Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-22224-20180521161500/@comment-3957-20180530132741

Pity that Chronarion sold the uncyclopedia.org domain to Wikia in 2006 without consulting with the community first; that move did untold harm to the project and its editorial autonomy. By then, I was already seeing issues which were making the implementation of "Babel projects" - Uncyclopedias in other languages - more difficult. The first of these was the French-language Désencyclopédie, which Wikia originally turned down because its creator wanted the non-commercial CC-BY-NC-SA licence (which is needed to reuse content from en.uncyclopedia, as-is or translated). Others such as Spanish and Italian soon followed. Among the original issues was an inability to create arbitrary language 'xx' under 'xx.uncyclopedia.org' (Wikia was forcing everything onto their *.wikia.com domain with their incompatible licence) and inability to edit the interwiki link table. By the time the next batch (Portuguese, Japanese, Taiwan - traditional script and a few others) was created in 2006, it looked easier just to pay for an server on a domain name which wasn't controlled by people outside the project and install Linux, MediaWiki - all of it is being given away free. Sadly, by then, the damage had been done for many of the projects. Sure, Wikia claims "we host you for free" and "the project belongs to the community", but nothing could be further from the truth. Wikia has made a lot of changes which have alienated a lot of communities - a series of ad-heavy forced reskins in 2006-08 were bad enough to actually get a bit of unfavourable mainstream media coverage (UK Guardian and The Register, IIRC) and, when disgruntled communities took their content and went elsewhere, Wikia's attitude was that those who had left were "no longer part of the community" and therefore their opinions did not matter - even through they created the original content.

Certainly, there are Uncyclopedias which have already moved - the Americans and the Russians are two examples. Wikia has done their utmost to abuse the search engine duplicate content penalty to destroy these projects, but they are very much still in operation. I am sure that there will be more. I have domain names for most of the individual-language Uncyclopedia projects; some of these redirect to Wikia at the moment, but that could change very easily. For instance, I hold the registration on *.uncyclopedia.info but a visit to ko.uncyclopedia.info redirects to an independent project in Korea - because I have no reason to demand that a project be hosted on my server just to use the domain name or just to have an entry in the interwiki links tables from a few Uncyclopedia-related projects which I have been hosting here since 2006.

As far as getting the old site removed? That's likely the biggest problem... I've only seen it done successfully once. "Spanking Art" used to have their wiki here. A troll discussion group which operates a domain just to attack (or, in their words, "review") Wikipedia decided to take it down as collateral damage by gathering a stack of screen shots containing whatever content they didn't like - surrounded by all of those pesky Wikia ads. They then contacted Wikia and told them to remove the project or else the trolls would contact every advertiser and show them exactly what they've been bankrolling here. Wikia folded like a cheap suit that day. I've never seen anything quite like it - they've been very brave when it comes to defying the Uncyclopedia community on everything from an unwanted forced domain name change to censorship of images to dumb the project down to PG-rated levels to this senseless reskin which completely breaks both usability and the ability to have Uncyclopedia look and feel like that other great encyclopaedia parody, Wikipedia. I'm more than willing to take in any refugees (this is beginning to look like a virtual Roxham Road - that tiny dead-end street where the world is funnelling into Canada as the situation degrades elsewhere), update interwiki links as needed and update any domains I hold to point to the new project (even if it's hosted somewhere else) instead of pointing to Wikia.

Oddly, there was one incident in 2006-07 where one tiny project (Czechloslovakia's version of Uncyclopedia) moved to Wikia and I didn't get one request from Wikia staff saying "please leave the old version up in competition with their new project". Funny double standard, that - but with no paid staff, I'm actually not in a position to censor content to keep users from finding out that a community has gone elsewhere. Wikia does this routinely. Pity.