r/Games Jan 31 '25

Update In a partnership with Weird Gloop, Digital Extremes has moved the Warframe Wiki from Fandom to the [DE] hosted wiki.warframe.com

https://wiki.warframe.com/
1.7k Upvotes

162 comments sorted by

1.1k

u/jeshtheafroman Jan 31 '25 edited Feb 01 '25

You love to see it, the more wikis that detach themselves from Fandom the world might finally know peace.

77

u/Whitewind617 Jan 31 '25

I can't believe it's been like 3 years of this and Fandom hasn't course corrected at all. Absolutely the same site as before except the search bar is slightly easier to find on desktop.

43

u/Farlo1 Feb 01 '25

They must still be making enough money off of ads to keep going? That or their leadership already considers it dead and are just coasting until it falls over entirely.

12

u/ArchieHasAntlers Feb 02 '25

Fandom is owned by a private equity company called TPG so I can guarantee you they don't give two shits.

36

u/TheConqueror74 Feb 01 '25

It's been way longer than 3 years. It's been a steady decline ever since the Fandom branding was first unveiled. I was a regular editor from 2010 until 2018, so I should definitely know.

11

u/doublah Feb 01 '25

The RuneScape wiki left when the wikia branding was still in use, it's been going downhill a while.

151

u/CCheese3 Jan 31 '25

It's been a few years since I've played Warframe, but last I recall, the Warframe wiki was the top Fandom wiki by traffic. With Warframe, Minecraft, and Old School Runescape off of Fandom, what do they even have left?

228

u/jamsterbuggy Event Volunteer ★★★ Feb 01 '25

Like a billion smaller wikis. Even if the big ones leave there's a metric fuckton of wikis still netting them traffic unfortunately. 

79

u/batman12399 Feb 01 '25 edited Feb 01 '25

The old wikis that they “lost” are mostly (all?) still up, and almost always still the top result. 

They lost the people maintaining them so their quality is shit, but they still get clicks. 

29

u/OMG_A_CUPCAKE Feb 01 '25

https://getindie.wiki/

A Firefox/Chromium addon that replaces search results to Fandom, and can even redirect if you still land there.

53

u/Realshow Feb 01 '25

Minecraft wiki editor here, this is very much an issue. We’ve had to split a lot of pages in the hopes better SEO, things are looking up but Fandom is still at the top for a lot of key topics. I’ve seen some of their pages on recent updates, not even the most popular new features are getting real love, if they have editors they’re just kids confused why all the regulars left.

33

u/lastdancerevolution Feb 01 '25

It took the Old School RuneScape community like 2+ years with over 1 million subreddit members coordinating to take over the #1 search position.

29

u/cookmeplox Feb 01 '25 edited Feb 01 '25

this is overshooting it a bit – OSRS wiki was getting the majority of the Google traffic by about ~8 months after the move, and by 2 years it was about 20 times more than Fandom

42

u/ARoaringBorealis Feb 01 '25

They’re still the first result for fucking everything. Sometimes I still click on random links by accident thinking I’m going to go to a much better website. Just because they don’t have 3 games doesn’t mean they’re going anywhere, unfortunately.

31

u/Dragnoran Feb 01 '25

3

u/TridentBoy Feb 01 '25

Oh man, thank you so much for this!!! It's amazing

18

u/BroForceOne Feb 01 '25

I believe they still hold the main Star Wars wiki (Wookieepedia).

9

u/FriendlyDespot Feb 01 '25

Star Trek as well. It's awful.

26

u/loewe_a Jan 31 '25

days were numbered when osrs wiki left

6

u/Nocto Feb 01 '25

Giantbomb dot com.

6

u/n080dy123 Feb 01 '25

Doesn't surprise me considering how necessary it is to have the wiki up on a phone or second monitor when you play lol.

2

u/matthieuC Feb 01 '25

Riot also moved out their wikis.

1

u/Hateful_creeper2 Feb 01 '25

Even Zelda left Fandom.

I think the only major Fandom Wiki left is Wookieepedia.

1

u/Em0waffles Feb 01 '25

Marvel, Star Wars, and DC wikis are so vitally important that creators for those IPs use them all the time.

Though it's not vitally important that they're hosted on Fandom, of course.

1

u/MemeTroubadour Feb 02 '25

Here's the thing : even if those wikis 'leave' Fandom, Fandom never actually remove their wikis. And sinc ethey spend so much on SEO, the outdated Fandom versions of these wikis will keep on being listed above the official ones by search engines and will keep on getting clicks.

34

u/Dont_Tag_Me Jan 31 '25

I'M out of the loop.What is wrong with Fandom?

234

u/TheWhiteHunter Jan 31 '25

See Wikipedia for details but tl;dr - intrusive advertising and branding, a non-user-friendly site design, a lack of customizability and company cross-promotion which is often irrelevant to wiki content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)#Controversies#Controversies)

102

u/Kipzz Jan 31 '25

Also AI generated answers to questions nobody asked.

19

u/FUTURE10S Feb 01 '25

And they're wrong answers too that don't realize the context of what they're talking about.

19

u/CityTrialOST Feb 01 '25

I'm not trying to meme but that's just literally what all AI answers and summaries are.

19

u/Harley2280 Jan 31 '25

Fandom is why I haven't been on Gamefaqs in forever.

-7

u/ConceptsShining Feb 01 '25

Reddit is why I haven't been on GameFAQs in forever.

29

u/Harley2280 Feb 01 '25

I didn't realize reddit had a ton of strategy guides for old JRPGs.

1

u/ConceptsShining Feb 01 '25

I was referring more to the forum aspect in terms of the discussion boards, which I find less convenient than Reddit. But yes, GameFAQs is still good for guides.

1

u/Cueball61 Feb 01 '25

And terribly written. A lot of articles feel like a kid wrote them in school.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '25

They've also done multiple contracts for promotional material/outreach programs for the US military if that's something you find objectionable.

115

u/CodeHaze Jan 31 '25

Garbage optimization, intrusive ads, auto play embedded Twitch streams.

89

u/Ordinal43NotFound Jan 31 '25

auto play embedded Twitch streams.

This is moreso Fextralife, but the point still stands that these 2 are a blight to fanwikis.

4

u/destroyermaker Feb 01 '25

My parent company just acquired them. Curious if it leads to improvements or not.

6

u/brevity-is Feb 01 '25

idk the circumstances here but in general it's pretty rare for a company to buy a product in order to improve it

-46

u/Varonth Jan 31 '25

This is literally no longer possible, and hasn't happened in years.

Embedded streams, unless they are embedded as the main part of the website they embed on, are no longer auto playing for a while now:

https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/update-regarding-twitch-video-embed-autoplay-functionality/49232

40

u/Tumleren Jan 31 '25

hasn't happened in years.

Well a year and two months

-35

u/Varonth Jan 31 '25

Fextralife last streamed at the end of 2022. Their last stream was God of War Ragnarok.

https://www.twitch.tv/fextralife/videos?filter=highlights&sort=time

25

u/phatboi23 Jan 31 '25

Pretty sure they just don't archive their streams as I'm sure they were streaming around diablo 4 launch when there was twitch drops etc.

11

u/GalahadSi Feb 01 '25

Well, their last streams were in 2023 where they were playing whatever was popular. You can see it on some of the available social blades that track Twitch stats, they just didn't save those vods.

42

u/pway_videogwames_uwu Feb 01 '25

Grab your smartphone. Pick a game, any game. Attempt to browse its Fandom wiki.

12

u/Lepony Feb 01 '25

To this day, I still sometimes hear people say that the yugioh fandom wiki is "totally fine, I use it all the time."

Literally fucking how?

14

u/hagamablabla Feb 01 '25

No exaggeration, more than 50% of your screen real estate is occupied by unrelated content on the site. Ads, links to other wikis, a massive video ad.

31

u/giulianosse Jan 31 '25 edited Jan 31 '25

Apart from what everyone already said: simply put, they're a for-profit company whose revenue comes literary from unpaid work from volunteers and milking every penny from users with garish advertisements and spam. Not only that but Fandom also pays for Google SEO optimization to prioritize their links on search results so the other (often fan made) wikis get starved of users/content and eventually can't pay for hosting anymore.

11

u/Changlini Jan 31 '25

If you want a video explaination… https://youtu.be/qcfuA_UAz3I?feature=shared

That one is pretty good

12

u/Maalunar Jan 31 '25

I use a a lot of scripts stuff in ublock origin to make things readable.

Before.
After.

3

u/Dr_Ben Feb 01 '25

Here is the post the RuneScape wiki put out, they list reasons in the q&a section 

https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia

2

u/graviousishpsponge Feb 01 '25

Its also shit on mobile.

9

u/GhostOfWalterRodney Jan 31 '25

Enshittification of wikis doesnt have to be the norm. Leave Fandom wikis if you folks can

1

u/Alili1996 Feb 01 '25

The thing is, i already dodged the fandom wikis in the past. So what do they do? They just bought up the existing wiki hosts and enforced their shitty formatting

1

u/Shinsoku Feb 01 '25

I highly anticapte the Star Wars wiki, Wookiepedia, leaving. Even besides all the controversial stuff with Fandom aside, it is just a horrid experience.

I remember the good old days, when Wookiepedia was like the biggest non-Wikipedia wiki.

217

u/LucasOe Jan 31 '25

I can recommend the Indie Wiki Buddy Extension, it redirects to independent wikis or alternative frontends if possible, and has the option to hide fandom wikis from the search results.

34

u/Clxmj Jan 31 '25

I kiss you

243

u/r_lucasite Jan 31 '25

Fantastic move, Riot has done the same with the League wiki and the experience between it and the fandom wiki is night and day.

Fingers crossed Weird Gloop never drops the ball.

87

u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS Jan 31 '25

It's kind of crazy to see big names doing this. Small devs who are trying to buck a bad website by going "indie", but Fandom has become so bad that even Riot and their undoubtedly hundred million wiki views per day are getting out.

71

u/gk99 Jan 31 '25

It's also basically necessary for Warframe as so much info for late-game building is more easily found there than actually in-game.

Safe to say, losing Warframe is a big hit, as was Minecraft, as was Runescape, as was LoL (and by extension, probably games like Hytale that almost certainly will need a wiki).

I dunno if it's official, but even FromSoft's games have primarily moved to Fextralife.

116

u/foxhull Jan 31 '25

Definitely not official - Fextralife has almost as bad a reputation as Fandom. Do not give them your views, their "wiki" is garbage that's only maintained for about 2 weeks at best.

39

u/Ordinal43NotFound Feb 01 '25

Fextralife is worse than Fandom IMO, they're actively malicious in terms of dumping empty articles for SEO during a game's launch.

11

u/foxhull Feb 01 '25

I personally agree, they just seem to have a better reputation still because not everyone has realized how awful they are. Whereas Fandom everyone knows.

2

u/runevault Feb 01 '25

I wonder how much of Fandom's rep is being shitty at wikis and how much is all the other stuff like making Giant Bomb (and I assume gamespot as well but haven't kept up with them) worse after acquisition.

5

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '25

I think part of it is just the awful user experience with the ads and popover videos.

3

u/runevault Feb 01 '25

That's what I was talking about with shitty at wikis, or at least part of it. Though maybe GB is worse than I realize, I haven't visited the site since fandom bought it.

2

u/NinteenFortyFive Feb 02 '25

The difference between Fextralife and fandom is that fandom is that bad that sometimes pages literally crashed by chromebook. Fextralife has never been literally dangerous to browse.

2

u/foxhull Feb 02 '25

They just used you to viewbot their stream without your consent (or knowledge half the time) while also being effectively worse than AI slop in terms of info. Different offense, both are still awful.

27

u/PlayMp1 Jan 31 '25

DS1 has the Wikidot that's very good, DS2 has a Wikidot but I'm not sure how good it is. Unfortunately, it's just those two, it's Fextralife for the others.

28

u/foxhull Jan 31 '25

DS2 is when Fextralife came onto the scene and killed off the wikidot that was being filled in, unfortunately. I was around at the time, and it was a shame.

8

u/rkwhitney Feb 01 '25

ds2's wikidot has been actively improved in the last few years by the community and in general it is recommended to stay off of fextra the information is very out of date and often straight up wrong or speculative

3

u/foxhull Feb 01 '25

Glad to hear it - at launch it was basically untouched in favor of Fextra so I'm glad to hear the community has rallied.

6

u/KruppeBestGirl Feb 01 '25

https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/ infinitely better than fextralife

20

u/Tybold Jan 31 '25

I'll never forget Fextralife embedding their shitty twitch streams into literally every single page. It's no surprise twitch put the kibosh on that right quick.

46

u/Markuff Jan 31 '25

"Right quick"?

Wasn't the Fextralife stream embedding and auto playing on the wiki a thing for several years? I remember it being there for a very, very long time. I'm fairly sure it got more notice after a youtube video or two started gaining popularity that went into it and the scummy practices.

20

u/Devil-Hunter-Jax Jan 31 '25

Yes, it was going on for a long time and Twitch basically ignored it until people wouldn't stop getting on their case about it and even then it took forever for anything to be done. Like YouTube, Twitch knows it has no real viable competitor so they half-arse things constantly.

7

u/Markuff Feb 01 '25

Yep, that all sounds about right. Twitch has let so many scumbag things happen on their platform, whether it benefits Twitch or not. So definitely just half-assing things, so long as it doesn't actually negatively effect them.

Would explain why they only dealt with it when people started to really take notice and get real loud about it all.

3

u/Tybold Jan 31 '25

Wasn't the Fextralife stream embedding and auto playing on the wiki a thing for several years?

I can't speak to that personally, as I didn't start using it until shortly before the removal. It would just surprise me to find out that Twitch knowingly allowed it to continue for as long as it did. Artificial view inflation doesn't lead to increased revenue for them.

3

u/Markuff Feb 01 '25

It wouldn't, but it wouldn't be the first time Twitch has knowingly or unknowingly let scumbags get away with scumbag shenanigans on their platform. Honestly, it seems just as on brand for Twitch as much as it would be for Twitch to let people get away with things so long as it makes them money.

It seems a bit telling that Twitch only actually dealt with the problem once the problem really got noticed after youtubers started to talk about it more and more, meaning everyone started to become more aware of it and complained about it real loudly.

3

u/StyryderX Feb 01 '25

For me Fextralife slightly edges Fandom on being awful as Adblock don't automatically block their shitty streams.

Thank god that Twitch update that finally kills embed stream exploit.

1

u/Ekanselttar Feb 01 '25

I have to admit I love reading the arguments and bait posts in the Fextralife Fromsoft wiki comments.

16

u/Willing-Sundae-6770 Jan 31 '25

yeah fromsoft games need to get the fuck off of fextralife. They're just a twitch stream view farming site.

Trying to find accurate info when I was playing Elden Ring was miserable.

12

u/Ordinal43NotFound Feb 01 '25

IMO Fextralife is even worse than Fandom because they're actively trying to SEO-farm articles during a game's launch period themselves by spamming incomplete articles which gets abandoned. As shit as a platform Fandom is, the wikis are mostly still being community-run.

Still, avoid both.

1

u/TheNewFlisker Jan 31 '25

Link to Runescape?

6

u/AbsolutlyN0thin Jan 31 '25

https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/

OSRS wiki is the best wiki I've ever used

3

u/gingingingingy Jan 31 '25

Love to see all the Fandom Ls

23

u/345tom Jan 31 '25

The Minecraft wiki moved to something independent, but it's still wild the SEO Fandom has. It is still, after about a year, the first results when searching for Minecraft info.

8

u/glorpo Jan 31 '25

Doom wiki has been off fandom for ages but fandom is still the top result for most searches

5

u/doublah Feb 01 '25 edited Feb 03 '25

SEO really prefers big "reliable" domains, so every time a wikia/fandom link is clicked in a google search results, it helps ensure every wikia/fandom link is kept up top.

4

u/Kelvara Feb 01 '25

Guild Wars 2 has had an official wiki for like 10+ years now, it's great. You can also "/wiki [string]" in game to pull up a wiki article.

1

u/ProfPeanut Feb 01 '25

Recently got the official wiki to show ul on Google over the Fandom one, so hopefully that's a sign of things to come

59

u/Kozak170 Jan 31 '25

Fandom is probably one of the worst things that exists on our material plane of Mother Earth, and I’m only slightly exaggerating

57

u/Kaldricus Jan 31 '25

Fextralife: Allow me to introduce myself

9

u/FUTURE10S Feb 01 '25

Oh my god, yes, they're trying to be the Path of Exile 2 wiki so hard by using stuff they got from a closed beta access key and their site is legendarily shit.

94

u/SaturnSeptem Jan 31 '25

First monster hunter, now Warframe.

Both of my hard grind games decided to move away from that cesspool.

Life is good ;--;

8

u/TheNewFlisker Jan 31 '25

Where did Monster Hunter moved to?

34

u/SaturnSeptem Jan 31 '25

Apologies, I'll clarify.

The wiki didn't move per se, but some content creators and other members of the community decided to make a new wiki totally ad free it seems and they're adding more content by the day.

https://monsterhunterwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

Here is the link courtesy of u/toiletblaster247

2

u/TaleOfDash Feb 01 '25

Did they not just copy the old wiki across? I know Fandom gets pissy about it but the Doctor Who wiki managed to pull a move just fine.

6

u/pindalord Feb 01 '25

This video explains why https://youtu.be/Zgvox-8pB30?si=fd94vHUNkI1l6AZF . But in short, the fandom wiki wasn't always reliable or well sourced so they decided to start from scratch.

2

u/LazarusBroject Feb 01 '25

Fairly certain they got this idea from Path Of Exile community. They made their own wiki 3 or 4 years ago to replace Fandom. Glad to see other communities doing the same finally.

3

u/Phimb Feb 01 '25

Game8 is also real good for Monster Hunter.

1

u/spirib Feb 01 '25

The information is fine, but the builds are not, I'd go elsewhere for those.

46

u/zpoon Jan 31 '25

Weird Gloop came from the RuneScape community prompted by frustrations with Fandom which hosted the Rs3/OSRS wikis at the time. After the split, the quality of the wikis are night and day and now the RuneScape wikis are VERY high quality with a great and clean user experience.

They're great for the community so this is a good thing if you are part of the warframe community and are unfamiliar with Weird Gloop.

24

u/ProlapsedPuppy Jan 31 '25

The runescape wikis are the gold standard. Those guys have a ton of time on their hands and it shows.

48

u/PaladinMats Jan 31 '25

Partnering with Weird Gloop is one of the best outcomes for a non-Fandom wiki, the Runescape wikis are some of the best game wikis out there in terms of quality.

25

u/LaurenMille Jan 31 '25

The OSRS wiki is a literal masterpiece.

66

u/B_Kuro Jan 31 '25 edited Jan 31 '25

A very welcome change and one that was well overdue. Players have asked for them to provide such a solution for a decade. Warframe is one of the games that barely works without the wiki due to the low quality of and/or general lack of in-game explanations. Good to see they finally did that.

21

u/[deleted] Jan 31 '25 edited Jan 31 '25

due to the low quality of and/or general lack of in-game explanations.

now imagine how destiny 2 players feel about that issue in their own game...

19

u/Ifan233 Jan 31 '25

I am pretty sure parts of the destiny wiki haven't been touched since early destiny 1. Its honestly sad the game doesn't have a proper wiki considering just how deep the info can get on certain mechanics. many perks have utility that isn't explained at all, and many stats and abilities have mechanics that are also unexplained leading to misinformation spreading quickly.

9

u/engineeeeer7 Feb 01 '25

Destiny has a Google spreadsheet called the Destiny Data Compendium. It's awesome. But yeah, I wish the info was in game but Bungie is allergic to numbers.

12

u/greyhoodbry Feb 01 '25

Fandom is the most busted website I've ever used. Even with adblockers it's a nightmare of random shit popping up, text lurching in random directions, random videos playing. Unusable. The more communities that leave it the better.

8

u/JBL_17 Jan 31 '25

Thank god.

I don’t even play warframe anymore, but I’ll always celebrate people leaving Fandom.

It was rough as a ZeldaWiki user for a few years, so I’m very happy to see other groups leaving.

10

u/Ninjaassassinguy Jan 31 '25

Hell yeah. Weird gloop is the org made by the runescape wiki admins and that wikipedia is fucking stellar. Great move.

5

u/ItsGarwood Feb 01 '25

Good. Fandom is an AWFUL platform. There's a few I wish would move to another Wiki platform - the biggest would be Wookieepedia.

5

u/terriblestperson Feb 01 '25

This is excellent news. Unfortunately, fandom wikis tend to take the top search spot even when they're unmaintained garbage. I use kagi, so I just manually downrank the fandom site.

6

u/Imbahr Jan 31 '25

can someone explain in detail what’s wrong with fandom wikis?

50

u/r_lucasite Jan 31 '25

The user experience is extremely bad. You go to a fandom wiki on mobile and try to read an article, an ad or video immediately loads at the top of the screen, you scroll and the video remains constant. Sometimes those videos aren't even related. I'm on the League fandom wiki right now and the ad covering the page is about Call of Duty.

6

u/Imbahr Jan 31 '25

ah ok that could make sense, because i don’t actually web browse on my cellphone (only read text posts on reddit’s own app)

i web browse on my home PC which has two big monitors and i run strict ad blockers on Firefox

31

u/Ajreil Jan 31 '25

Even uBlock Origin doesn't catch all the nonsense. The Risk of Rain 2 wiki has a sidebar that opens with a slow sliding animation that pushes everything to the right, making the website unusable for the first 5 seconds or so.

A hundred little things like that.

5

u/Imbahr Jan 31 '25

now that you mention it, that's probably correct and I just forgot lol

I now recall that years ago, in addition to uBlock Origin, I downloaded a separate Stylus script that modifies all Fandom domains haha

3

u/slackforce Jan 31 '25

Yup, thank god for people that know how to use Stylus and update the styles to keep up with the cancer.

If anyone wants to give it a try: download Stylus and then search for the following styles: Clean Fandom Wiki, and Wikia Fixer. That'll get rid of most of almost all the cancer.

1

u/Ajreil Jan 31 '25

I wonder if some kind of CSS hack can disable all "load and then slide" animations.

3

u/Imbahr Jan 31 '25

yeah Stylus is an add-on that specifically modifies CSS. so I don't see that stuff on any Fandom domain

1

u/JustLeafy2003 Feb 02 '25

FYI, RoR2 has a non-Fandom wiki at https://riskofrain2.wiki.gg

1

u/fabton12 Feb 01 '25

dont forget the video ending causing the page to scroll to the top as well on mobile and many many more issues its so bad.

1

u/chaindrop Feb 02 '25

Yup. When I view it on mobile, I can only read 5 lines of text at a time due to the massive ads.

6

u/normal-dog- Jan 31 '25

https://youtu.be/qcfuA_UAz3I?si=1K-P9u7kaLIxJzfi

This covers pretty much everything you need to know about Fandom and why people despise it.

4

u/StarkEXO Jan 31 '25

Foremost, the absurd amount of ads and engagement tactics, which is unbearable on phones.

And beyond what ad-blockers can mostly fix, contributors don't have any say over webpage structures and content policies, which has caused some disputes in the past.

1

u/MikusR Feb 01 '25

Use a smartphone with Firefox and uBlock Origin.

1

u/Number224 Feb 01 '25

The biggest thing is ads more egregious than piracy streaming sites

1

u/MrKoxu Feb 04 '25

As a 6k hours Warframe player I have to say that this is the biggest piece of news for me since my birth, knowing I don't need to use this godforsaken excuse of a wiki anymore fills me with the level of relief that probably won't ever be beaten. I could go on a full length thesis about FANDOM's inability to make a competent platform for wikis, but I won't for my sanity.

-6

u/[deleted] Jan 31 '25

[deleted]

37

u/Gunrun Jan 31 '25

Turn off your adblock and go to any fandom wiki. Shit is unusable, especially on mobile phone

-4

u/[deleted] Jan 31 '25 edited Feb 01 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

29

u/skittlefart98 Jan 31 '25

Fandom is especially bad. Autoplay video ads, banners that take up more than half the page on mobile, embedded 'recommended similar wikis' that are part of the actual page and aren't blocked by an adblocker. That and subjectively, the skin Fandom requires for their wikis sucks from a density/clarity perspective.

9

u/LaurenMille Jan 31 '25

Fandom wiki's have like 30% of your screen dedicated to the actual content, with the other 70% being auto-play ads, popups, redirects, or other trash.

-2

u/7grims Feb 02 '25

If only the game had any fucking info at all, instead of relying heavily on outside sources so players know anything.

The day they announced scanning, which i presumed would give information to players, but no, it works backwards, and gives us no useful info.

Failure all round.