Forum:Wikia overhaul?

Discussion
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I got a request for some advise on hosting elsewhere, so I'll just iterate over a few notes:
 * I'll spare you the bias on how I came up with the ShoutWiki name, the group broke apart, some members became involved in what seamed to be shady business, then a new ShoutWiki group came out from that and swiped the ShoutWiki name... Right now ShoutWiki has a single server, they're thinking of getting a "backup" server, but there is absolutely no proper setup for good performance and fallback on ShoutWiki, and they're already having performance issues. I mentioned that a wiki like Narutopedia moving there would probably kill them from the traffic, though this wiki is only about 1/4 the traffic as the Narutopedia so it's not as heavy, but in any case performance, stability, and the reliability of the service on ShoutWiki doesn't look good.
 * I would recommend self-hosting usually, but I don't know if there is anyone on this wiki capable of doing that on a level that keeps the wiki running well.
 * I have mentioned that on the chance that the Narutopedia does move I'd be willing to host any other related wiki along with it. But that's dependent on a few things that could cut that short (if the wiki actually decides to move, and more importantly, what my boss even thinks of the idea of hosting wiki when we have a big project -- which I was hired to create -- going into private beta, which is the more problematic thing). But I'm not sure about Kingdom Hearts as it's not so much a related wiki, I was focused around Animanga wiki as a network of them, so even if the wiki does come along, it would probably be dragged along with ideas focused around on the animanga category wiki and primarily the Narutopedia. For most things that might not mean much, besides having less priority on custom features, except for the skin. Part of self-hosting involves experimenting with various ad formats and trying to figure out the best way to get back the money needed to pay for the servers and profit the company hosting the wiki (otherwise the company looses money anyways, since it has to pay the employees spending company time working on the wiki). Trying to do this on different skins at the same time makes for a lot more work, so any other wiki would probably be stuck with the skin and experiments in advertisement placement that the Narutopedia decides on, which I'm expecting to probably be Monaco in an experiment like this with a 300px ad above the infobox, or a banner ad above the header (so far those seam to be the most popular ideas in the feedback).
 * Side note, Watchlist seams to be broken, I'm no longer getting e-mail updates about changes to watched pages, you may have to poke me on my talkpage once in awhile.
 * ~ NOTASTAFF Dantman(Local Talk &#8285; Animanga Talk) 14:45, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * Dantman, are you at all familiar with how tfwiki.net went about doing targeted ads, etc.? Why don't you try it just to see  what happens?  16:09, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
 * No, but you're talking about using Project Wonderful right? I knew about Project Wonderful a long time ago, I even signed up for an account (I can't remember where I put ads though, probably dead sites anyways). It's a nice idea, it's not "targeted" -- targeted ads usually refer to contextual ads, like how AdSense looks at the content on your page to guess what the best ad to serve is -- it's "direct" advertising, where people directly purchase ad space from you instead of using broad AdNetworks. The only issue is that it relies on having people visiting your site who are willing to purchase ads, or advertisers that pay attention to Project Wonderful, it's possible to end up in a situation sometimes where there is no advertisements coming from it. But mixed with other ideas it's lovely.
 * So far the first experiment I think I'm leaning towards right now if we did move, would be a small block of Project Wonderful ads below the navigation box in the sidebar (2-3 ads high, 2 ads wide, small banners, maybe one wider banner at higher price), as well as a 300px ad in a right sidebar above an infobox area, if there is no right sidebar on the page then instead either a banner ad above the page title header, or perhaps in an island above the whole content area. I might consider making those banner or box ads project wonderful ads with a minimum price which fallback to advertising networks when there is no advertisement, which should allow a fair box with revenue coming from advertising networks but which allows direct advertisers who are willing to pay about as much as we get from the broad ad networks from an ad area to place their advertisement inside a page instead. I've also tossed around the idea of a separate instance for pages in certain categories, like "Video Games", allowing for a directly targeted ad on video game articles, which could be an enticing space for a store that sells those games to want to take over.
 * A lot of different ideas have been tossed around on the Narutopedia and elsewhere and gone through my head; Play-Asia affiliation. Hulu videos (while I hate hulu, 3rd party sites that embed videos get 10% of Hulu's cut of the advertising profits from videos which are watched on the 3rd party site), various ad networks, Project Wonderful, bg takeover ads (not favored), partnerships with relevant companies, donations, etc... ~ NOTASTAFF Dantman(Local Talk &#8285; Animanga Talk) 18:12, October 7, 2010 (UTC)