Categories
Customer Support General Technical

Fortnightly update – 15 September 2012

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 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.

What are we currently working on?

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.

BugZilla

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

Categories
Customer Support General Technical

Fortnightly update – 1 September 2012

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 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.

What are we currently working on?

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:

  • the spam filter not displaying the word/URL/phrase that it blocked (the “Array” bug)
  • an issue with the Hope premium skin toolbox code
  • ShoutWiki’s global notices showing up in external search engine’s results
  • {{Special:Editcount/Some user}} displaying wrong results (global edit count instead of local edit count)
  • better support for right-to-left languages, such as Arabic (ar), in Eminence, Hope and Monaco skins
  • even better anti-spam tools
  • fixed references to nonexistent images on Monaco’s CSS files, in Internet Explorer specific styles
  • upload-by-URL option shown on Special:Upload for users who are not allowed to use the feature (bug #201)
  • and lots more!

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.

BugZilla

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