Categories
General

Monaco: coming soon to a ShoutWiki near you!

Hello there everyone,

We have been getting more and more questions about the Monaco skin lately, and we thought it would be best to write about it.

Firstly, I would like to answer the most frequently asked question, does ShoutWiki have Monaco? The answer to this question is: yes, ShoutWiki has its own Monaco. The Monaco skin is one of our premium (paid) features that are still in development. You can in fact try out Monaco and other premium skins on our Premium Examples wiki; do note that you need to be logged in to be able to access the preferences page.

We haven’t yet finalized the pricing (among a few other things) on premium features, but once we do, we’ll make all of them available. Don’t worry, our goals is to make all the features as affordable as possible, while still maintaining profitability.

For Monaco, however, given its popularity, we have recently begun thinking of something different. While there are still a few things that need to be ironed out before we can enable Monaco, as soon as it’s ready, we will enable the Monaco skin for free on all ShoutWiki wikis for the duration of the next six months. By that time the premium features will be fully developed and anyone who wants to use Monaco after the six months are up will be able to keep it for a modest fee.

We understand that you’d prefer Monaco completely free, but please understand that maintaining a wiki farm has its costs too. Thus, we will make sure that the pricing for Monaco is affordable for everyone, while still profiting enough from it to maintain ShoutWiki.

Jedimca0
Customer Support Team

Categories
General Technical

Upcoming changes in ShoutWiki

Today you shall receive an update straight from the Cave of the Tech Guys, i.e. the Tech Team behind ShoutWiki.

As you may be aware, Wikia, another wiki host, has recently developed a new look to their site, in the form of a skin called “Oasis”, a.k.a. “New Wikia Look”. Their business decision was also to make the skin not only the default one but effectively the only option. This has raised an uproar among Wikians and many communities started considering other hosting options, ShoutWiki among those. Consequently, we have been contacted by several leaders of those communities regarding the transfer of their wiki from Wikia to ShoutWiki.

Some have already moved and settled, many more are in the “import queue”, as we call it, yet some still lurking around, considering. This has greatly increased traffic to our sites, to the point where our primary webserver has crashed on a few occasions in the last few weeks. We admit honestly that we weren’t expecting such a rapid development of events and found ourselves unprepared. Until this problem is resolved, we unfortunately had to hold off on migration of some of the larger wikis.

Nevertheless, we consider this a challenge and opportunity to develop and are already working hard to resolve the problem. During November, you can expect the following:

  • New hardware will be acquired with much greater (and extensible) capacity to accommodate the increased traffic.
  • All wikis will be moved to the new server.
  • More of an internal issue, a new approach to software management will be employed to improve ShoutWiki’s agility in fixing bugs and implementing changes.
  • Imports of larger wikis will resume.

We strive to make the transition as transparent to end-users as possible. Nevertheless, some downtime is to be expected, during which all wikis will be locked in “read-only” mode and some may temporarily redirect to our “No such wiki” page. Then, once we’re done casting spells of Arcanum Serverum, everything should return to normal, and, hopefully, run faster. Details of this operation will be published once we have a schedule ready and a confident estimation of planned downtimes. We will also publish live updates on our Twitter profile.

Stay tuned and thank you for using ShoutWiki!

Misza, Chief Technology Officer