Re: Vim Weekly

On Jan 27, 2014, at 9:25 AM, Ben Fritz <fritzophrenic@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not all that excited about it. Is it just you who will be making content? If not, how do you plan to combat spam?

I should note that I am not (to the best of my knowledge) involved in this (at least yet). All the same, the need for and approach to spam fighting is going to vary depending on how this is done. If contributions come in the form of GitHub pull requests, say, then I don't even know what spam would look like, as I've never seen or heard of it there. If it's going to be on a site like Wikia, then yeah, that will probably need to be thought out (although hopefully the hosting site has a thing or two in place of its own in this regard; I can't see how individual wikis should have to do their own checking to make sure individual users on the hosting site aren't spammers, for example).

> I've not seen a lot of really obtrusive ads recently. But then again, I also am pretty much always logged in over there. Try creating an account and logging in: when you do so, most of the ads go away.

I see maybe half really obtrusive ads and half actual content when I go there, probably because I am never logged in. I really don't actually want to create another account on such a site just so I can get rid of ads on those pages.

> I agree it needs some editing. But so will any new content created elsewhere. At least on wikia we have a good start at that. Starting from scratch won't buy you much there.

If I could make better sense of what's already there, I'd probably help. :-) It's just hard for me *to* make sense of it. Often enough, even leaving out the more usual editing issues, it looks like there's just handfuls or sometimes buckets of tips of varying length, related by one or other keywords, all dumped together into a single wiki page. And I don't have anything against the content. As I think the OP said, there is good stuff there. I just don't like the presentation.

> What wikia gives us:
>
> 1. "anyone can edit" but with powerful spam fighting tools (and full-time staff dedicated to fighting it sitewide, not just on our wiki)
> 2. search engine optimization: you'll notice wikia is consistently near the top of search results when the article is relevant
> 3. technical support when things go wrong
> 4. great availability and decent speed; wikia has lots of servers, all linked together to serve up pages even when one is down, regular backups, and round-the-clock staff supporting them
>
> All this takes money. Ads provide that money so we don't need to.

I expect all of this to come with whatever alternative we might use instead of Wikia, but yeah, it might require money. (Ads are IMO one of the nastiest ways, reader-wise, to get that, unless done extraordinarily well.)

> Moving away would be difficult. The biggest reason: search engines, bookmarks, and links would still continue pointing there. Wikia, if I understand correctly, claims some level of ownership in the content it hosts, so we probably can't just take it all down. Very few wikis have successfully left wikia, to my knowledge (although there are a couple really big wikis that did).
>
> Now, what would we get from moving to a different hosting service?
>
> We'd lose the ads, but we'd also lose a lot of the benefits. Content would not be improved at all. We'd need to do the same amount of editing on any content we copied over. And then, we'd need to spend time watching and porting over any changes made to wikia. That is time better spent just editing. When the spammers started noticing the new site, we'd need to figure out how to deal with them. And we might need to do that without a paid support team (depending on where the new site was hosted). Finally, we'd be competing with the old wikia content in search results probably for years. People will continue going to wikia first until the new site increases its search ranking enough.

Editing (as far as I can tell) is something which the *content* needs, entirely apart from Wikia or wherever else it could be hosted. The "time better spent just editing" must (or at least, I would say, should) be spent, regardless of the moving-away discussion -- even if it never does move away, I think that should be done. And I don't know that every other alternative would have the same spam problems that sites like Wikia seem to end up with. There would of course be search competition, but only in the same sense that there currently is between the Wikia site and all other Vim tip listings elsewhere.

All the same, it may be impossible (or not worth the time, or just plain unlikely) to move away from there now. It's just hard for me to make sense of what's on it in its current form.

--
b

Sent from my iPhone

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