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Customer Support General

Spring Cleaning: The Staff List

As summer is very quickly approaching, we figured we’d squeeze in one last bit of spring cleaning.

Our staff list is a bit overdue on a clean. We’ve been a bit slow to remove those of our team that have decided to move on from ShoutWiki, for various reasons.

“Out with the old…”

We’ve said goodbye to Lynton, Solar Dragon, Pinky and Jedimca0 all of whom gave up ShoutWiki due to other personal commitments a number of years ago.

Unfortunately, Richard Cook (Cook879) has chosen to resign due for personal reasons. Richard has been our face to the community for a long time and his presence will be hugely missed by everyone. You may have noticed Richard reduce his activity in February, and has been working with us to handover since then. Today we finalised the last of this, and we’re announcing this change.

We would like to thank all of these amazing individuals for the time and effort they have put into ShoutWiki.

“In with the new.”

We’d like to introduce you to the newest member of our team – Samantha Nguyen. Samantha will be filling a small part of the hole left by Richard. You’ll primarily see Samantha answering tickets and dealing with spam as part of our Community Support team, however you may also notice her on Phabricator dealing with design and user interface issues, or editing on Brickipedia.

Samantha is based in the US and helps us respond in more timezones.

 

Please hang with us as we get Samantha up to speed with the huge challenge that is supporting our amazing communities.

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Support and Sessions

As we enter Spring, we want to provide a quick update on a few rather important recent changes.

Ever since we updated to MediaWiki 1.28 in December, users have been reporting session and cookie issues, caused by a change in MediaWiki core relating to authentication and session storage. The appropriate tasks are filed in Phabricator as T144 and T154. We’ve changed the backend storage for sessions at ShoutWiki and we are now confident in saying we have fixed these issues.

Anyone still experiencing problems is advised to clear any cookie and session data for ShoutWiki in their browsers. We would like to remind users that while most ShoutWiki sites are available over HTTPS, that HTTPS is not supported for wikis, and there are a number of issues with the setup. The current HTTPS set up was for testing has not yet been disabled. If you have been using HTTPS, please cease to do so, and ensure you clear all Strict Transport Security (STS) headers and cache for ShoutWiki from your browser.

You should notice any session issues clearing up after following these steps have been completed. Anyone still having session issues is encouraged to provide details on the linked tasks.

The second item we would like to comment on is our support infrastructure. We’re currently experiencing issues with the contact form (Special:Contact) and how Google handles emails sent through it, affecting the amount of emails making it into the support ticketing system.

Due to changes in Google’s anti-phishing detection, we are currently having to manually force many support tickets through into the system. You should receive an automated message when this has been done, however, you may experience delays due to this.

It is strongly advised that users email us directly at support @ shoutwiki.com to ensure a ticket is opened as soon as possible. If you have not received an automated message from the system, your ticket has not been processed. Please do not create a Hub forum as we will not be changing any wiki settings from Forum posts.

We understand that this is in no way ideal, and we are currently working on trying to solve this issue. Thank you for your cooperation!