Recent growth pains

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