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It appears that at some point in the recent (distant? I don't know) past, Memory Alpha changed its domain from memory-alpha.wikia.com to memory-alpha.fandom.com. Given the copious number of times links to that site appear in questions and answers on SciFi.SE, is it possible to fix them all with some kind of global find/replace?

I am assuming that "wikia" has changed its name to "fandom". wikia.com is successfully redirecting to fandom.com so I don't know why the MA URLs aren't.

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    wikia.com moved to fandom.com at some point so it affects more than just Memory Alpha. There is a redirect up still at the moment, not sure if it's up indefinitely or not though.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Sep 25, 2019 at 16:12
  • @TheLethalCarrot yep, see my edit I made at the same time you commented.
    – Darren
    Sep 25, 2019 at 16:13
  • Per your update, Memory Alpha links do redirect for me at least. Maybe something your end is blocking the redirect?
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Sep 25, 2019 at 16:14
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    @TheLethalCarrot You are right, they are working for me in other browsers but not Firefox, which is my regular one.
    – Darren
    Sep 25, 2019 at 16:17
  • As of last Sunday (SEDE updates once a week but I doubt there are new wikia links) there are 12674 posts on main with wikia links and 85 posts on meta with wikia links.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Sep 25, 2019 at 16:28
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    (1) Doesn't wikia still redirect to fandom? Or do we really have zillions of dead links now? (2) Last time something like this happened, we successfully appealed for support from SE. If the links are easy to change by a short piece of code at the database level, we can ask them again - much easier than editing thousands of posts manually!
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Sep 25, 2019 at 17:13
  • @Randal'Thor it seems to be just a Firefox issue.
    – Darren
    Sep 25, 2019 at 17:14
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    The links are still working for me as well (Firefox, macOS). Just to inform you of the possibility: I have a script to automatically repair posts in the form of regular edits (so they bump the post, and are done at a rate of 3 edits / day) which is doing a similar task on German.SE: german.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1506/15821
    – Glorfindel
    Sep 25, 2019 at 17:15
  • @Darren I'm using Firefox and the wikia links work for me. Problem on your end maybe?
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Sep 25, 2019 at 17:19
  • @Randal'Thor maybe. I tried it in safe mode which didn’t help.
    – Darren
    Sep 25, 2019 at 17:20
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    @Randal'Thor the redirect still works, whether it’s always going to is another question.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Sep 25, 2019 at 17:34
  • Some Wikia wikis were actually migrated to wikia.org rather than fandom.com. If a global rewrite script is created, it will have to avoid those specific wikis.
    – gparyani
    Sep 30, 2019 at 22:14

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Finally had a bit to get this taken care of. I poked around and noticed that there were 1920 outdated URLs that were redirecting (for most people) from memory-alpha.wikia.com to memory-alpha.fandom.com. While dummy checking this change, I noticed that 390 of these were actually en.memory-alpha.wikia.com but the new fandom URLs don't indicate English, it's the default, so if we'd converted these links to en.memory-alpha.fandom.com we would have broken just under 400 links... so we didn't do that.

On Main (1920) and Meta (44), both sets of URLs have been converted to the same thing, memory-alpha.fandom.com (without the language indicator). For good measure, we also converted the 44 instances on M&TV.

Thanks to Shog for actually doing the change.

Please let me know if there's anything that seems off!

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  • Thanks. And thanks again to bump the char count up.
    – Darren
    Jan 7, 2020 at 9:30
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    Thanks for doing this! Is there any chance of fixing up the remainder of the wikia links? I know it's a big ask but it's next to impossible to do by hand.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Jan 15, 2020 at 11:24
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I've talked with the community team about this. Since the redirect seems to be working for almost everyone, they're putting it in the backlog and will get to it sooner or later. If the redirect breaks before the mass update, I'm sure it will get bumped up to a higher priority.

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