It's been over a year since the independent Neptunia Wiki went live. I've got almost all the pages forked from the former Fandom wiki onto the new host, kept a lot of pages up-to-date, and got some contributors, new and old to help out too. But it just makes me wonder: how come we're not getting more people to join the wiki?
Ever since this wiki went live, we've had some issues with bots spamming the site with unnecessary pages and the multiple DDoSes that slowed it down, but thankfully the owner of the site took care of those issues by adding strong anti-bot features to combat them. And although we do get a few legitimate users, half of the time they're just vandals trying to make the wiki unusable, and nobody wants to see a page of their favorite character all messed up by some evading clown. We even tried to get included in the list of independent wikis on Indie Wiki Buddy, and thankfully, we got approved.
Another reason why we're not getting much users is mostly just Fandom wikis trying to become the first page result of various popular search engines, outshining other indie wikis like the GTA and Minecraft wikis. Although the owner did allow search engines to cache the wiki and not scrape all the pages for AI training, we're still not getting much traffic from real users. But since Neptunia is such a niche franchise, it's somewhat expected, but don't you want some newbies who want to be into this franchise come to the independent wiki, and not let major wiki farms like Fandom screw you over?
And one last reason would have to be not enough promotion and advertising. We first advertised the wiki on the r/gamindustri Subreddit and established a Discord server and a Ko-fi page to help people support the wiki and keep it alive for the following years, and managed to get a couple people to join and donate. We even got recognition from an independent artist and game developer to promote it, but it still wasn't enough to get more people to come to the wiki.
All in all, it felt somewhat good to be contributing on an independent host with the help of some fans, old and new, even though there were some stressful moments, like session timeouts and the site breaking for no apparent reason. But if we want to become a community, we should at least get more people to contribute and fill in all of the missing puzzle pieces, so that way, I don't have to do most of the dirty work while the admin keeps the site, Discord server and Ko-fi page up and running.
