Category: General

Hello again.

Just a quick update for all you faithful readers. The server upgrade is now over, after a successful all-day operation. In the final stage we stumbled upon a few bugs we didn’t anticipate, but soon after all problems were resolved. Should you discover any more problems (e.g. things that stopped working after Friday), don’t hesitate to report them either through [[Special:Contact]] on your wiki, or using our Bugzilla.

Our first impression (and hopefully yours as well) is that the new server works much faster than the previous one and should be able to accommodate all the new wikis that are waiting in queue. Speaking of which, we’d like to update you on our plans for the immediate future:

• Operationally, wiki imports from Wikia will resume, most likely next week, roughly in order in which the requests were reported.
• Development will now focus on issues related to upgrading our software to MediaWiki 1.16, which something a lot of our users anticipate.
• On the way, as time permits we would like to work on enabling new features that were requested, such as the OggHandler and SemanticMediaWiki extensions.

That’s it for today – stay tuned for more updates.

Misza, Chief Technical Officer

Like we announced not long ago, ShoutWiki is planning a major server upgrade to address ongoing performance issues that stem from many new wikis moving in from Wikia. At this point we can announce a pretty confident timeline of events.

The whole operation will take place on Friday, 12th of November, starting in the morning (UTC time) and will take most of the day:

• First, to ensure database consistency, all wikis will be set to read-only mode, i.e. no edits and other operations will be possible (except reading) and will remain in this state for the duration of the day.
• Wikis will begin copying to the new server.
• Once the process is sufficiently advanced, DNS records will be updated to point to the new server. Wikis which have not been copied until this point will temporarily show the “No such wiki” page. Validation of destination server begins (errors, bugs, missing dependencies).
• Once copying is complete, all wikis are in place, a GO/NO-GO decision will be made. If it’s, hopefully, a “GO”, wikis will be unlocked for editing. Otherwise, we would revert DNS records to the old server.

While the operation is ongoing, you may expect live updates both on our #shoutwiki IRC channel as well as ShoutWiki Twitter status.

Misza, Chief Technology Officer