Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-22224-20180521161500/@comment-3957-20180529133549

I was one of the Uncyclopedia administrators in May 2005 and was involved during the time that most of the "Uncyclopedia Babble" series of Babel projects was created in 2006. I currently own four servers co-located in a commercial datacentre in Montréal which host various Uncyclopedias, including Brazil, Japan and Taiwan. All of these run using free software with little or no customisation for a reason - if Uncyclopedia is a parody of Wikipedia, *.uncyclopedia.info needs to look like *.wikipedia.org right down to the Vector and Monobook skins.

I haven't been following the GDPR debate closely as, last I checked, Canada is not part of the EU (and our former colonial masters have jolly well had enough themselves, chaps - so tally ho and pip pip!) and Desciclopédia/Ansaikuropedia et al. are hosted offshore on an island in the St. Lawrence River beyond the reach of a lot of foreign countries (of which the EU is the least of my concerns; communist China has been blocking the site and an upstream provider for years). In any case, this seems to have little to do with the GDPR. Uncyclopedia needs to run stock Mediawiki to look like Wikipedia, the Wikimedia folks are giving the software away because FLOSS is a religion over there, the solution is obvious. Buy a server, stick it in a datacentre, run the stock unmodified software and call it a day.

I can't even open a Wikia page without the NoScript and RequestPolicy browser extensions warning me that the page is trying to hotlink to half a dozen other domains, many of which look to be trying to run JavaScript on my computer, track me or plaster my screen with ads. By contrast, Désciclopedia has never run a paid advert in more than a dozen years of its existence. Many Uncyclopedia communities are neither here nor on Wikia, but independent - Stupidedia (German) and Uncyclopedia.kr (Korea) are their own separate projects, the Americans (uncyclopedia.co) and Russians (absurdopedia.net) both forked and went their separate ways due to various issues - such as a domain change from uncyclopedia.org to uncyclopedia.wikia.com over the community's objections and censorship of photos down to a PG-rated level so as not to offend the advertisers.

I'd be willing to take in and host any Uncyclopedias which can't fulfil their rôle as Wikipedia parodies here for want of the Monobook/Vector skins (contact me at 'carlb at kingston net'). It may also be worth contacting some of the other Uncyclopedias which are already independent to see if their operators are willing to intervene. Moving a project is awkward due to the SEO sabotage which is being inflicted by search engine duplicate content penalties (Wikivoyage is still recovering from the damage IB caused - the project forked from Wikitravel in 2012 with the full backing of the Wikimedia Foundation and its lawyers, servers and top-ten Alexa rank) but, unless Wikia reconsiders its stance, the option does need to remain on the table. Uncyclopedia is a parody of Wikipedia and needs to look like Wikipedia. This would go to the core of Uncyclopedia's mission statement if we had one.