This is partly a rant on fandom.com, partly a lesson in bad web design. I haven’t ranted about something stupid for a while so my apologies if I get a little repetitive.

So, DBDSU has been ongoing for over three months now and I’m perfectly, well, satisfied with its design. I don’t need lots of fancy windows and sidebars, just my text and a few colors. Zonelets has let me make this very simple little website that has everything I need and nothing more.

But if you ever want to see the futility of excess just go over to fandom.com when you need to pull up something in the middle of a game. Count how long it takes for the page to load, too. Maybe you even have to go through a sub-page which doubles your loading time. Some wikis are slower than others, but those with lots of images, videos and pop-ups are generally the worst. And what’s awesome is that fandom will put those on every site without getting permission.

So even if you do streamline your site, get ready for the two hundred advertisements per page that’ll slow down even like a 4090 GPU. And don’t even get me started on how miserable this experience is on mobile, where it's much harder to block advertisements. The site is practically unusable at times-- Not even an exaggeration. Occasionally you get so many ads on your tiny little screen that it's impossible to close them all and use the site. Holy shit is this frustrating.

So, maybe the site isn’t designed for mobile, whatever, I guess that’s okay. I haven’t really designed DBDSU for mobile either. But Fandom Incorporated (Yes, Fandom Incorporated) is also owned by a private telecommunications firm with 2000 employees, itself with 300+ employees as of 2016, and also owns a slew of similar sites, which come with their own employees (And some actually have nice web design): Giant Bomb, Metacritic, and even poor GameFAQs have been bought out by Fandom Inc. If this amount of people and money can’t make a wiki work on mobile then I think there’s a larger issue.

Hmmm, that larger issue… How about their history of censorship and destroying wikis for profit, or their other generally greedy business practices which don’t support the free spread of information (Which is what wikis are all about)? No, couldn’t be that…

Wait, wait, I know.

It’s because they got rid of the amazingly stupid comment section!