Categories
General Technical

Downtime since June 17th

Hi everyone,

this is a blog post I wished I never had to write, but here we are again: the server’s down. It’s frustrating for everyone involved, and we’re doing our best to bring it back online, but it seems that it’s going to take a while.

I want to apologize on my own behalf as well as on the behalf of the whole staff team about our poor communication during this downtime. We realize that many of you would like to hear an official word about what’s going on when the site’s down and we were unable to provide that to you in a timely manner, which is not acceptable. Rest assured, we will definitely aim to improve the communication between the staff and the users once the site’s back up again.

What can I say? We believe in our mission and we have no intention of “closing down the shop”, despite what other sources may claim. But it doesn’t change the fact that we don’t have people 24/7 to work on this issue. Downtime is always a critical thing, but this seems to be something only a few select people from the tech team are able to fix. We want to bring the site back up as soon as possible without losing anyone’s important data. Needless to say that it’s not the fastest possible process in the world.

The techs are busy working on our new, more stable server, which will be located in the United States of America. This will replace the Polish server as our main webserver and bring the much-needed stability. This server was planned to be our backup and was close to being ready to be deployed for production when these new issues occurred, we are now changing that plan.

I want you to know that we haven’t given up — and we have no plans to do that!

Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team

UPDATE 1: To clarify a few points. This is NOT a repeat of last time. Last time the server itself crashed and needed to be restored from a backup, and said backup was corrupted. This time there was no need of a backup to be restored, and as such there shouldn’t be any data loss, although we cannot confirm this for sure. The main issue here is not recovering databases, but rather moving everything to the new server, which should prove to be much more reliable than our old one. While we’re working on moving everything over, I’ve managed to set up a hack to make MySQL behave properly and actually display the wikis, albeit in read-only mode. Please note that since this is a hack, you might see the same “unable to connect to socket” error as before — this is temporary and if you reload the page in around a minute you should see it. –Skizzerz

Categories
General Technical

New feature: WikiForum — forum for your wiki!

Back in 2010, we were analyzing the major problems wikis were experiencing, and one problem common to many wikis was communication (or the lack of it). MediaWiki, while it is awesome, lacks in that department. Discussion (talk) pages and user talk pages exist, but they are not very ideal for multiple reasons, of which the most notable is that discussions can easily fragment and become difficult to follow. Many wikis have historically used and still use the DPLforum extension, but we felt that it was more of a stopgap solution than a proper solution.

We drafted up a list of things that the forum extension should have, and we started looking whether any existing extension matches these specs. While we eventually concluded that there is no existing extension that matches our requirements, Michael Chlebek’s WikiForum extension came close and we decided to use it as a base. We did many fixes and changes into Michael’s code since he released version 1.2 of WikiForum in December 2010 and finally we are proud to announce it to you, ShoutWiki users!

The WikiForum extension is highly flexible:

  • internationalization — there are 85 internationalization messages currently
  • configuration — certain forum settings can be changed on-wiki via system messages
  • look — the forum is customizable via CSS to a great degree

You can read more about WikiForum’s features on the WikiForum help page on ShoutWiki Hub.

Because ShoutWiki is an open company, we’ve released the source code of our version of the WikiForum extension on the official MediaWiki Subversion (SVN) repository at svn.wikimedia.org.

If you notice any bugs with WikiForum, be sure to report them either on ShoutWiki’s Bugzilla or on the official MediaWiki Bugzilla.

Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team

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