WikiIndex:Admin Notes

October 2010 Upgrade Thoughts

Upgrade

I'd be happy to try to upgrade this MediaWiki and/or add extensions that we might need, but not sure what's needed and also not sure what customizations, etc. we've had that we'd have to keep in mind. Any thoughts? Raymond King | talk

• Oh, and yes, I know about the favicon and will fix as soon as possible ...

One common extension we don't have is Extension:Renameuser, which allows bureaucrats the ability to change the name of an account. Elassint, 10 14 2010

Also, how about Semantic MediaWiki

• Semantic Wiki (allows if statements which can help make better infoboxes and other stuff too)

Making WikiIndex a semantic wiki with the extensions. - I like this, ~~ MarkDilley

I would like to consider if we would like to move to a semantic MediaWiki - I am asking now if all that is, is the extension. This is an estimate I got from Yaron Koren of WikiWorks.com:

Update of existing code: .5 hour

Updating site copy: 2 hours

Installing SMW and related extensions: 1 hour

Setting up wiki for SMW, including re-arranging category structure: 5 hours

What do folks think? ~~ MarkDilley

• CITE (allows easy creation of references)

I almost forgot about the cite extension, that's practically mandatory, and semantic would not be a bad idea either. Elassint, 10 16 2010

Nice but not mandatory in terms of DocumentingWikis as different than EmergentWikis. Best, MarkDilley

So when do you think a possible upgrade might happen? Elassint, 10 17 2010

Can you think of anything else that we've customized or added that we should be careful of when we upgrade? If not, then I'm ready to move forward with it. Could you help me identify and ask any other admins? Raymond King | talk

When John Stanton retired, I took notes about what files needed to be saved during an upgrade, Raymond King - please talk with me before doing an upgrade. Thanks, MarkDilley

• The idea of installing Semantic MediaWiki greatly appeals to my inner geek, but I can't think of any specific uses for it right now. Then again, with the shiny new toy in front of me, that might change. Felix Pleşoianu | talk 03:37, 27 October 2010 (PDT)
• Are there any downsides to installing SMW, apart from the workload? Felix Pleşoianu | talk 03:37, 27 October 2010 (PDT)

Logo

Crazy thought / change the logo? Here's a concept, comments welcome Raymond King | talk

I prefer our current logo, it fits in well with the style of the site and the monobook skin. Elassint, 10 21 2010

Understood; I was thinking that we'd also move from monobook to vector when we did the upgrade. Example at ICANNWiki.com Raymond King | talk

I don't see a need to rebrand right now, even under vector. I must admit to being biased to the current logo though :-) ~~ MarkDilley p.s. look at past logo ideas too.

I find the logo great, but it could be even greater :-) though a need for a rebrand seems not to be. But think also about the favicon which is currently empty. Please let me have a further look on it. --Wolf | talk 00:07, 27 October 2010 (PDT)
@Raymond, was it your design?

Dreamhost Disaster

Our former hoster, Dreamhost, had a server failure about noon on Saturday, May 5th that caused 23 of our wikis and blogs to go down including WikiIndex.org and RecentChanges.info. They brought up a replacement server on Sunday the 6th but were unable to restore our sites from either the failed server or the server backups and that condition remains today. Luckily the databases for the sites were not affected because they were on a separate server and we were able to pull the very latest data out of the database.

We had already made the decision to move from Dreamhost to 1and1 before this failure occurred because of the many outages and very bad performance of Dreamhost, so we decided to rebuild all of the sites on 1and1. Some of our sites are quite large and uploading just the images can take over a day, so restoring the sites is really a pain. Dreamhost and 1and1 are on different versions of the MySQL database and restoration without corrupting the data proved a bit daunting for a while until we found the magic bullet. Most of our wikis are now operational including WikiIndex but several sites are still awaiting name transfers and some wikis have yet to be restored.

There are almost always losses when this kind of thing happens and for WikiIndex we lost images that were entered between 15 Dec 2006 and 5 May 2007. Most of these are logos and they can be recovered as we get the chance. The image loss was the result of poor judgment on my part because I had elected to backup the image directories on the server that failed because of their size.

If you run across a missing image just re-upload it under the same name and all should be ok. If you notice any configuration or extension issues just let me know and I'll track them down.

Sorry for any inconvenience this outage may have caused.

John 22:09, 15 May 2007 (EDT)

You will be ok wit 1and1, i used em for eight years, never had downtime. Just other things to watch for now, Good Luck wit 1and1.... Written by a 1and1 eight year ignored client

Dreamhost

We are going to have to find a more reliable hoster than Dreamhost. The outages over the last two weeks are just unacceptable! Let us know if you have a recommendations for a MediaWiki friendly hoster. We are going to change within the next two weeks. John 12:06, 26 February 2007 (PST)

System Outage 2/22/2007 - 2/23/2007

Sorry about the system outage over the last two days, Dreamhost upgraded PHP 5 to a new version and it took down all of our wikis that were not on MW version 1.9.X. I was force to upgrade all of our wikis to 1.9.2 and still have some to go. Not a happy camper!

Beware of PHP 5.2.1 upgrades and MW versions below 1.9.x!

John 19:29, 23 February 2007 (PST)

Spam Control Policy

I've put up a proposed Spam Control Policy page to try and get our spam fighting coordinated and everyone on the same page. Please check it out and revise, extend and discuss as you wish. The local spam blacklist is a bit out of control and may be defeating it's own purpose. I propose deleting the content of that page and starting over using the new policy.
John 14:44, 18 February 2007 (PST)

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Page Location Problems

Since the Move we have been experiencing some problems with specific pages generating errors. The problem was traced to the code that allows the use of so called "pretty URLs" (URLs without the /index.php part). The offending code has been removed and all is well. The downside is that you may have to re-bookmark specific pages. The issues with this code are complex and we will continue to use the ugly URLs until we are sure we have code that addresses all the issues.
John 16:28, 8 February 2007 (PST)
(Partial workaround implemented 15feb07.)

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