Why Fandom sucks, and how to move your wiki somewhere else

Fandom sucks. A lot.
There's gonna be some of you who think Fandom's actually a great platform, so, let's look at the pros and cons of Fandom:

Pros

Cons

  • Way too many ads
    • The ads sometimes block content on smaller devices, making the content unreadable
    • The ads are sometimes malicious, causing an antivirus to pop up and block the site
    • The ads make the site extremely slow
    • When the user interacts with the pages before the ads finish loading, the page jumps back to the start to make the user click on an ad
  • Page loads really slowly.
    • No, your internet is fast, the real problem is Fandom.
  • "Are you a kid or an adult?" popup every time you visit a page from a search engine
  • Bright yellow theme, practically no customization
  • Collects all your data - your IP, your location, etc.
    • Now, I have no proof on this, but they probably sell the data to data broker companies.
  • Annoying sidebar on the left
    • Worst thing is, it doesn't even work properly.
  • Ate up Gamepedia in 2021.
    • Gamepedia was the best wiki host for games, but now, all the wikis are now integrated into Fandom, and Fandom has shifted its focus from games to movies.
    • When they did the merge, the old wikis that were on Fandom were forcibly archived and stripped of their subdomains, breaking a ton of links
  • Terrible wiki interface
  • Intentionally makes it hard to move your wiki out
    • You need to ask Fandom support to get an up-to-date XML dump, else you'll just get one from a few days ago
    • The XML dumps don't include images, and it's against their Terms of Use to use a script to move the images (which is the only way other than manually reuploading the images).
    • Once you move, you can't delete the old wiki, not even delete all the pages because that's also against their policies
  • Basically no moderation
    • The only thing the mods do is delete rants about Fandom and deleting LGBT wikis (no, they actually did that in 2022)
  • Has SocialProfile extension. It's wonky, slow, and terrible overall.
  • For some reason VisualEditor is just especially slow on Fandom. Not sure why, probably because loading ads in the background
  • Very strict policies
And before you go, "Fandom was literally created by Jimmy Wales, the same person who created Wikipedia!", first of all, that's only half true, and second, I know he's like chairman or something, but correct me if I'm wrong, but he does basically nothing at Fandom now.

How to move your wiki

If you have a wiki on Fandom and want to move it somewhere else, I recommend Miraheze. No ads, customizable interface, no telemetry.
If you do decide to move your wiki to Miraheze, then check out their guide on how to do that.

Written by Anpang - Go back