Hi everybody,
As you may have noticed, ShoutWiki has been in maintenance mode for most of today (June 3). The cause of this downtime was a combination of finishing patching our MediaWiki 1.21 build and moving our MySQL to a new server.
The MediaWiki build, which we upgraded to on Saturday, has needed multiple patches and today we applied the final one. This caused a short-period of downtime. During this downtime, we decided to move forward with the implementation of our new server. This server now hosts our databases and is running MariaDB, which will give us more storage and better performance, meaning a better service for you!
This did result in a small loss of data, but rest assured that all edits are preserved! We have lost all image files and most of the wiki setting files, but we are obtaining our external backup and will be re-uploading these as soon as the files come through. After this, we will be back online.
Note that while all edits are safe, as well as most images and setting files, there may be some loss of images and setting files from the hours prior to our maintenance. We will update you further on this when we find out when the backup was taken.
We’ve been preparing a collection of premium skins, which are MediaWiki skins unique to ShoutWiki. These skins come from various sources and they’ve exclusively been tested, improved and tweaked by and for ShoutWiki. A lot of time and effort has been put to these skins by our developers in order to deliver the best possible ShoutWiki experience to you. As a way of apologizing for the unscheduled downtime, we’ll be enabling one of these premium skins on all of our wikis for an extended period of time. More details will be revealed in a future blog post.
On behalf of the entire ShoutWiki staff team,
–
Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team
Hi everybody,
Just a quick notification that you’ll see a small bit of downtime early Saturday morning due to us upgrading all sites to MediaWiki 1.21.1 – the newest MediaWiki release. The downtime will start at approximately 10AM UTC and is nothing to be worried about. The sites will return shortly after this – we’re not sure exactly how long things will take, so keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter for more information.
More details about what is in the new release will be posted here as soon as the upgrade is complete!
Regards,
Lewis Cawte,
Chief Technical Officer, ShoutWiki.com.
This is ShoutWiki’s quarterly report for the fourth and last quarter (Q4) of 2012, from 1 October to 31 December.
Over this period, 387 wikis were created by 334 unique users.
1749 new users signed up on ShoutWiki.
33 commits were made to our internal Subversion (SVN) source code repository.
One bug in our Bugzilla bug tracking system was marked as resolved during this period.
One new MediaWiki extension, called EmailCheck, was introduced during this quarter.
On behalf of the staff team,
Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team
A few days ago, I announced on Facebook that I was working on upgrading ShoutWiki to the newest MediaWiki version, 1.20. For those who don’t know, MediaWiki is the base web application that ShoutWiki is based off, along with Wikipedia, Wikia and many other sites out there on the world wide web. This wasn’t necessary a planned rollout, we just knew that we wanted to get this new version out as soon as possible, already being delayed by real life factors influencing the availability of the staff needed to make this happen. This is why it was not announced here, as the days proceeding the unavailability of our staff were spent on this upgrade.
When I was happy with the upgraded copy, and a new tool or two we put in place internally to smoothen out the upgrade process, I updated the production copy of ShoutWiki, putting the wikis into “Maintenance mode” while the databases upgraded. In theory – and next time, this should be a fairly painless procedure with no more downtime than necessary and no left over bugs to cleanup. This time, that wasn’t the case. We had a series of bugs, some through human error, one or two caused by upstream factors. These bugs and a log of actions are detailed below:
Saturday 17th November, 21:41UTC – Wikis brought back out of maintenance mode. A problem was quickly spotted with captchas not working causing many edits to fail. Another issue with adverts not showing in Vector and Monobook was also discovered, as well as a few smaller non fatal errors leaving messages in our error logs.
Saturday 17th November, 22:10UTC – Adverts in Monobook are fixed.
Saturday 17th November, 22:17UTC – Vector adverts fixed.
Saturday 17th November, 22:41UTC – ConfirmEdit, the extension we use for Captchas is rolled back to an earlier version. We believe this may have been causing us problems because of an incompatible version of the extension being branched for 1.20, however this could be a new feature that is incompatible with some of our systems. We are currently reviewing this breakage to find the root cause and stop this happening again.
Sunday 18th November, 20:33UTC – I am alerted to an error in a wiki on ShoutWiki missing part of its database. Upgrade script is run to correct problem on all wikis in attempt to fix any wikis globally affected by this problem.
Tuesday 20th November 2011, 20:14UTC – After having another report of the same problem from Sunday, the team discovers the problem, rooting from an outdated copy of tables SQL being used to create new wikis. Updated copy of tables deployed and all wikis fixed by script.
Tuesday 20th November 2011, 23:20UTC (approx) – Alerted to error on new wiki creation. Database error.
Wednesday 21st November 2011, 16:17UTC – Team identify problem of additional unneeded tables in the SQL file causing MySQL to throw errors. This is patched fixing problems and allowing new wikis to be created again.
We believe this is everything fixed now. We thank everyone for their patience through this time and if you have any more problems please contact us through the usual channels.
This is the first update that I’ve managed on done through this message, the second or third in total I have managed while here. Through the course of this upgrade, we have learnt a few things and increased our knowledge and toolset to allow us to perform future upgrades with more efficiency and speed and in future releases we should have less bugs while completing this process.
– Lewis Cawte
Chief Technical Officer, ShoutWiki.
This is ShoutWiki’s quarterly report for the third quarter (Q3) of 2012, from 1 July to 30 September.
Over this period, 217 wikis were created by 182 unique users.
604 new users signed up on ShoutWiki.
Cook879 was promoted from intern to a full customer support staff member on 26 September 2012. Welcome!
96 commits were made to our internal Subversion (SVN) source code repository.
19 bugs in our Bugzilla bug tracking system were marked as resolved during this period.
6 new MediaWiki extensions were introduced during this quarter:
On behalf of the staff team,
Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team
Hi,
This is the fortnightly update, detailing what we’ve done since the last fortnightly update, which was published on 15 September 2012 and what are our plans for the future.
Since our last fortnightly update, four bug tickets were closed.
Two wikis were imported to ShoutWiki:
Cook879 was promoted from intern to a full customer support staff member. Welcome!
We’re planning on releasing a quarterly report, featuring statistics about the past quarter (Q3) on Sunday, 30 September 2012, which is the last day of the third quarter.
Past targets which are yet to be completed are on our roadmap, but in addition to those, we’re planning some cool new stuff, such as:
As always, we would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions regarding these features, as well as what we could do to make ShoutWiki even better! If you have a great idea for a feature, a suggestion or just general feedback, let us know — either in the comments section of this blog post or via the contact form.
Please report any and all software bugs you may come across to on our BugZilla to help us in getting them fixed and improving ShoutWiki!
—-
On behalf of the ShoutWiki staff,
- Solar Dragon
ShoutWiki Customer Support Team
Hi,
This is the fortnightly update, detailing what we’ve done since the last fortnightly update, which was published on 1 September 2012 and what are our plans for the future.
Our developers have mostly been working on backend things during this period. Namely, we’ve set up an analytics site that uses the great and free, open source Piwik analytics software.
Piwik shows detailed information about the visitors of a ShoutWiki-hosted wiki, such as the user’s (ISP’s) country, name of their Internet service provider (ISP), a graph of latest visits to the site, most popular browsers and their versions, popular search keywords, a list of websites referring users to the wiki and lots more!
Right now our Piwik instance is accessible by staff only, but we’re looking for ways to make the data available to wiki administrators in the future, as we feel it could be a valuable tool in promoting the wiki as well as generally improving the site.
A security vulnerability (SQL injection point) was identified in the Phalanx anti-spam extension by Chris Steipp of the Wikimedia Foundation. The issue was quickly fixed by Jack Phoenix and the fix was committed upstream.
We also fixed a CSS issue with diff pages on the Dark Monobook theme, as well as an issue with the CreateWiki founder talk page message always showing up in English, even if a translation was available.
We’re trying to improve our internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) support to provide an even better ShoutWiki experience to our users who are not native or fluent speakers of the English language.
Some ShoutWiki extensions not previously translatable via translatewiki.net, such as Phalanx and SiteMetrics, can now be translated there.
Everything else that is not translatable via translatewiki.net can be translated via our Interface Messages Wiki. Please contact us to get translating privileges on the Interface Messages Wiki.
There has been some talk about designing and writing a custom skin for ShoutWiki. While no code has yet been written, this is certainly something we’re excited about. If and when such a skin would be written, it would most likely become the default skin of official ShoutWiki wikis, such as the English ShoutWiki Hub and its translations (for example, the Finnish ShoutWiki Hub, the French ShoutWiki Hub, etc.), but we want to emphasize this: it is not our intention to force a specific skin on ShoutWiki sites.
We, the ShoutWiki staff, believe in the freedom of opinion and the possibility to choose; the possibility to choose how you want your wiki to look like. That is precisely the reason why we’re offering a plethora of premium skins and we plan to add more premium skins in the future.
As always, we would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions regarding these features, as well as what we could do to make ShoutWiki even better! If you have a great idea for a feature, a suggestion or just general feedback, let us know — either in the comments section of this blog post or via the contact form.
We’ve upgraded our BugZilla to use the popular Vector skin as the default skin.
Please report any and all software bugs you may come across to on our BugZilla to help us in getting them fixed and improving ShoutWiki!
—-
On behalf of the ShoutWiki staff,
- Solar Dragon
ShoutWiki Customer Support Team
Hi,
We have decided to start posting more frequent updates to keep you informed about what we are currently working on to make ShoutWiki a better place.
A security release for the MediaWiki software was announced on 31 August, and we have updated all ShoutWiki wikis to this new version, 1.19.2.
As we mentioned in our previous blog post, we have an instant database dump feature. This is accessed by the stewards of a wiki via the wiki’s Special:Statistics page. The database dump format has now been changed from SQL to XML due to popular demand.
There was a bug with Special:MultiUpload which returned an error saying that the upload had not been done, even though the uploads were done. This was the reason this extension was taken offline for a brief amount of time. This has now been fixed and MultiUpload is now accessible again.
All requested wikis have now been reimported. All other wikis have been removed from the database, leaving their domains to be available. We still have the database dumps so if you still want a wiki to be reimported, it’s still not too late to ask. Let us know!
We’ve also deployed a new feature, the Babel extension, to all of our wikis. This extension provides the ability to indicate what languages you speak on user pages. You can see this extension in action on Jedimca0′s ShoutWiki Hub user page. The related bug ticket is bug #178.
We are almost finished on a new extension, SiteWideMessages. This feature will allow staff to send messages to all users on ShoutWiki giving you updates or any other news about ShoutWiki.
We are also working on an on-wiki problem reporting system called ProblemReports. This extension lets users submit problems on pages for other users and administrators of the wiki to see and attempt to fix. This feature is almost ready to be deployed, pending some CSS fixes.
A new minor feature we have implemented is that founders of a wiki from now on will get a talk page message explaining them the best things to do to get their wiki started as well as what to do if they need help with their wiki. This feature will affect only newly created wikis.
We also have a new staff tool, called RenameWiki, which allows renaming wikis (changing their subdomains).
And as always, we fixed plenty of minor bugs, such as:
Last year, we had our own IRC server which, unfortunately, had to be shut down. We are currently looking into bringing this online again so that users can make IRC channels for their wikis.
As always, we would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions regarding these features, as well as what we could do to make ShoutWiki even better! If you have a great idea for a feature, a suggestion or just general feedback, let us know — either in the comments section of this blog post or via the contact form.
Some of you may have noticed that BugZilla, our bug reporting website, was offline for a while. After the server maintenance on August 4th, we were able to bring BugZilla back online.
Please report any and all software bugs you may come across to on our BugZilla to help us in getting them fixed and improving ShoutWiki!
—-
On behalf of the ShoutWiki staff,
- Solar Dragon
ShoutWiki Customer Support Team
You have probably heard that ShoutWiki has been looking for new interns to join. We have now filled the first position.
Richard Cook (Cook879) is an experienced wiki user who is probably best known as a bureaucrat on Wikisimpsons, The Simpsons Wiki. He is good with wiki code and CSS and has access to bot tools, such as pywikipediabot and AutoWikiBrowser. Outside of ShoutWiki, Richard likes traditional pop music, and could happily listen to nothing else but Frank Sinatra. He also enjoys programming (currently in Python) and various TV shows.
There are still three intern positions remaining. Please read our careers page if you are interested in joining the ranks of ShoutWiki staff.
–
Solar Dragon
ShoutWiki Customer Support
Hello users.
ShoutWiki will be going offline on August 4th (UTC) for scheduled maintenance.
You may have noticed that ShoutWiki has been fairly slow recently. This is an issue affecting all users and is rather annoying. The maintenance is expected to get the site running significantly faster meaning less loading time and more editing time.
Edit by Lewis Cawte:
In more technical detail, for those who are wondering – our server host will be replacing our HTTPd which renders PHP files and makes them readable to the client (your web browser) thus giving you the output that you read, the ability to edit and so on. We are doing this because as of recent, it has been causing us a lot of problems and has been crashing rather frequently – which caused you to see pages such as “Could not find server at http://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page”. This does change will not affect data, as all wiki edits and contents are stored in a MySQL database which is a completely different piece of software.
We will be offline for 24 hours at the maximum. The maintenance might be finished before the 24 hours is over, which will mean ShoutWiki will be up sooner than then. If the maintenance is not complete within 24 hours, it will be stopped and ShoutWiki will be brought back online.
To clear things up, this is not a repeat of our previous downtimes. This downtime is planned, unlike previous downtimes, and is expected to improve ShoutWiki, rather than damage ShoutWiki.
—-
Thank you,
Solar Dragon – ShoutWiki Customer Support