Forum:Future of The Keyhole

Today, the wiki's account received this email:

''This email is being sent to the KHWiki on behalf of The Keyhole and its staff, because of your affiliation with us. We would like to inform you that we, the long serving staff of The Keyhole, are abandoning this wiki. While the site won’t disappear due to FANDOM’s policies, we will no longer be moderating The Keyhole. At this current time, there are no other active users, so no one will be stepping into our current positions until further notice. You are more than welcome to keep your affiliation with The Keyhole, however be warned that whoever may take over the site may not necessarily share the values, techniques, policies, etc. that we held. We’d ask you respond within a week if you wish to cut ties with The Keyhole. If no response is received within that amount of time, we will leave the link up, and you will remain affiliated with The Keyhole.

''If you have any further questions regarding The Keyhole and our collective retirement, please see this forum: https://kingdomhearts.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:**Important:_Please_Read.**

''After viewing the forum, feel free to reply directly to this message, or send a message on discord to: Chaineh#5758 or KeybladeSpyMaster#4933

''If no action is taken, Thank you for the past 12 years, and may your heart be your guiding key to Kingdom Hearts III.

-The Keyhole Staff

So, The Keyhole is being abandoned and anybody can take over. With that in mind, we have to decide if we want to stay affiliated with them or not.

I say we stop being affiliated until we know who is taking over and what they're planning to do with it. It is highly likely that the new staff of the Keyhole will want to compete with us, instead of being partners, like the Keyhole is now.

Please share your thoughts as soon as possible, so we can reply on time. 16:32, 25 June 2018 (UTC)
 * That's surprising. I didn't think the staff would retired with KHIII so near. Looking at the Keyhole's RC, I definitely won't say it's completely abandoned, either. I can see users still editing it, like Aixon, DarkMaster, FinalRest, and even Byzantinefire, who's going under the name "Valyrian Wildfire" now. As KH is a huge franchise, I believe that the active community users will eventually decide who among them will help moderate the Keyhole. Right now, all we can do is watch and see how things unfold within the week. That said, I agree with TheSilentHero.


 * The Keyhole has acted more of a fanon wiki than a encyclopedia website, allowing speculation, cosplay images, fanfics, and other fan-related content onto their site. I do suspect that, whoever the new staff will be, will continue to follow that tradition. It's a good place for fans of the series who dislike our more professional policies (e.g. no speculation or fan-related content) to go and still contribute to the overall fandom in their own way. I'm not sure about whether they would favor competition over partnership, because that will depend on the new staff, but given the long history the KH franchise has and how time-consuming editing is, it is highly unlikely that will compete with us due to the amount of work that will have to do on the mainspace and reorganizing the community. While our community is small like theirs, the KHWiki and its articles are more up-to-date in certain areas. I personally never found the partnership between the Keyhole and KHWiki to be all that beneficial (it's not like our partnership with the KHUX Wiki), so I'm fine with the KHWiki cutting ties with them, but objectively speaking, keeping the affiliation might be a good idea to let other users who find our policies disagreeable to gravitate there and vice versa, as the KHWiki is more up-to-date and fans who want factually accurate information would come here. I am more concerned with the possibility of plagiarism, as it's a very likely occurrence between splinter wikis, but I suppose it's too early to worry about that.-- 20:02, 25 June 2018 (UTC)
 * To clarify Ninja, FR and Aixon will be leaving as soon as the week is done. DM only came back yesterday, so if he wants to take over the wiki, that's on him. Byz also expressed interest on leadership. That's up to wikia. 20:35, 25 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Ah, thank you for the clarification! I'm not familiar who's on the staff, and was simply looking at the RC to see who is active. If DM and Byzantinefire are expressing interest in taking it over, then it seems the Keyhole won't be without staff members. Though, if it's Byzantinefire, I do have some concerns about affiliation with the Keyhole, given his animosity towards the users here.-- 20:42, 25 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I've gotten some other users from other wikis that are interested. However, know that they may/may not share our values, beliefs, policies, etc that we shared. So that is something to consider as well. 00:50, 26 June 2018 (UTC)
 * EDIT: So to give you all an update on what's going on, we've informed Wikia (now called FANDOM) on the situation regarding the site. After Sunday, they will be taking the reigns on the site until its caught up in info we've been missing from previous titles in preparation for Kingdom Hearts III. In that time they'll be looking at the community and choosing users to take over from there. That being said, I don't believe that the current situation of a sister site would be beneficial for both parties. In my opinion, either you could remain as normal affiliates or cut ties altogether. I don't know how they'll feel on the issue, but thought I'd give you a heads up. 03:22, 26 June 2018 (UTC)
 * ohhhh...joy. 13:54, 26 June 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, so I think we should definitely stop being "sister sites", especially if Wikia themselves are taking over, and kick The Keyhole out of KHWV for now.


 * @NinjaSheik: I'm not so sure the new staff will follow the Keyhole's current policies. Right now a lot of pages are lists, with each individual name linking to us. I think it's highly likely that whoever will take over, wants to cover everything themselves, like we do, especially since a lot of people seem to have a problem with out strict policies.


 * As for the affiliation itself, like I said before, I think we should de-affiliate for now, and if the new staff wants to, we can always re-affiliate later. 17:43, 26 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, definitely. Ceasing affiliation is good idea if the Central Wikia folks are taking over. I figured the staff would handle things more internally, as Wikia don't usually concern themselves with a wiki's inner workings unless it violates their Terms of Use and other regulations. Best to cut ties now and revisit the possibility with re-affiliating with the Keyhole once their community is reorganized.


 * Right now, this is all just idle speculation on whether or not the new will follow the Keyhole's current policies. All we can do now is wait and to see what happens with that. Either way, ever since the split, the Keyhole and the KHWiki's rules and editing format and styles are very different from each other. Whatever happens with the Keyhole, the KHWiki isn't going to adversely affected by anything they do. The KHWiki and Keyhole just kinda do their own thing. If the new staff chose to cover everything themselves, that'll be their decision. If they choose to separate from the KHWiki, all the means is that they have to remove their redirects links from their articles and rewrite their articles in their own way that doesn't plagiarize our content.-- 19:33, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

Side note: We're still in charge over there until Thursday, so contact me rather than wikia when you make the final decision, just to make it smoother. 19:42, 26 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes we should deaffiliate. We should keep an eye on what goes on there though. My main concern is the new users begin to plagiarise so we should watch out for that. 21:46, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

FANDOM's Community Development team is frequently assigned to bring up a wiki's quality and Google rank before a major release (and it's very likely they'll get involved for Kingdom Hearts 3). I'd expect them to view you as competition, so you may want to adjust accordingly. Catuse (talk) 23:32, 26 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Is there any way the abandonment can wait until after January? 12:33, 27 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Doesn't the Central Community folks need to discuss the direction of the Keyhole with the other users before they swoop in and take the reigns? After all, it's a community, and they must make decision as a whole. If they intend to bring up the quality before KHIII's release to increase their ad revenue and ranking, then they have a lot of work ahead of them depending on what techniques and policies they wish to implement on the Keyhole. Again, due to how time-consuming editing is, this makes me concern with plagiarism, while the staff members at Central Community know better than violate their own rules and regulations, other users might attempt to plagiarize our content. They're going to have their hands full reorganizing the community, discussing policies and format style with the active users, moderating the pages and cleaning them up, and dealing with new users coming onto the Keyhole in the upcoming months. I really doubt they'll be a "competition" for us as a result (not that it should be competition, anyway; we're all fans here that just want to provide factually accurate information on a franchise we all love), but I guess it just depends how much time and effort they're willingly to put into improving the Keyhole's quality.-- 20:19, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Since no one objected to de-affiliating, I'll go ahead and ask Chain to remove us from the affiliates. 21:37, 27 June 2018 (UTC)


 * The Keyhole has removed the link on the main page and affilition page, and the site has been handed over to FANDOM. Any links going to this site in the mainspace will be removed by those taking over. Thanks for your partnership over the past 7 or so years, and we wish you the best of luck with the KHWiki and hope you enjoy KH3. 21:55, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Part II
I might as well bring up this up here on the forums since some of the users here have mentioned the current issues going on right now at the Keyhole. Since the Central Community staff has taken over, several of the KHWiki's users have kept an eye on the Keyhole, and there seems to vandalism and plagiarism going there right now. KrytenKoro and Pain88 reported that some of our image files are being stolen and not given attribution, and I see that some users are currently vandalizing some of former staff users' user pages by removing messages. Two of our staff members are currently trying to resolve that issue. I honestly have no idea that the FANDOM Community is thinking, violating their own guidelines like this, but it's pretty clear they're viewing us as competition and are bent on doing whatever is takes to raise their profits for KHIII release. The community agreed to talk about the possibility of re-affiliating with the Keyhole sometime after they take the reigns, but I think that ship has sailed now. I definitely don't approve of what they're doing right now and affiliating with the current community on the Keyhole isn't sitting right with me as a result.-- 20:49, 22 July 2018 (UTC)


 * I agree with NinjaSheik here. Pain88 (talk) 21:50, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
 * As with the original split, I expect that, eventually, wikia will get bored and someone sane will move in, and at that point we can try extending the olive branch again to reaffiliate. Honestly, I wouldn't have much issue with them trying to fill the same role we were, as long as they weren't plagiarizing our material and then getting pissy when we politely ask for them to credit it, as is the standard across all wikis. I don't know what the staff members are thinking -- surely they've been around wikis long enough to recognize that what they're doing is extremely uncouth and shameful, but I suppose ad dollars are a smooth tempter. 12:15, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
 * They will soon be busy with their portable infoboxes. I think, when KHIII it is released, the staff gets a bit calmer. Otherwise scare the still all users. After Kryten Koro was even blocked, I'm thinking of doing nothing in the Keyhole. Fandom interest is all about the traffic score and profit and less about the content anyway. The users at Fandom are ignored anyway and have to accept all trash from fandom, or they are allowed to leave. Byzantinefire will have to do a hard work if it is allowed to take over the keyhole. The Time will tell if its concept will work or if it will fail. I'm also interested in Dollars. :D Pain88 (talk) 14:37, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I can't be believe they blocked you, KrytenKoro. I think that's pretty unjustified, given the fact you stopped when they asked you to the first time when dealing with the issues with the stolen image files.
 * The FANDOM staff are only interested in revamping and creating articles related to KHIII to increase their profits, ad revenue, and their SEO rankings in preparation for the game's release. Afterwards, there will undoubtedly leave and give the reigns to users who are interested in adopting the Keyhole. Byzantinefire and other users have expressed interest, but no matter who adopts the Keyhole, I'm sure that the Keyhole is going to plagiarize our content. Everything on the Keyhole is severely out of date, and right now, they're reverting numerous articles back to the way they were before the split in 2012 and removing redirects to the KHWiki. Given how huge the franchise is, there's no way they can possibly bring ALL of the content on the Keyhole up to date by themselves in time, hence their main focus is KHIII-related articles. The community over there is barely active and much smaller than the community here on the KHWiki, and plagiarism is the biggest concern now that it's evident that they're taking our image files. Is ShardofTruth going to be credited for the stuff he personally edited, as our main and best image uploader for the wiki? The metadata should show that, right? He deserves to be credited.
 * The only thing we can do is keep an eye on the Keyhole and making sure our content isn’t being plagiarized.-- 18:30, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Is it worth it to add citations, or a template for citations, to images that are taken from this Wiki without credit? Or is that just being complacent with this thievery? 04:44, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, we can't. Trying to credit this wiki for the images taken from here is what got Kryten banned from the Keyhole earlier this week. 05:40, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm guessing reaching out to another FANDOM staff member who is willingly to talk things out civilly, and not unjustifiably block one of our users who is simply trying to make our users' work is properly credited, will probably be fruitless? The FANDOM staff members on the Keyhole are just bending and twisting their own rules to justify stealing our image files, but maybe there's a FANDOM staff member who might be willingly to help us out and talk things out peacefully? Granted, this is probably just wishful thinking on my part.-- 17:54, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Don't get so worked up about the images please, that's not the hill to die on. Even with the removal of the khwiki links we still have the KHUX wiki and the Final Fantasy Wiki who link to us, I think they are huge boosts. In my opinion this place is not in a bad shape, even if not everything is up-to-date. We should get the KH3 pages going and see how things take shape at the Keyhole, maybe we can learn a thing or two.
 * It's sad that greed comes again before quality, content or even human decency, but that's Wikia for you.-- 19:15, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

I wouldn't expect to find anyone that would want to try and see things our way. There isn't a lot of evidence in the last month to suggest a willingness to talk. That said, we should make sure we maintain a willingness to talk it out. Part of me wonders if our concerns are, willfully or not, being misinterpreted. I would hope that is the case over maliciously being ignored, but we don't know. I know we discussed yesterday what we could do to maybe talk things out with them, so that's still a possibility. We should make sure it still is, at least on our end. I'd definitely advise against responding or otherwise exacerbating the situation right now. As I mentioned earlier this week, emotionally-charged responses, as justified as they may be, will not get us where we want to go. Who knows? Perhaps we will find a way to persuade them to at least hear our concerns out. 20:53, 27 July 2018 (UTC)