Categories
Customer Support General Technical

Continued efforts

Dear users,

I am writing to inform you of our continued efforts to restore and stabilise the site and all wikis hosted on ShoutWiki.com. Over the course of this weekend, new staff members have been appointed roles on the ShoutWiki.com staff team, to replace those who have more recently resigned. We hope that with this new ‘young blood’ on the team, we will be able to start making ShoutWiki the best it can possibly be.

What are we doing? Currently, we are working on restoring previous systems that we’re once part of “community.shoutwiki.com”, the Invision Power Board site. These systems include this blog, support ticketing, bug tracking and a feature that we will re-integrate at a later date after discussions with the relevant staff members has taken place, the paid features store. As well as this, the technical staff are working on upgrading the wikis to MediaWiki version 1.19.0, the current stable release of the MediaWiki software that powers our wikis, and we are improving transparency with the launch of our new configuration portal, located at http://www.shoutwiki.com/conf.

How can you support ShoutWiki? Keep being patient, we’re glad that we’ve had so many patient users, and we can assure you that a little bit longer, and we will have the site stabilised. As well as this, we’d love your feedback on features of the site as soon as we’re fully back online.
If there is something that particularly annoys you, do not hesitate to contact us immediately! Our goal is to make ShoutWiki the best it can be for you, and thus we want to squish those annoying bugs. We hope to publish a plan of how the money we initially receive will be spent soon, and I can personally promise you that it will be sent on the site, and improving it through new servers and improving our current servers. Just like before, none of our staff will be paid until we can assure ourselves and to you that the server will not die after months of hard work again.

As always, thank you for your continued patience,

Lewis Cawte
Head of the Technical Team, Customer Support Staff at ShoutWiki.com

Categories
Customer Support General Technical

Meet the new ShoutWiki staff members!

Earlier in April I promised changes in various areas of the site, including people. Now the time for these changes has come. It is my pleasure to announce the newest additions to the ShoutWiki staff — all of whom have ties to Britain!

Callum Walmsley (Solar Dragon) joins the Customer Support Team with years of wiki experience at Wikisimpsons, the biggest Simpsons wiki on the Internet. He is comfortable with CSS, advanced wikitext tricks and other “power user” tools, such as pywikipediabot and AutoWikiBrowser. Outside ShoutWiki, Callum likes watching NCIS, Stargate and CSI, and listening to rock music.

Lewis Cawte (Lcawte) basically is our new technical team. He is responsible for making sure that things like our bug tracker or this very site — the ShoutWiki blog — are running smoothly, but he is also interested in learning and more and more about the MediaWiki software. In addition to expanding his knowledge about MediaWiki, programming and server administration, Lewis enjoys working code, as well as a wide variety of TV shows from Stargate SG1 to Criminal Minds and NCIS. When he’s not found around the MediaWiki community, he is hiking or camping somewhere in the outdoors of Sussex, UK.

Nicolas M. (Nicmavr) is an avid Halo fan, best known for his work on Halopedia, the Halo wiki. On ShoutWiki, Nic will provide general support as a member of the Customer Support Team. He is also interested in aviation.

Each staff member has a @shoutwiki.com e-mail account, the username being their wiki username (so for example, Solar Dragon’s email account is solardragon), if you need to contact them privately.

Let’s give them a warm welcome!

On behalf of the ShoutWiki staff,
Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team