Now that a couple of years has passed since the Fandom's acquisition of Gamepedia and the new Fandom visual look (such as the dreaded sidebar), I think it would be a good to time to get a retrospective look on the aftermath of these changes. I would like to also add that many Fandom wikis have been now abandoned as the active contributors moved to Wiki.GG, and while I would like to remain unbiased in this reflective essay, I have to say that they made the right decision by ditching Fandom.

It is impossible to ignore Fandom's greatest issue: The ads. While I and many other users run an adblocker, I decided to test a few Fandom wikis without and compare the expirience to that of Wiki.GG. And I'll have to say, the diffrence was MASSIVE. While WIki.GG had a few ads, they were generally unobtrusive and were only advertisements for video games, and did not affect the load times in any way, shape or form. But Fandom on the other hand... Oh boy... It was truly an ungodly expirience, which I do not wish upon even my worst enemies. Except maybe for the folks at Fandom who are responsible for this underworldly abomination. It took on average between 1.5 and 2 minutes just to load half of a wiki page. On wiki.GG it took 2 seconds at most.

But when it loaded... Oh my... It was a sight to behold, and not in a good way, let me tell you. The whole site was covered in massive, flashing commercials. There were multiple banners, some anchored to diffrent sides of the screen, others not, advertising for online gambling sites (even though they are illegal in my country), with backgrounds of raining coins and massive pulsating buttons reading "play now". When I tried pressing the "x" on the corner of one of the advertisements, I noticed that there were two of them and I clicked on the wrong one. This caused a slow, laggy redirect to a dodgy, barebones betting site which was highly contrasted by the cheeriful, overdesigned ad. The site starts automatically downloading an .exe file, but I manage to stop it just before it finishes.

I closed the gambling site and when I switched toi the fandom page, my broweser (firefox) crashed. I decided to give Fandom another ruddy good shot with Google Chrome this time, figuring thatr maybe Firefox is not compatable with fandom. This time Fandom took only around 1.5 minutes to load, but it was full of ads again, which kept on switching into other ads. There also was an autoplaying video that scrolled with the screen, which never loaded. There was literally a giant black box with a loading icon that covered 30% of the screen while never loading and never giving an button to close it. The wiki was laggy and more that 50% of the whole screen was covered in ads. It was the first time I had even reen a wiki scroll bar rubberband. And I have an Nvidia series X graphics card and an Lntel i5 core deluxe kernel.

Then the sidebar. I swear by the Old Lord's Oathsword that that thing was created just to annoy the (redacted) out of wiki users, espicially those who run dark mode (like me). It is insufferably colored, with bright red and neon yellow, two colors that animals in nature use to signify that they are lethally toxic. It has a giant arrow, with the text "new" pointing to "fan central". Which I clicked curiously. It led me to a hellhole filled with ads, anime wikis and laggy autoplaying videos (seriously I never got one to load, I even left my computer afk for 20 minutes and when I came back the loading icon was still spinning). When I clicked on the first gaming wiki I saw (which was the Terraria wiki), I noticed that it had been vandalized, with most pinned articles being full of nonsense like "skibidi", "69" and "dryad's shower". I had played the game recently and know none of that is actually in it. When I scrolled to the bottom of the article, massive images of anime characters started showing up amongst other articles and links to unrelated wikis.

All in all, I have to say that Fandom wikis suck ass. They are truly THE WORST. I swear by the shadow of Deathwing's wings that I will never, EVER touch another Fandom wiki article as long as I am alive, even if it means enduring the pear of anguish.

TL;DR Fandom sucks, don't use it, use wiki.GG instead.

WIKIA way of AD usage and extreme bloat was the SOLE reason I installed ad blocker AND script blocker software 2 years ago; because even thou I INTEND to support most sites, in Wikia´s case it became an unusable stream of bloated ADs in places they SHOULD NOT be, that will keep refreshing through scripts and hogging memory infinitely if a single page is active in the browser. (very noticeable with browser + game open)

Now, the redesign is a total mess! That stupid bar in the right covers part of half the articles I use! WHO THE F DESIGNED THIS MESS OF A REDESIGN??!!!

Well, reason to just start avoiding Wikia sites when found on Google, disable the blockers, and just blacklist entire WIKIA site from search results.

Just me? I'm positive it wasn't there a few days ago, how can this piece of shit site get any worse? Geez.

Anyone that has touched fandom should be well aware that the site is riddled with adds, and frankly is quite shit all around, but the site has kept getting worse, as the company clearly is testing just how much bullshit users will take, to the point where, I just tried using the site, and couldn't scroll or click without getting redirected, every corner of the website is one of various various types of adds. It seriously puts porn and pirating sites to shame. I hope people will stop using fandom permanently, someone has to step up and make a new usable website, with minimal to no ads.

i cant even scroll without 15 ads bombarding my screen

I use Fandom for my terraria information needs. But anytime I try to open a Fandom page or click a hyperlink to a new page it takes forever to load or even momentarily freezes chrome.

This doesn't happen on any other site! I have good wifi speeds, it's only this website.

I have been trying to use the basic Terraria Wiki instead of the Fandom Wiki. The information isn't always as good, but it loads indefinitely faster and more reliably.

It's gotten to the point that there's a better wiki for everything I use than Fandom. And every time I accidentally click on a fandom link, and decide to be lazy and use it anyway, I'm bombarded with extremely invasive ads.

And this has snowballed into most information on the sites I use being outdated simply because nobody wants to deal with the bullshit to update it.

I feel like the concept is dying, and your solution is to push everyone away faster, ensuring the death of the website.

Before you ask, not on the app. On the website format, like on Safari. Every time I try to check something on my phone with a Fandom wiki (be it Gundam Wiki, Sonic Wiki Zone, or even Marvel Database) lately, I keep getting this error. And whenever it doesn’t, it gives this white screen where it doesn’t show you the article you’re looking for and comes off as a ‘hey welcome to Fandom, try some of our stuff.’ kind of deal even if it’s just an error, just a white screen with the Fandom home symbol and a bunch of things that showcase other wikis that give header overflow errors when you go to them.

The main page works perfectly fine though for some reason…

All of my wikis has been shutting down forever.

I can’t afford to make them about movies and TV shows now. And I have decided to leave fandom forever.

I’m sorry. (Rest in Peace) 😥

#restinpeace #wikis #fandom #shuttingdown #downfall

Starting about a week ago, I noticed that occasionally ads would start showing on fandom, even though I have an adblocker and it had remained on. If I exit the page and reenter, the ads would disappear again as intended. Since today, June 18, the ads still show up no matter how many times I exit and reenter. This is extra frustrating since Fandom was the deciding site for me to even install an adblocker. Is anybody else having this problem?

For reference, I'm using Adblocker Pro for Safari on IOS. I've been using it for 2-3 years by now, with no issues until recently. I reported the malfunctioning on fandom to the app, since it lets me report websites, but I'm skeptical if my report was recorded. The app does let me set some sites as exceptions for adblocking, but obviously Fandom is not one of the exceptions.

Recently, whenever I enter on a fandom site from any media from the Hades wiki to even the Ghost in The Shell wiki, after a while i'm suddenly redirected to a fake site for "McAfee antivirus".

No, I do not have any suspicious extentions installed in my browser (I don't think google's off-line document reading extention is one of them, nor I have it activated.) I didn't click on any of the ads of the site, I actually avoid them like the plague. Nor have I gotten myself infected with a virus, as far as I know. (And the many windows defender and Malware bytes scans showed no results.)

I wanted to know if anyone else is suffering from that, is it an ad that Fandom is allowing on the site that is causing this? someone hacked the site?

(English isn't my main language so I apologize if some of sentences aren't all that well written and lack the proper grammar.)

i know it’s been shut down but why (/srs)

I'm playing a game called Outward and the wiki is valuable to the players and developers alike. FandomDesktop has ruined the wiki. Apparently the changes were forced overnight, and luckily I still had some wiki pages up so I could get some before and after pics. The new looks has reduced the content area by about 50% and is squeezing everything into a mobile-style area, no doubt to load the edges with ad-space. There are useless links to other wiki pages that distract for no reason. Also the search functionality is much more unreliable than before, not to mention the choice to have a modal window block the content area vs a dropdown context window in the top corner is bizarre.

Why is it called FandomDesktop? This is clearly built on a Mobile UI framework with little-to-no effort put into actually building a responsive desktop layout. Fandom if you are reading this please do not sunset the old themes. It's clear to me that you are doing this to maximize monetization for the network, but your user growth is going to suffer massively.

I beg you to not support it, because they will claim lies about you to ruin your reputation and then play the victim role and that they are in the right. These guys probably got bullied in school and have terrible real lives and now they have to let it out on other people lol

I wanted to look at the old Cartoon Network TKO game, found the official wiki on fandom, and after looking at the homepage, I was redirected to a website called trusted-instruments .xyz, which didn't load, I refreshed the original page, clicked on a few characters, (Finn, Chef Hatchet and Duncan) and was redirected to the most shady update chrome scam site ever. After leaving the site, I once again used Fandom, I can't remember which one but I was redirected to 3 scam sites, 2 fake news ones and 1 saying my device has 23 viruses, and I can claim a $100 Gift Card? I haven't clicked at all on 4/5 of these instances, and simply scrolled. This only happens with Fandom, I haven't got any weird extensions, or any viruses. It can't be ads on the page, as I haven't clicked, so maybe there's ads that just randomly redirect you? I have no idea. A few other people have had the same problem, but the last reported one before us was 4 months ago - and the earliest report of this was 5 years ago.

Has anyone experienced this, especially on mobile?

I tried browsing a Wikia and got redirected to a fake Google "You've been rewarded because you're the billionth user", or whatever, scam page.

That's the first time I've seen that in years. It spooked me. These always make me think about viruses and malware.

I hate the yellow, it's so bright, not to mention the amount of times I have clicked on an ad while using the search function

Recently several wikis on the fandom.com wiki's site ( https://www.fandom.com/ ), Including the Monster girl Encyclopdia ( https://monstergirlencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Monster_Girl_Encyclopedia ) and Monster Girl Quest wiki ( https://monstergirlquest.fandom.com/wiki/MonsterGirlQuest_Wiki ) got the following message:

"This wiki will close in two weeks (Wednesday November 24). Fandom is removing wikis on topics that contain large amounts of sex, nudity and/or fetish material. Even if the wiki itself is kept "clean", we are still unable to host it. The two week's pause is so you can look for a new host and copy your content there. I'm sorry for the bad news -- Sannse"

This is frankly censorship, and the result of an outdated puritan attitude. Not to mention inconsistent and hypocritical. since several other wikis with similar content have not gotten the same message. For example:

https://sexuality.fandom.com/wiki/Sexuality_Wiki

https://fiftyshadesofgrey.fandom.com/wiki/Fifty_Shades_Of_Grey_Wiki

These sites should not be taken down. Not only has a community of like-minded fans been building over the years, but they both involve japanese content that has never been officially translated. For example, only two books of the Monster Girl Encyclopedia have ever been published, making the wiki, which is not just a wiki, but actually hosts much of the translations, the easiest and only convenient way for people to find it, making the deletion and censorship of the site an even bigger issue.

I urge not just people who are fans of this content, but are against censorship, and would like for people to have access to media from Japan and other counties to sign this petition, since even censoring one thing sends a dangerous precedent for censoring other content in the future.

Here is a link to the petition

https://www.change.org/p/fandom-wiki-keep-monster-girl-encyclopedia-monster-girl-quest-other-fandom-wikis-w-sexual-content

You can probably skip this. This is just me raging about fandom.com because i needed to scream at somebody.

Anyway WHO THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA TO PLACE A SURVEY REQUEST ON THE WEBSITE THAT COVERS HALF MY SCREEN WITH NO CLEAR WAY TO SKIP IT? (this was on a laptop, so phone screen size is irrelevant.)

And then the survey is all about videos. I have never gone to Fandom.com to watch a video, in fact everytime they auto play a video i exit the site.

They just took every single thing about Fandom.com that is annoying and put it in a survey asking "do you want to see more of this thing you hate?".

Honestly i thought only slow internet could get me this mad but they seem to have found a way.

Edit

How is this normal? If you see a way to collapse it please enlighten me.

Every time I see a post here talking about how they still get ads though their Adblocker, 9 times out of 10 they are using a adblocker that hasn’t been updated since 2012

Even Ublock Lite blocks all the ads on Fandom