The Wandering Inn Wiki:Migration Announcement/Draft

From The Wandering Inn Wiki

The Wandering Inn Wiki has Moved

About a month ago, the TWI wiki community has agreed to move the wiki out of Fandom for the following reasons:

  • Everyone was tired of intrusive ads, especially on mobile, keeping people from reading the wiki properly.
  • A lot of the fluff from Fandom is useless and makes the user experience clunkier.
  • Fandom actually prevents you from moving your Wiki fully away from them by various means (like not being able to shut down a former wiki after a move, incomplete backups not containing any files/images/user data, etc.) so the content we editors create isn't easily exportable and available.
  • Fandom has made moves in the past which were detrimental to wiki communities, just to make more money off their content.
  • For a summary of the controversy surrounding Fandom as a wikifarm platform, Wikipedia did it best: Fandom Controversies

As a result, we are starting 2024 with a bang. With the agreement of the wiki's admin, we investigated how to move the Wiki's contents to an ad-free self-hosted solution with more creative and customization freedom.

The Wandering Inn Wiki has joined the exodus and moved away from Fandom, in the footsteps of other wiki communities such as, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Hollow Knight, Runescape and more.

What You Need to Know

  • All content and pages are the same, and were ported over to the new wiki.
  • The new URL: https://wiki.wanderinginn.com. Pirateaba and the TWI Webmaster have agreed to point the official Wandering Inn domain to the new wiki!
  • The wiki is now hosted on Axel Terizaki's server called Shelter. It is an enterprise-grade server in a data center hosted in Germany, with daily backups made on another server in France. Axel also hosts The Wandering Inn Booru (a fanworks gallery) for the community, free of charge.
  • If you have a Fandom account created BEFORE December 17, 2023 (17/12/2023) you can migrate your account over at the new wiki by following instructions here. Migrated accounts will retain their contributions on the wiki linked to their profiles. If you created an account AFTER December 17, 2023 (17/12/2023), please contact @AxelTerizaki on Discord (ping in the Wiki Project thread) or write something on User talk:AxelTerizaki.
  • The old Fandom wiki will no longer be maintained, as our editors and admin(s) have migrated. Over time, the old wiki will grow out-of-date.
  • Due to Fandom developing their own extensions without properly documenting them or keeping them open-source and available to the rest of the MediaWiki community, some features cannot be ported to the new wiki. These include :
    • Message walls. Comments on a User page are meant to replace this.
    • Blog posts
    • Old comments on pages weren't ported over, but a new Comment system is in place.
    • Polls. We are currently vetting a new Polling system.
    • Achievements. A new Awards system has been set up. Award badge art will soon be populated. See below for the ongoing contest for you artists out there who would like to contribute and win prizes.

You can read more about the migration process the wiki underwent here.

Great! How Can I Help?

Readers:

  • The new wiki will need time and traffic to rise up in the results of search engines, such as Google or Bing. Giving the new Wiki your traffic instead of the old Fandom wiki helps us, every little bit!
  • If you have bookmarks or web apps on your phone pointing to the Wiki, please redirect them to https://wiki.wanderinginn.com instead.
  • We have submitted a request to have our wiki added to Indie Wiki Buddy, an extension used to direct anyone to the independent wiki, rather than Fandom. If you want to give your support and traffic to independent wiki's, you can use this extension on Google Chrome or Firefox!

Artists:

  • The Wiki's new Awards system uses badges to reward editors for their wiki contributions. This means there are lots of badges lacking art. There is an ongoing contest hosted on the TWI Discord with cash prizes for artists who are interested in contributing. See here for more information.

Editors, Lore Hounds, and Wiki Warriors:

  • You can help us improve the quality of our wiki articles and add your knowledge to the new wiki. This helps the new wiki out-grow the old.
  • Alternatively, if you have an eye for overall wiki organization, we have many community projects to get articles and information standardized and organized!

That's a Wrap

Thank you for reading this far.

May you be a reader or editor, you're welcome to our new home!

- The Wandering Inn Wiki Migration Team

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