announcements – Page 2 – ShoutWiki Blog

We’re excited to announce a brand new ShoutWiki-exclusive feature, global user pages.

Global user pages are exactly what they sound like — user pages which appear across all ShoutWiki sites. This means you can easily maintain one user profile across all ShoutWiki wikis. Of course, you can overwrite your user page on certain sites, but until you, do your default profile will appear globally.

Using global user page is simple: create your user page on ShoutWiki Hub, then go to your global preferences, click the “Use global user page” checkbox and save the changes.

The code is very similar to our recently launched Shared Help Pages feature. Both features were written by Jack Phoenix, and both are based on the HelpPages extension by Kunal Mehta.

Scheduled Maintenance Window

As mentioned in our previous blog post, we’ve had to plan a maintenance window. Here are the details:

Announcement

When?

The window will be the entire of the weekend of the 5th/6th of October, however it could well be done early. Keep an eye out on our Facebook and Twitter, as well as this post which we’ll be updating throughout the weekend.

Why?

We’ve had excessive loads on the server, causing pages to not be returned to users. This has caused much upset, and we’ve had to disable various features to try and improve this in the short term. We’re now going to implementing our long term fixes.

What?

The maintenance window will mean sites go into read-only mode while we transfer the necessary data across servers, and configure the new server. We’re hoping that all sites will still be readable during this period, as we’ll be serving read-only data from the old server until the new one is configured and ready. When this is done, we’ll switch be switching the IP address assignments and you’ll then get data from the new server.

The server we are replacing is the server that stores our production MediaWiki code base, and stores the images. All wiki edits and pages are stored on a separate server which is unaffected and will run as usual, so you will not lose any of your hard work. Images will be backed up and transferred across.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment! Again, we thank you for your continued patience.

Updates

09:25 UTC Sat 5th – Maintenance has started. Image uploads and deletions have been turned off temporarily while the maintenance is completed. Wiki creation has also been suspended temporarily.
17:15 UTC Sun 13th – New server in production usage. Maintenance restrictions still in place while the new server is load tested. Thumbnails must be regenerated.
17:00 UTC Mon 14th – Issue with images with UTF-8 characters in their names resolved. These will now thumbnail correctly.
22:18 UTC Mon 14th – Subdomains now redirect to the the correct Main Page (fixes for non-English wikis or wikis with custom main page names.)
20:37 UTC Tue 15th – Wiki creation, image uploads and image deletion re-enabled, marking the end of the maintenance period.

On behalf of the ShoutWiki team,

— Lewis Cawte
Chief Technical Officer, ShoutWiki.