Technical

1.20 MediaWiki Upgrade

Posted by on 21 November 2012 at 3:50 pm

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 [...]

Fortnightly update – 29 September 2012

Posted by on 29 September 2012 at 12:55 pm

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. Recent updates Since our last fortnightly update, four bug tickets were closed. Two wikis were imported to ShoutWiki: Darren Shan Wiki — an English-language wiki [...]

Fortnightly update – 15 September 2012

Posted by on 15 September 2012 at 2:38 pm

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. Recent updates Our developers have mostly been working on backend things during this period. Namely, we’ve set up an analytics site that uses the great [...]

Fortnightly update – 1 September 2012

Posted by on 1 September 2012 at 5:28 am

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. Recent updates 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 [...]

Scheduled server maintenance on August 4th

Posted by on 28 July 2012 at 12:22 pm

Hello users. ShoutWiki will be going offline on August 4th (UTC) for scheduled maintenance. Why are we doing this? 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 [...]

Easier programmatical access to ShoutWiki wikis’ meta-data

Posted by on 6 July 2012 at 10:30 am

Have you ever wondered just how many wikis ShoutWiki hosts? I bet you have, and so have we at the staff team at times. Finding that out has been easy, thanks to the {{NUMBEROFWIKIS}} magic word. But what if you have wanted to know how many of those wikis are French, for example? Or how [...]

New feature: instant database dumps

Posted by on 6 June 2012 at 8:50 am

One of the features that both users and the staff alike have been wanting for a while has been instant database dumps. Now we’re thrilled to announce you that such a feature is finally available! Where do I find this feature? The instant database dump generation feature is available on the statistics page, Special:Statistics, of [...]

Wiki Reimports

Posted by on 22 May 2012 at 3:16 pm

This is a copy of an email I sent out to all users that our database listed as people that had used Special:CreateWiki to found a wiki. Dear ShoutWiki user, I am writing to you because our database tells us that you have at some point in the past, created a wiki on ShoutWiki.com through [...]

Continued efforts

Posted by on 8 May 2012 at 2:30 pm

Dear users, I am writing to inform you of our continued efforts to restore and stabilise the site and all wikis hosted on ShoutWiki.com. Over the course of this weekend, new staff members have been appointed roles on the ShoutWiki.com staff team, to replace those who have more recently resigned. We hope that with this [...]

Meet the new ShoutWiki staff members!

Posted by on 8 May 2012 at 2:30 pm

Earlier in April I promised changes in various areas of the site, including people. Now the time for these changes has come. It is my pleasure to announce the newest additions to the ShoutWiki staff — all of whom have ties to Britain! Callum Walmsley (Solar Dragon) joins the Customer Support Team with years of [...]