Categories
Customer Support General Technical

Site outage on 14 March 2011

Hi all,

as you’ve probably noticed by now, there was an outage on 14 March, caused by a malfunction in our host’s datacenter. As a result of this, our host had to restore the site from a backup — which was dated 7 March. This unfortunately means that every single page, wiki and user account created after 7 March has been lost and needs to be recreated.

We at ShoutWiki realize how frustrating this is. It was frustrating for us, too, when we noticed the situation and realized that it’s basically out of our control. We’ve been working on getting the site back up since yesterday (15 March), but right now MySQL daemon process is having issues, and as a result the wikis do not work.

Our tech team are working on getting the site back up as soon as possible. As a result of this unfortunate data loss, we will be looking into building a dump system that allows the steward (founder) of a wiki to generate a database dump on-request.

Apologizing for the behalf of everyone,

Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team

Categories
Customer Support General Technical

New feature: GlobalNotice

Hi everyone,

we’ve added a new feature called GlobalNotice to ShoutWiki today. While this functionality will be mostly used by staff, you may still notice it in action. We will use it to inform our users — that’s you! — about very important things, such as site-wide server maintenance. That’s not the only use case, though. Some example use cases include:

  • Asking all French users to help out with interface translation (in this case, the message would be visible to all French users and on all French wikis)
  • Requesting all admins to test out a new, administrator-only feature (in this case, the message would be visible to all users who are admins and only on the wikis where they have administrator privileges)

The code was written by myself and Misza of our technical team.

If you notice any bugs with this extension have requests regarding it, please open a bug ticket on our Bugzilla.

What are your thoughts on global messages from the staff to you? What kind of things would you like to see us use this tool, in addition to informing you about upcoming maintenance? We would love to hear your thoughts! Please share them either by commenting on this blog post or by leaving me a message on my talk page.

Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team