[00:06:01] Such bad words [00:28:55] Oh my god I just read this message and it feels like history repeating [00:31:03] The whole "Discussions is 10 years old and didn't quite live up to its potential" feels like they are going to kill another product that we told them was a bad idea so they can continue with another bad idea [00:31:56] Pre-UCX flashbacks [00:32:43] Forums were another bad idea in many ways but Discussions are a whole different beast [00:33:26] Forums were bad because they for some reason counted towards an article's talk page (or were those comments?) [00:33:54] Those were both lmao [00:34:14] https://tenor.com/view/slendytubbies-gif-8082108445899402227 [00:34:31] The underlying structure powering message walls, forums and comments was so painfully bad [00:34:35] and in the end they never bothered to automatically delete them [00:36:05] You could edit other people's comments through the API in 2016, they fixed it a couple years later but in the process broke the ability for anyone (even Staff) to delete broken Message Wall redirects or something to that extent [00:36:21] God [00:36:57] I was just recently born in those years but I miss the old Oasis look [00:36:58] They originally had usernames in those page names but after the GDPR update had to move billions of pages to instead use user IDs [00:38:11] And they left the fucking redirects so whenever you hard-deleted one of these pages an old thread page would pop up in your broken redirects [00:38:38] And I say hard-deleted because, funnily enough, they had three fucking ways to delete a thread [00:38:59] There was "remove", which basically just hides [00:39:43] There was "delete(?)" which does not let users view the thread regularly but because the pages still existed you could just view their wikitext as normal [00:40:07] Off the Fandom topic real quick, but if Miraheze ever remakes their main page, I absolutely HOPE it's bee-themed [00:40:48] Like, the Miraheze logo is literally shaped — and colored — with hive colors [00:41:24] And there was deleting the actual page with the thread text which wasn't even natively supported because it broke a bunch of shit (sometimes it rendered errors on message walls, and if you wanted to restore the page it would get an entirely different URL because thread URLs were tied to page IDs) [00:41:47] But here's a funny thing about this [00:42:27] When you made a thread, it would be stored under Thread:Board_name/@comment-userid-timestamp [00:42:55] But the actual page that you visited had the URL of Thread:pageid [00:42:56] why does Fandom still have those namespaces years later? [00:43:29] And the page ID referenced in the canonical thread URL is the page ID of the underlying page [00:44:16] So if this page had the ID of 1234, you would visit the thread at Thread:1234 even if there was no page specifically called "Thread:1234" [00:44:22] However... [00:45:09] When they migrated all that to Discussions, Thread:1234 pages all started redirecting to their new Discussions locations [00:45:29] Which makes sense because they would've broken a lot of URLs otherwise [00:46:22] But if you delete the underlying Thread:Board_name/@comment-userid-timestamp page, the Thread:1234 page no longer redirects, because there is no longer a page with the ID of 1234 [00:47:05] So that's why they left a bunch of junk pages in those namespaces, and why I had to make a script to blank them all instead of delete [00:47:55] The funny thing is that links to Thread:1234 pages counted as redlinks even though these pages would have redirected lol it was such a mess [00:49:04] i might have manually deleted them [00:49:25] Well I guess you might have broken some old links if they existed [00:49:57] Unless you did that post-migration [00:50:07] post-migration [00:50:32] Then it doesn't matter, the redirects would have only worked on Fandom anyways [00:51:09] Working with those was such a massive pain and Discussions only improved a little in that regard [01:01:18] The Forums were a mess but tbh I had a lot of good times on them. They started to die out on most wikis I edited on when Discord became more and more popular but tbh I prefer forums over chat rooms a lot of the time. [01:06:15] Discord accelerated the demise of Special:Chat [01:06:27] Which was another one of their bad ideas [01:10:54] I had a lot of good memories on there too 😔 [01:11:04] Infinite emoticon space [01:11:14] The in jokes were unrestricted [01:11:58] One time the chat got raided by a bunch of accounts roleplaying as the power rangers [01:12:04] It was a lot of fun [01:12:21] I have fond memories of the comment section on Moegirlpedia. With 3000+ active users and the terrible support for large group chats on Chinese messaging apps (e.g. no concept of "channels" which results in a large volume of messages in a single group chat), it is a lot easier to chat on-wiki, especially by commenting on user pages. [01:14:09] I just feel like the chat and forums were the “right” amount of social features [01:26:01] Yeah the chat and the forums as spaces were great and I also have a lot of good memories from there but ultimately Fandom have shown time and time over that they just don't have the capacity to build social tools that are feature complete [01:26:28] This is partially the fault of MediaWiki which wasn't built with modern social features in mind [01:27:18] I think having an on-wiki discussion space is a great idea if done right [01:29:30] But most of the time... linking a Discord server is probably good enough [01:31:38] [1/2] Anyways I think that roundtable is basically this comment of mine from 2021 in that same server [01:31:38] [2/2] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/615786602454581249/1496684945274441850/Screenshot_20260423_032108_Discord.png?ex=69eac7fa&is=69e9767a&hm=5f32aa2be35b055f0386af144ec9bd5ee08e4ee505563a72c9686d76cc8fb019& [01:34:58] Moegirlpedia restricted commenting to autoconfirmed users which helped a lot with random spam. Some editors still did not like the feature but at least most comments came from editors. [02:08:18] Honestly, the forums were a bit of a nightmare. It wasn't too bad on our wiki, but on our sister wikis, I'd notice not just a lot of spam but also a lot of young users treating it lowkey like a diary and giving out personal information. It feels like something that'd need its own moderation team, and most wikis are not equipped for that. [02:13:45] (Nor should they be imo. Since when you're signing up to admin a wiki, you aren't really signing up to wrangle comments giving out personal information or getting inordinately mad at fictional character or just being generally mean to people.) [02:14:59] I guess I was in a sort of unique position since the wiki I helped administrate was very forum-focused and had a large moderation team (frankly too large by the time I left). So much so we convinced Fandom to let us have an external forum which we had in place of discussions. [02:19:07] [1/2] Yeah, I've seen some really big wikis have large teams with special teams to deal with forum moderation, which is great. But the wikis I'm most familiar with are those with a large readership but a small editor-base, and those tend to get overwhelmed with forum messages. I think our sister wikis generally handled it well, but I've certainly seen other wikis in the same space that di [02:19:07] [2/2] dn't, and many posts that should've been deleted for the safety of all involved were left up, sometimes indefinitely. I'm definitely a lot happier now without forums since our fandom migration, personally. [11:31:19] oh also if you deleted any legacy comment page that used a file, that file would show up in Special:UnusedFiles. if you deleted that file, then the image wouldn't show up when viewing the comment [12:23:07] That too [12:23:38] They just transferred the HTML of the post instead of reuploading the file [12:26:39] At one point Discussions allowed you to edit the HTML of the post and I was wondering if to use that to transfer those files to Discussions before they fix it lol [12:29:33] then someone found a vulnerability in that so they instead mangled all the posts to escape the html [12:32:22] Well I found the vulnerability that allowed you to edit the rendered HTML [12:32:40] But I don't remember when they mangled them lol [12:41:49] they ended up with p tags everywhere e.g. https://battle-cats.fandom.com/f/p/2332632566202811123 [12:49:40] ew, link to an abandoned fandom counterpart of a miraheze wiki [12:58:08] how else did you want me to find an example [12:58:52] just joking around with my instincts [12:59:36] The fear and hunger fandom wiki becoming a collective shitpost to protest against fandom was very funny [12:59:58] Fandom wiki sucks [13:00:17] It's just a bunch of ads completely unrelated to the topic of the wiki you're un [13:00:29] Plus they don't have as much costumization [13:17:29] help i didn't realize the Fandom wiki was still up until you brought it up [15:31:18] I sorta forget that the Fandom counterpart of the wikis I edit exist at all [16:28:00] I think I’ll always remember the Megami Tensei fandom wiki because like once a week there’s some fandom drama about misinformation on that site [17:02:35] The only conclusion I can draw from their comments is that they're hemorrhaging cash 💀 [18:03:01] [1/2] how though 💀 [18:03:01] [2/2] as cook said, pretty much most of weird gloop gets paid entirely through below-the-fold ads for desktop users outside the uk/eu. Fandom with their ads that also sometimes come with wiki pages should be making millions [18:04:23] I can't speak to their financial state though I could probably look at their finstatements and make some inferences. [18:05:02] High level though, devaluation of ad spend is big for a lot of sites, and fandom is intensely ad reliant [18:05:17] Oh wait, it's newspapers 2.0 [18:05:36] Different mechanism, but similar outcome [18:11:34] [1/2] TPG's 10-K filing from Feb, if folks with business knowledge feel like perusing: [18:11:35] [2/2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001880661/000188066126000011/tpg-20251231.htm [18:11:43] ^Fandom's parent company (private equity firm) [18:26:00] No mention of Fandom in those unfortunately [18:27:31] Aggregated under the TPG Growth product banner, what I'm gleaning from poking around is they've made some very rosy promises about said growth. [18:27:55] And one way or another, delivery on those promises will be happening. [18:28:25] (General disclaimer that I am not an investment professional and all things should be taken with a block of salt) [18:29:27] Yeah my guess too was that they aren't actually low on cash but have unrealistic growth goals which they aren't meeting [18:29:57] That would track with what I'm seeing [19:10:53] [1/2] There exists a Board Elections Committee role [19:10:54] [2/2] Only used for every year, looks special haha [19:31:53] I hate momomonomsdays [23:23:52] [1/4] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/615786602454581249/1497015176887533628/image.jpeg?ex=69ebfb87&is=69eaaa07&hm=80ec03d9724cab98eb0cc9ed1d9d0816f9475d5744d37163cff1890dfe7f9cf6& [23:23:52] [2/4] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/615786602454581249/1497015177974124614/image.jpeg?ex=69ebfb87&is=69eaaa07&hm=7548a5fdeac970e4874a399c6d2187b11fafebc4eee2841c868491811158f4a4& [23:23:53] [3/4] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/615786602454581249/1497015178699472946/image.jpeg?ex=69ebfb87&is=69eaaa07&hm=e19d271b08c9607c323d19f84a79cb80a04fdbef03afb63fafdbb9e98d620eb9& [23:23:53] [4/4] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/615786602454581249/1497015179420897331/image.jpeg?ex=69ebfb87&is=69eaaa07&hm=260dd416d1134998cc4729797c5c9042bfe3a6e024edfff23d3d76db6f0f1601&