Board 8 > Fandom has acquired GameSpot, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Metacritic, and more

(+) Yeah! (+)

-hotdogturtle-- posted...

What browsers other than Firefox or Chrome do anyone use?

There's Safari, Brave, Opera GX, and oddly enough, Microsoft Edge.

But pretty much only Firefox is the only non-Chromium based web browser. Except for like really obscure ones.

Red Ventures bought Giant Bomb, fucked up enough all the founders left, then sold it to a dogshit company like Fandom.

Yikes

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Red Ventures bought Giant Bomb, fucked up enough all the founders left, then sold it to a dogshit company like Fandom.

Yikes

Vinny, Brad and Alex were already going to leave before the sale and said they had no issues with Red Ventures (if only because of not having time to) but tonnes of issues with CBS. Jeff is a real ??????? though, we still dont know what happened there.

Is this that "big change" I was supposed to like?

And yeah, glad I dropped Chrome and went back to Firefox a while back. This place gonna be ad central if you don't have an adblocker.

Fandom is one of the few sites I actually actively refuse to go to (one of the others is Forbes)... so this is upsetting.

I've never had a problem with fandom sites. Are ads the only complaint?

Thorn posted...

Sticking with Firefox this whole time vindicated once again.

absolutely vindicated but god someone please make a browser that is even less like chrome than firefox is

Kenri posted...

absolutely vindicated but god someone please make a browser that is even less like chrome than firefox is

Lynx is looking better and better.

Im more concerned with what they do to my Metacritic than this site.

I love Metacritic.

KokoroAkechi posted...

Fandom is one of the few sites I actually actively refuse to go to (one of the others is Forbes)... so this is upsetting.

It was nice knowing you. I wish you the best of luck wherever you may end up.

I too feel vindicated with using Firefox + uBlock Origin. I like that it has some Chrome features but isn't mining your data. I don't mind having your favorites and history tied to a login - you don't lose them that way.

*spits on it*

If I haven't left yet I never will

gamefaqs dot gamespot dot fandom dot com

HaRRicH posted...

I also thought GameFAQs was sold recently with Red Ventures. Did I misunderstand that? Seems to be a bit of hot potato.

Red Ventures acquired GameFAQs in late 2020, so it's only been about 2 years since the ownership switch from CBSi to Red Ventures.

Anywhere that autoplays videos is just absolute fucking scum to me because it overrides my Spotify when I'm listening to the radio. There's probably a way to get it to not but no site should ever be autoplaying videos to begin with and I just opt not to never use sites that do that now

adblock?

I've used FireFox + uBlock Origin forever and still think fandom is awful. It goes beyond the ads. Terrible news.

DireKrow posted...

I've used FireFox + uBlock Origin forever and still think fandom is awful. It goes beyond the ads. Terrible news.

What's bad besides the ads?

Some wikis have ads and even auto-play videos that go through ublock unless I manually add them. Then, because of the way the domain names work, I have to do this individually for every wiki it happens on. There's also this enormous "fan feed" at the bottom of every single page with obnoxiously huge thumbnails, somehow unfiltered by ublock.

Some wikis have tons of wasted space on the left/right and panes dedicated to things like unhelpful most popular pages that consumes an entire column and scrolls with the view. On some pages there's even links to entirely unrelated wikis there. They also like to have various little pop ups in the corners to various ends I never use.

Most wikis also have an obnoxious bright yellow fandom banner on the left hand side which looks bad and draws the eye. For some reason the search function is there instead of in the main wiki body??

Speaking of the search, I don't like how when you search something, even an exact title, it goes to a search page instead of just going to the page (Bulbapedia does this too), even though it gives you auto-complete and search suggestions to direct you to specific pages!

A lot of communites that use fandom wikis will rely on category pages to aggregate lists (e.g. "lists of bosses"/"lists of items", etc), even though they're terrible to use because they're just a list of links without pictures in alphabetical order, strewn across multiple pages, with no further context or hierarchy (except sometimes categories within categories). Oh but don't worry, fandom helpfully gives you 5 big thumbnailed "Trending pages" results at the top that you have to scroll past every time. Surely those are what you're actually looking for!

I loathe how it dominates search results on Google, so that when there is dev-supported and/or more complete and/or more accurate non-fandom wikis, the results for them get buried by the fandom equivalents every time. It can be surprisingly hard to find the non-fandom pages sometimes. Terraria is a notable case of this.

There's some more fiddly things too like how file urls not ending in their image extensions by default screws with some image-related things I've tried to do with them in the past which just adds to my ire.

And this is completely subjective and not always true but: non-fandom wikis, for when games have both, tend to just... look better? The communities put more effort into nice presentation and usability for their own wikis than what you get from the fandom default.

Yesss go off. Fandom fuckin sucks

DireKrow posted...

A lot of communites that use fandom wikis will rely on category pages to aggregate lists (e.g. "lists of bosses"/"lists of items", etc), even though they're terrible to use because they're just a list of links without pictures in alphabetical order, strewn across multiple pages, with no further context or hierarchy (except sometimes categories within categories)

god yes

I wish Google could even feel the mass exodus of people come 2023

I see the footer. Red Ventures is no more.

And yeah, Fandom doesn't have the best wiki layouts, but some of them actually have good information on them. It just depends on who is writing. I know I've cleaned up legitimately terrible pages out of boredom. Sometimes I even start from scratch because what's there is so messy and convoluted.

I just hope this doesn't end up like other Fandom properties. I've used some of those and they are clunky. GameFAQs works because it's simple. Take that away, the site no longer has appeal. However... I do think the new owners would be more willing to do a contest since they'll understand how it drives site traffic up.

NFUN posted...

adblock?

Doesn't seem to be adblock for Chrome on mobile? Least I don't see it anywhere obvious

Shattered posted...

Doesn't seem to be adblock for Chrome on mobile? Least I don't see it anywhere obvious

Switch to Firefox. I run uBlock Origin just fine on mobile.