. Nowadays Cloudflare could absorb most traffic because of the highly cacheable nature of it, but at the time, Cloudflare didn't exist, and every request hit our servers.

[pjc50]

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!

[Ambroos]

If you can run your application on Cloudflare Pages / Workers with Cloudflare's storage/DB things, it really gets dirt cheap (if not free) and very fast. And even without that, Cloudflare's caching CDN is very good, very cheap and very easy.

[bombcar]

Ten years ago bandwidth was expensive. Still is, even if not as much. A simple VPS gets overwhelmed, but a simple VPS behind cloudflare can do quite well.

[pornel]

Cloudflare caches pages at many many datacenters, often colocated with large ISPs.

This lets Cloudflare deliver pages from their local cache over local links (which is fast and cheap), instead of fetching the data every time across the world from wherever the VPS is located.

[jchw]

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...

[noen]

This is so true.

I adopted mediawiki to run a knowledge base for my organization at Microsoft ( https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/I... ).

As I was exploring self-host options that would scale to our org size, it turned out there was already an internal team running a company wide multi-tenant mediawiki PLATFORM.

So I hit them up and a week later we had a custom instance and were off to the races.

Almost all the work that team did was making mediawiki hyper efficient with caching and cache gen, along with a lot of plumbing to have shared infra (AD auth, semitrusted code repos, etc) thst still allowed all of us “customers” to implement whatever whacky extensions and templates we needed.

I still hope that one day Microsoft will acknowledge that they use Mediawiki internally (and to great effect) and open-source the whole stack, or at least offer it as a hosted platform.

I tried setting up a production instance af my next employer - and we ended up using confluence , it was like going back to the dark ages. But I couldn’t make any reasonable financial argument against it - it would have taken a a huge lift to get a vanilla MW instance integrated into the enterprise IT environment.

[account42]

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.

[tempest_]

Have any of Intels server offerings been "premium" since epyc hit the scene?

I just assumed they were still there based on momentum.

[Nux]

> 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.

[hinkley]

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?

[Arch-TK]

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]

"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]

I was a teenager at the time. I'm in my mid 30s now, it feels like I was a kid back then.

[RGamma]

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]

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

[Dwedit]

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

[matt_heimer]

That's up to the site owner.

For example I configured my osdev wiki (mediawiki based) so that the history and other special pages get the Cloudflare test but just viewing a page doesn't trigger it. OpenAI and other bots were generating way too much traffic to pages they don't need.

Blame the bots that are DDOS'ing sites for the captchas.

[whstl]

At least they moved away from Google Captchas, which really hates disabling of 3rd party cookies and other privacy-protection measures.

I haven't had a problem with Cloudflare and their new Captcha system since their changed, but I still suffer whenever I see another website using Google Captcha :(

[kbolino]

Even better, you can get a captcha before you're allowed to see 404 Not Found.

[yard2010]

The other side of the coin is lizards trying to literally end the internet era with their irresponsible behavior, and hell, making a nice living in the process

[treefarmer]

And god forbid you use a VPN and try to do anything on a Cloudflare site

[theamk]

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

[misode]

The Mediawiki software is not a static webpage