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General Technical

Wiki Reimports

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 the CreateWiki interface. As some of you may be aware, there have been a number of human created issues involving the ShoutWiki site over the period of the last few years. Firstly, I wish to apologize for those issues caused by my predecessors.

Secondly, as you may know, we’re in the process of getting the site back online. Currently there are around 20 databases on the server, instead of the 500 which the master database believes we have. According to my latest predecessor, we have a backup of all contents of the previous server, wail. The point of this e-mail is simple, I would like to know how many of you have wikis, and which of those that you would like to imported to the new server. I will warn you first however, that these contents may be out of date, there are contents of 300-odd wikis at archive.org that I can attempt to reimport if its significantly newer than the database import.

I also apologise for any of you recieving this e-mail multiple times, as this is taken directly from the CreateWiki creation log database, and I am rushing to get this important e-mail to you. We will be working on fine tuning these “mailing lists” in future, including removing anyone that requested a wiki to be deleted, as you may still be getting this e-mail currently.

Thank you for your support,
— Lewis Cawte
Chief Technical Officer, ShoutWiki

There is no time limit on these imports, however we are building a list, and these will be done in order of response and we cannot guarantee any imports will be complete, up to date or the quality of the import, however we will try our hardest to reduce repeated edits, stress and broken wikis again, as that’s the last thing we believe our users deserve.

By Lewis Cawte

Lewis is ShoutWiki's technical director, responsible for keeping the site working. He's also responsible for ShoutWiki's finances... for now.

4 replies on “Wiki Reimports”

Fortunately, hope springs eternal…

Your email was received, although as it was lacking linebreaks and a proper return address, it was almost thrown out.

I had a small private wiki back then. Do you plan to restore those too? What are the conditions? Will private wikis still be supported? Have you finally decided on a business model (ad-supported, paying, etc)?

If you would be so kind as to specify a form of private contact/request system, I’ll gladly go on with the details.

Hi Scarbrow,

Firstly, the email was originally written with line breaks, however for some reason, the script did not listen to them. As for a return address, thats the from address, and its default email client behaviour to reply to the from address if no Reply-to is set, so I don’t see why it is necessary.

As for private wikis, yes, of course we plan to reimport them as well. Business model, there was one decided roughly before and that will be what we’re sticking with for a while. We’ll have free, ad-supported wikis with optional premium features that you can pay for additionally, and we’ll open those features up as soon as we have a system in place to handle these.

If you would like your wiki imported, please email the domain name (web address) as a reply to the email you received.

— Lewis Cawte
Chief Technical Officer, ShoutWiki.

A question: do you plan to publicly or privately state when reimports have finished? Do you plan to tell us when all of them are completed, or will it be notified to wiki stewards on a case-by-case basis? I’m asking because I’ve found an old XML dump of my wiki, and maybe I could re-create mi wiki again from it, but I don’t want to disrupt the reimport process if it is running

Hi Scarbrow,

These will be emailed out, due to the fact that we didn’t set a date on when the replies have to sent in by, so we’ll be sending out emails one-to-one regarding this.

— Lewis Cawte
Chief Technical Officer, ShoutWiki.

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