I've been an active gamefaqs user for over 20 years now (I actually have more GF karma than HN karma, and you only get 1 GF karma a day!), and I'm honestly kind of okay with it. Yes, Fandom's sites are filled with terrible ads and autoplaying videos and all the other things that make the internet lousy. But I'd much rather have owners that are at least somewhat related to the content than be owned by some acquisition company or giant megacorp like CBS. It just seems like Fandom will be less likely to randomly shut us down someday.
Another 20-year GameFaqs veteran, and all I can say is, no. Dear god no. The last thing I need is a freaking autoplay video with an impossibly-tiny 'x' button in the top-right corner obscuring display of my plaintext walkthrough.
I haven't been active for about 17 years, but I got on GF in 2002 for the Final Fantasy VII walkthroughs. Then I fell into this weird roleplay community of "factions" that existed on some old game boards for Atari 2600, I was part of Z-Tack. Then there were some people who build clones of the message boards, mostly in PHP. Outboards, Darkside Legion, Magician Type 0 were some of their names. I built my own clone largely from scratch (and with some help staring at leaked source from Outboards) and that's how I learned PHP3, MySQL, XHTML and CSS while listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers and techno.
The boards now look like shit, but then, the Internet has changed in 20 years. All good things come to an end.
