Pandora's Tale Wiki:Moving to a Custom Domain

From Pandora's Tale Wiki

This discussion has concluded. The result is: Move to pandorastale.wiki.

Should we move Pandora's Tale Wiki to a Custom Domain?

This page is a request-for-comment about whether to move from a Miraheze subdomain to our own domain. This discussion is not about leaving Miraheze: it is about whether to continue using Miraheze with a custom domain. Any hypothetical move away from Miraheze would be discussed separately in the future.

Arguments For Moving

  • While Miraheze is currently a good host, that could change in the future. If we do have to move hosts again, having our own domain would mean getting to keep existing links and search indices.
  • A custom domain could be easier to remember. I don't think I had even heard of Miraheze two years ago, and the name still doesn't really tell you what it is. A domain like pandorastale.wiki is clearly a wiki about Pandora's Tale.

Arguments Against Moving

  • There's allegedly (according to the MH Discord) a bug that Google can't find the sitemap xml file for Miraheze wikis that use their own domain.
    • This might not matter. Previously, I managed to get Google Search Console to recognize this wiki's sitemap, and it "discovered" almost every page on the wiki (but didn't actually index most of them). However, last week Google Search Console shows that it apparently lost the sitemap and has now only "discovered" 40 pages in total.
  • The major search engines prioritize subdomains of big domains over independent sites with their own domain.
    • Again, this might not matter. Fandom is still beating us on Google, Bing, and Yandex in a search for "Pandora's Tale Wiki", and they will likely continue to beat us for awhile. Searching for the words Pandora's Tale Wiki (without quotes) turns up results on a bunch of other wikis unrelated to the comic.
  • I will have to pay annually to renew the domain.
    • Unless I lose my job I don't think that will be an issue.

If we move, what should the domain be?

I already bought pandorastale.wiki. It was only $3, so if another domain ends up being better then I didn't lose much. Other options I considered are pandorastalewiki.net and pandorastalewiki.org.

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