User:Vish/Sandbox

Hey everyone. Today we'd like to announce that we've decided to move off from Fandom's website onto our own server. The new wiki is live at https://jojowiki.com. We've discussed leaving Fandom for years and now we've finally decided to take the opportunity.

We apologize that we've had to keep it a secret for a while to get everything set up, but we believe it's ready now.

Forking off from Wikia/Fandom will allow us to be independent from Fandom's policies regarding customization, javascript, and many more. We can also add any extensions we want and create our own skins. We hope to see everyone over on the new wiki.

What is forking?
Forking is the process of leaving https://jojo.fandom.com and moving to our own domain https://jojowiki.com. All of the admins, moderators and main editors have already moved onto the new site.

If interlanguage wikis (such as the Russian, Spanish, French, and Portuguese JoJo wikis) are interested in moving with us, we may have a solution for that. However, for the time being, the English wiki is the focus until we are stable.

Why?
Short answer: To get away from Fandom.

Longer answer: Here are a few reasons:
 * Wikia/Fandom's movement away from wiki content to click bait blogs and editorials. Their rebranding from "Wikia" to "Fandom" only confirms that they want the site to be less of an encyclopedia and more like a social media site.
 * Fandom's increasing control over our site content, such as things like having to review the Javascript we add, limiting how many links we can add in the top navigation bar, and by pushing their own "Featured Videos" over the actual articles.
 * Speaking of the videos, they are made by Fandom staff with content that we have no control over. While there is an option to disable them for logged in users, guests of the site will still see them and the majority of our viewers are guests.
 * Fandom's security allows vandals and trolls to easily remove content from pages and there's no way for us to see IPs to handle these cases more easily.
 * Fandom's MediaWiki software is extremely out of date and relies on a heavily modified version of it. MediaWiki 1.19 was released in 2012 and many custom extensions are not supported, nor can we add any ourselves without having to email Fandom. However, they do have plans to update to the latest version but who knows how long that will take.
 * Fandom doesn't care about us nor do they care about JoJo. We're voluntarily editing and handling the site for free while they're reaping the benefits from all the advertisement revenue.
 * The new Discussions feature they added which they plan to replace the Forums with in January 2020 is terrible.

Who is running the wiki?
Vish and MetallicKaiser

Why didn't you talk about this sooner?
We have kept this under wraps for several reasons:
 * Fandom knowing too early could have been bad.
 * We couldn't have too much traffic on the site while getting everything ready.
 * We didn't know how long it will take to get everything ready and the actual process of migrating all the articles and images while fixing various bugs took some time.

Do I keep my account?
Yes. You will need to create a new account but just follow the short, easy instructions in this thread. Your username doesn't even need to be the same if you want to change it. Then Vish can reassign your edit history and contributions to the new account.

What happens to the old wiki?
Well, we plan to stop editing it.

Is this why the background and favicon changed recently?
Yes.

What about SEO and traffic?
SEO will be a problem since Fandom is basically all over Google but we hope the traffic we get on the new site after this announcement will bring our search position higher.

What changes?
We've tried to add all the custom features Fandom had with their own extensions. The only thing missing right now is the Special:WikiActivity page but Special:RecentChanges still exists which is primarily the same.

What's next?

 * We plan on adding a Dark theme soon.
 * In case you get any bugs or have any suggestions for the wiki, please make a thread on the new forum or on our new public Discord server. Thanks for your support and we hope to see you on the new wiki.