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Upcoming changes in ShoutWiki

Today you shall receive an update straight from the Cave of the Tech Guys, i.e. the Tech Team behind ShoutWiki.

As you may be aware, Wikia, another wiki host, has recently developed a new look to their site, in the form of a skin called “Oasis”, a.k.a. “New Wikia Look”. Their business decision was also to make the skin not only the default one but effectively the only option. This has raised an uproar among Wikians and many communities started considering other hosting options, ShoutWiki among those. Consequently, we have been contacted by several leaders of those communities regarding the transfer of their wiki from Wikia to ShoutWiki.

Some have already moved and settled, many more are in the “import queue”, as we call it, yet some still lurking around, considering. This has greatly increased traffic to our sites, to the point where our primary webserver has crashed on a few occasions in the last few weeks. We admit honestly that we weren’t expecting such a rapid development of events and found ourselves unprepared. Until this problem is resolved, we unfortunately had to hold off on migration of some of the larger wikis.

Nevertheless, we consider this a challenge and opportunity to develop and are already working hard to resolve the problem. During November, you can expect the following:

  • New hardware will be acquired with much greater (and extensible) capacity to accommodate the increased traffic.
  • All wikis will be moved to the new server.
  • More of an internal issue, a new approach to software management will be employed to improve ShoutWiki’s agility in fixing bugs and implementing changes.
  • Imports of larger wikis will resume.

We strive to make the transition as transparent to end-users as possible. Nevertheless, some downtime is to be expected, during which all wikis will be locked in “read-only” mode and some may temporarily redirect to our “No such wiki” page. Then, once we’re done casting spells of Arcanum Serverum, everything should return to normal, and, hopefully, run faster. Details of this operation will be published once we have a schedule ready and a confident estimation of planned downtimes. We will also publish live updates on our Twitter profile.

Stay tuned and thank you for using ShoutWiki!

Misza, Chief Technology Officer

By Jack Phoenix

I'm the head of ShoutWiki's Customer Support Team.

6 replies on “Upcoming changes in ShoutWiki”

Do those changes include the release of MediaWiki 1.16? I read somewhere you’re going to release it on November 1.

So, where would I go to request an import for my wiki? I’m willing to wait a while for things to get smoothed out first, but I just -really- don’t like the new Wikia look. DX

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