Subject: It is very likely that they won't care.
Author:
Posted on: 2023-11-02 14:56:48 UTC
We're niche - incredibly so, to the point I am more worried about Fandom suddenly nuking our wiki as soon as it becomes convenient more than I'm worried about them not letting us close it.
Let's face it, a wiki like ours doesn't move much traffic - and the page about, say, the Sunflower Official has a similar weight on their servers to, say, Sakura Kinomoto's on the Cardcaptor Sakura wiki while likely not providing even a hundredth of the latter's traffic to them.
Of course, when it comes the time, there's a few tricks we can use to "go under the radar".
- Not use any forking toolset that Fandom might have, but copy the pages manually (might not be doable, since our wiki is kinda big) to delay the discovery of the fork
- Have a burner account, a "Nameless Admin" of sorts use the toolset if the above is not doable - that way, Fandom will only end up de-admining a string puppet. Said burner account should be used with Tor and/or under a VPN if we're really paranoid they might try to trace the account to existing admins, tthough. -Those who need to work on both wkis at the same time should use a differently named account on the new one, possibly made with a different email, to give the imperssion that, say, SergioTurbo didn't go with the fork, but the fork version of the pages about his stuff are being maintained by this GinoTheWriter guy!
- Be sneaky with the deletions. We do that slowly - and we use their rules against them. The PPC dealt with a lot of nasty content and sensitive arguments - in this day and age where everything must be politically correct and safe it wouldn't be so suspicious if we decided that, say, the page about Dubious Lube was too explicit, and the consensus was that it was also unnecessary so we decided to axe it instead of "dumbing it down". Even better if we have pages that could be interpreted as not being really in line with Fandom's own rules - they get zapped with "violation of this or that rule" in the reason.
- Once it is successfully brought down to the smallest we can, we lock it with some bogus explanation. "The wiki is under reorganization, until the process is over edits will only be done by admins" or something like that.
- With the new wiki up and going, and the old one shrink-sized to the point it cannot compete on Google results (as per hS' theory, we kill the high-traffic pages first) we might hopefully reach the point where Fandom itself nukes it. They do nuke small wikis with little traffic - as I said, mine was while I was still setting up, and they didn't even bother sending me a single mail about it!
