Categories
General Technical

New feature: instant database dumps

One of the features that both users and the staff alike have been wanting for a while has been instant database dumps. Now we’re thrilled to announce you that such a feature is finally available!

Where do I find this feature?

The instant database dump generation feature is available on the statistics page, Special:Statistics, of each wiki. However, due to the high abuse potential of this feature, we have implemented certain restrictions.

Only stewards may generate a database dump. In addition to that, only one database dump process may run at a time. So, if someone is running a database dump for a different wiki, you will need to wait for that process to complete before you can run yours. Finally, a dump may be generated only once a week.

The good thing is that the process is instant: once the dump process finishes, the dump will be available for download from our database dumps site! There will also be a link to the newest database dump on the wiki’s Special:Statistics page.

Technical details

The extension was written by Jack Phoenix, based on code written by Krzysztof Krzyżaniak.

The generated database dump is an SQL file, which has been compressed with gzip to save some space. The dump contains the following core MediaWiki tables and their data:

In addition to these core tables, certain extension tables will also be dumped if the relevant extensions are installed:

Bugs reports & feature requests

Bug reports and feature requests can be made on our Bugzilla. Pick “MediaWiki extensions” as the product and “DumpsOnDemand” as the component.

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

Update on 17 June 2012: We’ve changed the format of the database dumps from SQL to XML due to popular demand. Please let us know if you encounter any issues with this.

Categories
General Technical

Wiki Reimports

This is a copy of an email I sent out to all users that our database listed as people that had used Special:CreateWiki to found a wiki.

Dear ShoutWiki user,

I am writing to you because our database tells us that you have at some point in the past, created a wiki on ShoutWiki.com through the CreateWiki interface. As some of you may be aware, there have been a number of human created issues involving the ShoutWiki site over the period of the last few years. Firstly, I wish to apologize for those issues caused by my predecessors.

Secondly, as you may know, we’re in the process of getting the site back online. Currently there are around 20 databases on the server, instead of the 500 which the master database believes we have. According to my latest predecessor, we have a backup of all contents of the previous server, wail. The point of this e-mail is simple, I would like to know how many of you have wikis, and which of those that you would like to imported to the new server. I will warn you first however, that these contents may be out of date, there are contents of 300-odd wikis at archive.org that I can attempt to reimport if its significantly newer than the database import.

I also apologise for any of you recieving this e-mail multiple times, as this is taken directly from the CreateWiki creation log database, and I am rushing to get this important e-mail to you. We will be working on fine tuning these “mailing lists” in future, including removing anyone that requested a wiki to be deleted, as you may still be getting this e-mail currently.

Thank you for your support,
— Lewis Cawte
Chief Technical Officer, ShoutWiki

There is no time limit on these imports, however we are building a list, and these will be done in order of response and we cannot guarantee any imports will be complete, up to date or the quality of the import, however we will try our hardest to reduce repeated edits, stress and broken wikis again, as that’s the last thing we believe our users deserve.