49 ms·

Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile

Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load. Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user experience as frustrating as possible. And not once has the video had even a tangential relationship to the article being viewed. The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.

tpaulin 5y ago
A few months back I opened a link to a new article using an in-app browser (no ad-blockers). I kid you not, upon initial load the entireiy of the screen was ads or "annoyances". The one thing missing was the entire reason I clicked on the link.
rstat1 5y ago
I'd say the worst part is that Firefox has a feature for blocking auto playing video. But it never works.
- gruez 5y ago
  I suspect that's because you can programmatically start video playback from within event handlers. That's necessary because otherwise any site that use custom playback controls will break. However, that also means malicious sites can implement "autoplay" by adding a onmousedown/onscroll/touchstart event handler and starting playback from there. Video playback will start the moment you try to interact with the page in any way.
  - boring_twenties 5y ago
    > any site that use custom playback controls will break Is that actually a bad thing? I have no idea about video playback controls, but in every other instance I've noticed where sites implement their own custom versions of browser controls, it's been absolutely terrible. Custom scrollbars, or lack thereof. Custom drop-down lists, which never support keyboard input properly. And so on. And even if I'm wrong, and custom video playback controls are somehow desirable, why should they be supported for any event except onclick?
    - gruez 5y ago
      >why should they be supported for any event except onclick? obvious example would be articles with scrolling effects (eg. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-libyan-prisons-that-keep-migrants-out-of-europe https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-...), and need to autoplay videos when they scroll into view. That said, even if you restricted it to onclick, I don't imagine it's too hard for a page to receive a stray click (eg. if you're randomly selecting stuff) to trigger playback.
      - inetknght 5y ago
        > articles with scrolling effects That is not a legitimate example of a good thing. That's a legitimate example of something that shouldn't be a thing
        sdoering 5y ago
        In your opinion. Being someone who hates these autoplay videos on news sites I can also see that examples like OP's are a valid and when done well interesting new firm of story telling. It is imho very valid to experiment with new forms of multimedia mixed stories. And just because some people abuse features that enable this we should not try to stifle innovative ideas as a whole imho. I just don't use sites that do this anymore. I mean the abusal part.
      - drdeca 5y ago
        Why, as a user, would I want a page to begin playing a video as a result of scrolling?
  - Firadeoclus 5y ago
    That seems solvable, for example by blocking programmatic control of playback until you allow it for a given video element. That way it only "breaks" when the user wants it to be "broken".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  With some ad blocking I can at least get the videos to stop playing. The black rectangles are only slightly less annoying, though.
- grishka 5y ago
  I don't understand why there isn't a browser feature that would simply disable all and any support for <video> and <audio> elements, or ask you a permission before a website can create any. It's really that simple. No need to try, and fail, to figure out which videos are "safe" to autoplay and which aren't. Let the user decide.
  - hiccuphippo 5y ago
    Makes me miss the days of Flash because I could block everything video, audio and animation related with FlashBlock.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    I've seen sites that autoplay video by implementing a JS h264 decoder that renders to a <canvas> element. Developers will go to significant lengths to work around browser permissions.
    - grishka 5y ago
      That's... actually viable? You can decode h264 in real time in JS with a single thread that also runs the UI?! Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".
      - zrm 5y ago
        Or just have browsers disable javascript by default and require explicit permission to use it. 90+% of web pages shouldn't need it for anything.
        wruza 5y ago
        Or make a dead-slow subset that doesn’t eat cpu cycles, but schedules 10-20 ops every 1ms. And then enable full-speed if the user asks. Ads guys would then resurrect a demoscene spirit out of it. Ah, dreams.
judge2020 5y ago
Hosted mediawiki isn't cheap, so I don't see another player coming into the market. The consolidation of gamepedia into "Fandom" is the worst in this respect.
- Blackthorn 5y ago
  Hosted mediawiki is plenty cheap. When wikicities became Wikia they added some ads. They eventually redesigned it to look like a monstrosity because the $. I moved my very large wiki, which eventually became dnd-wiki.org, off of it at this point and self hosted it for a $10/mo virtual machine. Then Wikia became fandom and somehow became even worse. It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap. For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month. But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts. A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month. But as privacy intrusive advertising became the norm no solution ever grew enough to become feasible for the masses. I remember the flattr button. I used flattr for a while. But in the end I stopped. tl;dr 10 bucks are not cheap to anybody. I wish easy micropayments were a thing.
    - Blackthorn 5y ago
      > For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap. I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month. Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.
      - Washuu 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- nefitty 5y ago
  Who in tech do you hold up as an ideal persona? I'm not defending what happened to you. It's surprising to me that even someone like Jimmy Wales, who pioneered the most impactful knowledge-sharing project in the world, is vilified by some people.
  - sobkas 5y ago
    > Who in tech do you hold up as an ideal persona? For me it is mjg59 and maybe Miguel de Icaza, also maybe Linus Torvalds
    - genghisjahn 5y ago
      Kelsey Hightower
  - theturtletalks 5y ago
    Tim Berners-Lee
  - zentiggr 5y ago
    No one. Every name I can think of has had some great ideas, and some truly cockeyed are-you-kidding-me-seriously" moments. Even legendary names are just humans. TBL and his support for DRM. LT's notorious personality. Page & Schmidt and completely losing sight of the helpfulness they started from. Worship / revere / appreciate no one. Filter their good, acknowledge their bad, find a path past them to something better, and know you'll probably be corrupted by something along the way unless you somehow transcend your own DNA.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  Wikia was never actually good, but they were never this bad, as when they sold out to some capital and start squeezing every penny from every pixel on the screen. Right now, fandom.com is basically unusable. Unfortunately, as some info that is there is nowhere else.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rwky 5y ago
If you're using Firefox on Android then under settings > site permissions. Set block auto play to video and audio. For some unknown reason video is set to play by default. This seems to work at blocking the fandom crap for me. I also have ublock origin installed.
_dain_ 5y ago
Isn't most (all?) of the content on fandom.com under a Creative Commons license? Is there anything stopping someone from scraping all the content and forking the projects, giving it a more humane and user-friendly interface?
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  I’m currently working with a number of folks to fork a wiki off of Fandom. Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.
  - account42 5y ago
    This is really a problem with google, overvaluing big sites with many subsections/articles compared to independent sites. Still sucks to have to add "overwiki" or "uesp" to search terms all the time.
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      Yeah, its significantly worse with a fork though as you’ll be hit with duplicate content penalties
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    The origin story for this is reminiscent of how AO3 got going. Maybe if you partner with them, make a "Wiki Of Our Own" sister project, it would get more traction and then move up the search rankings organically? Although checking the AO3 wiki page, man I didn't expect them to have hosting costs that high. Do you have a project site? I might be interested in contributing.
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      We’re not doing badly for ranking, because we’ve engaged with the wider community and got many of the larger sites to link to us instead of Fandom, but for folks that want to fork all this stuff it is worth thinking about. The site in question is https://www.poewiki.net https://www.poewiki.net
kayxspre 5y ago
Every time I use Fandom without logging in, I will be faced with similar experience. A pop-up video with ads about the content it tried to promote (sometimes related to the content of the Wiki I visited, but mostly not) will play automatically, and I have to stop it every time. As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.
frosted-flakes 5y ago
uBlock Origin's element picker mode works just fine for me on Firefox Android.
salamandersauce 5y ago
It is incredibly annoying. My other "favorite" is AMP reddit which will autoplay some video with sound completely unrelated to the link you clicked on somewhere down the page. How the hell autoplaying video leads to ACCELERATED mobile pages I have no clue.
severine 5y ago
uBlock Origin's element picker works fine for me in Firefox for Android, and always has, try again! Thank you, gorhill and co.
- yellowapple 5y ago
  How do you activate it?
darksaints 5y ago
Yeah that mobile experience is just about as bad as you can make it. Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing crypto mining in the browser...at least that's what my device temperatures are implying.
account42 5y ago
I'm always thankful for the game communities that still have independently hosted wikis so that I can avoid that fandom/wikia mess.

tpaulin 5y ago

A few months back I opened a link to a new article using an in-app browser (no ad-blockers). I kid you not, upon initial load the entireiy of the screen was ads or "annoyances". The one thing missing was the entire reason I clicked on the link.

rstat1 5y ago

I'd say the worst part is that Firefox has a feature for blocking auto playing video. But it never works.

gruez 5y ago
I suspect that's because you can programmatically start video playback from within event handlers. That's necessary because otherwise any site that use custom playback controls will break. However, that also means malicious sites can implement "autoplay" by adding a onmousedown/onscroll/touchstart event handler and starting playback from there. Video playback will start the moment you try to interact with the page in any way.
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  > any site that use custom playback controls will break Is that actually a bad thing? I have no idea about video playback controls, but in every other instance I've noticed where sites implement their own custom versions of browser controls, it's been absolutely terrible. Custom scrollbars, or lack thereof. Custom drop-down lists, which never support keyboard input properly. And so on. And even if I'm wrong, and custom video playback controls are somehow desirable, why should they be supported for any event except onclick?
  - gruez 5y ago
    >why should they be supported for any event except onclick? obvious example would be articles with scrolling effects (eg. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-libyan-prisons-that-keep-migrants-out-of-europe https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-...), and need to autoplay videos when they scroll into view. That said, even if you restricted it to onclick, I don't imagine it's too hard for a page to receive a stray click (eg. if you're randomly selecting stuff) to trigger playback.
    - inetknght 5y ago
      > articles with scrolling effects That is not a legitimate example of a good thing. That's a legitimate example of something that shouldn't be a thing
      - sdoering 5y ago
        In your opinion. Being someone who hates these autoplay videos on news sites I can also see that examples like OP's are a valid and when done well interesting new firm of story telling. It is imho very valid to experiment with new forms of multimedia mixed stories. And just because some people abuse features that enable this we should not try to stifle innovative ideas as a whole imho. I just don't use sites that do this anymore. I mean the abusal part.
    - drdeca 5y ago
      Why, as a user, would I want a page to begin playing a video as a result of scrolling?
- Firadeoclus 5y ago
  That seems solvable, for example by blocking programmatic control of playback until you allow it for a given video element. That way it only "breaks" when the user wants it to be "broken".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jeroenhd 5y ago
With some ad blocking I can at least get the videos to stop playing. The black rectangles are only slightly less annoying, though.
grishka 5y ago
I don't understand why there isn't a browser feature that would simply disable all and any support for <video> and <audio> elements, or ask you a permission before a website can create any. It's really that simple. No need to try, and fail, to figure out which videos are "safe" to autoplay and which aren't. Let the user decide.
- hiccuphippo 5y ago
  Makes me miss the days of Flash because I could block everything video, audio and animation related with FlashBlock.
- onion2k 5y ago
  I've seen sites that autoplay video by implementing a JS h264 decoder that renders to a <canvas> element. Developers will go to significant lengths to work around browser permissions.
  - grishka 5y ago
    That's... actually viable? You can decode h264 in real time in JS with a single thread that also runs the UI?! Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".
    - zrm 5y ago
      Or just have browsers disable javascript by default and require explicit permission to use it. 90+% of web pages shouldn't need it for anything.
      - wruza 5y ago
        Or make a dead-slow subset that doesn’t eat cpu cycles, but schedules 10-20 ops every 1ms. And then enable full-speed if the user asks. Ads guys would then resurrect a demoscene spirit out of it. Ah, dreams.

judge2020 5y ago

Hosted mediawiki isn't cheap, so I don't see another player coming into the market. The consolidation of gamepedia into "Fandom" is the worst in this respect.

Blackthorn 5y ago
Hosted mediawiki is plenty cheap. When wikicities became Wikia they added some ads. They eventually redesigned it to look like a monstrosity because the $. I moved my very large wiki, which eventually became dnd-wiki.org, off of it at this point and self hosted it for a $10/mo virtual machine. Then Wikia became fandom and somehow became even worse. It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.
- sdoering 5y ago
  For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap. For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month. But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts. A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month. But as privacy intrusive advertising became the norm no solution ever grew enough to become feasible for the masses. I remember the flattr button. I used flattr for a while. But in the end I stopped. tl;dr 10 bucks are not cheap to anybody. I wish easy micropayments were a thing.
  - Blackthorn 5y ago
    > For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap. I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month. Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.
    - Washuu 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nefitty 5y ago
Who in tech do you hold up as an ideal persona? I'm not defending what happened to you. It's surprising to me that even someone like Jimmy Wales, who pioneered the most impactful knowledge-sharing project in the world, is vilified by some people.
- sobkas 5y ago
  > Who in tech do you hold up as an ideal persona? For me it is mjg59 and maybe Miguel de Icaza, also maybe Linus Torvalds
  - genghisjahn 5y ago
    Kelsey Hightower
- theturtletalks 5y ago
  Tim Berners-Lee
- zentiggr 5y ago
  No one. Every name I can think of has had some great ideas, and some truly cockeyed are-you-kidding-me-seriously" moments. Even legendary names are just humans. TBL and his support for DRM. LT's notorious personality. Page & Schmidt and completely losing sight of the helpfulness they started from. Worship / revere / appreciate no one. Filter their good, acknowledge their bad, find a path past them to something better, and know you'll probably be corrupted by something along the way unless you somehow transcend your own DNA.
shp0ngle 5y ago
Wikia was never actually good, but they were never this bad, as when they sold out to some capital and start squeezing every penny from every pixel on the screen. Right now, fandom.com is basically unusable. Unfortunately, as some info that is there is nowhere else.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rwky 5y ago

If you're using Firefox on Android then under settings > site permissions. Set block auto play to video and audio. For some unknown reason video is set to play by default. This seems to work at blocking the fandom crap for me. I also have ublock origin installed.

_dain_ 5y ago

Isn't most (all?) of the content on fandom.com under a Creative Commons license? Is there anything stopping someone from scraping all the content and forking the projects, giving it a more humane and user-friendly interface?

iamacyborg 5y ago
I’m currently working with a number of folks to fork a wiki off of Fandom. Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.
- account42 5y ago
  This is really a problem with google, overvaluing big sites with many subsections/articles compared to independent sites. Still sucks to have to add "overwiki" or "uesp" to search terms all the time.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    Yeah, its significantly worse with a fork though as you’ll be hit with duplicate content penalties
- _dain_ 5y ago
  The origin story for this is reminiscent of how AO3 got going. Maybe if you partner with them, make a "Wiki Of Our Own" sister project, it would get more traction and then move up the search rankings organically? Although checking the AO3 wiki page, man I didn't expect them to have hosting costs that high. Do you have a project site? I might be interested in contributing.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    We’re not doing badly for ranking, because we’ve engaged with the wider community and got many of the larger sites to link to us instead of Fandom, but for folks that want to fork all this stuff it is worth thinking about. The site in question is https://www.poewiki.net https://www.poewiki.net

kayxspre 5y ago

Every time I use Fandom without logging in, I will be faced with similar experience. A pop-up video with ads about the content it tried to promote (sometimes related to the content of the Wiki I visited, but mostly not) will play automatically, and I have to stop it every time. As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.

frosted-flakes 5y ago

uBlock Origin's element picker mode works just fine for me on Firefox Android.

salamandersauce 5y ago

It is incredibly annoying. My other "favorite" is AMP reddit which will autoplay some video with sound completely unrelated to the link you clicked on somewhere down the page. How the hell autoplaying video leads to ACCELERATED mobile pages I have no clue.

severine 5y ago

uBlock Origin's element picker works fine for me in Firefox for Android, and always has, try again! Thank you, gorhill and co.

yellowapple 5y ago
How do you activate it?

darksaints 5y ago

Yeah that mobile experience is just about as bad as you can make it. Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing crypto mining in the browser...at least that's what my device temperatures are implying.

account42 5y ago

I'm always thankful for the game communities that still have independently hosted wikis so that I can avoid that fandom/wikia mess.