User talk:Gymnasiast

New wiki

Hello, I used to contribute to the RCT Wiki on Wikia ages ago and just came across this wiki. What made you move the wiki away from Wikia? Good luck! Lachlancoasters (talk) 12:20, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Lachlancoasters: It was a long list of annoyances with Wikia, both in how they run their platform and in the platform itself. To start with, Wikia uses a heavily modified, old version of MediaWiki that lacks many improvements of later version, and their extensions are often incompatible with anything outside it. Over the years, they gradually removed all the useful skins, starting with Monaco and ending with Monobook, only leaving one that was both unpractical and ugly. They also introduced several plug-ins that duplicated functionality with no way to turn them off, like the Message Wall. And they put advertisements all over the place, with no control over where they are placed. There is also the Fan Feed which is a huge block of adverts for other wikis, which is inserted at the bottom of every page and may not be removed.

Over the years, they have proven not to listen to any feedback from their wikis, even from the Runescape wiki, which at the time was by far the biggest and most important one. This all gives us little hope it will get better. They could get away with it when they were the only wiki farm in town, but those days are long gone. Gymnasiast (talk) 13:17, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough, I actually can't remember what it was that pushed me in the end but I took over operation of Coasterpedia back in 2013 due to similar reasons. I'll try and add some more here in the future! I am not sure how we can get this wiki to show up ahead of the Wikia one on Google, for Coasterpedia, it took years and a lot of new content. Lachlancoasters (talk) 13:52, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! Appreciate you linking from Coasterpedia to here, by the way, that’s the sort of thing we need to get higher rankings on Google. Gymnasiast (talk) 14:09, 20 October 2021 (UTC)