Messages

It is of little issue to transfer the ownership to another registrar, and GoDaddy is fairly evil, therefore, neither one of us will use them.

That's fine, and you're quite within your rights to boycott services you don't agree with. However the fact remains that these domains no longer point anywhere, which is presumably reducing WiKirby's traffic...

If someone could just PM me to confirm that they'll accept ownership and give details for where they want it transferred to, I'll do it.

Hi all, update on the current status:

I've cancelled Josh's original hosting for WiKirby (with TMD Hosting). I have a full compressed zipped backup of the site from before it went down, which includes all files and the database itself, in case anything is needed (it's in my Dropbox, please PM me for the link if you'd like it). The filesize is around 600 MB.

I contacted Dillion and RingtailedFox by PM offering to transfer ownership of the .COM, .NET and .ORG domain names. All three of these are currently registered via Godaddy. They both gave me the same response; that neither of them uses GoDaddy or has an account. Someone will need to take responsibility for these; to give you an idea of the renewal costs, I just renewed two of them for GBP 22.00

If whoever is going to own these domain names could sign up for a (free) GoDaddy account, I'd be happy to transfer ownership. While it would be possible to transfer to another registrar, this seems to be a lenthy process and sounds anything but straightforward. In light of the fact that these domain names no longer point to a working site, I think it'd be best for WiKirby's sake to get them transferred and redirected ASAP (ideally I'd suggest you use the .COM as primary, to keep the current SEO status and avoid having to start again from zero!)

[I'm sorry]

Look, I can understand how you guys must be feeling. You've made that very clear. Angry. Betrayed. Frustrated. Neglected. Disappointed. Resentful. And you have every right to feel that way. I won't make any excuses here, so please don't take any of the elaboration below as such. I plan to make a separate post later on (when I'm in a better frame of mind EDIT: posted here) because I feel that the community deserves to know the personal reasons behind what has happened over the previous 2.5 years.

And before I go on, to address the most important point here; yes of course I'll transfer the domain ownership and whatever else you guys may need from what I have. I've already contacted Dillion directly about that.



Maybe this was never as clear to anyone as I'd believed, but it was certainly 100% clear to Josh (Axiomist) even from the point when WiKirby was nothing but a twinkle in his eye; I was never going to have any kind of active presence as an editor on the wiki itself. From day one, my role was purely one of technical support and consultancy, on the basis that I considered Josh a good friend and wanted to help his project succeed in the long term. He understood that I had no interest in Kirby games, having never layed them, and would never be in a position to patrol edits or get involved in the community as such. Josh himself started from a similar position, although he cultivated an interest in the series and began to play and learn the games. The reason Josh founded WiKirby wasn't due to a passion for the games themselves. What he saw was a lack of any open, independant wiki for this series of games, and he wanted to create a place where that community could take root and grow.

Perhaps this is crass, but I'll say it anyway. When Josh died, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly holding the "keys" to WiKirby. I thought deeply about what to do; but of course there was only one conclusion. Despite any obstacles, the wiki must stay online, and I was the only one there to take on the burden. Since that moment I've sunk at least $1500 of my own money into the site, paying the server bills and domain renewals, as well as large chunks of my time in previous years working on the server-side. I bought two new domains to try and combat the fact that we couldn't get control of the original .info domain name, redirecting them all to .com way in advance of the original domain expiring, to ensure there was no negative impact in terms of search engine referrals. I ensured that there was a full and comprehensive backup in placed in case we ever needed disaster recovery, and have maintained the infrastructure supporting that until today.

Yes, there were suggestions that others might consider taking over running WiKirby (either one or two, I don't recall exactly), and yes, I did reject tese offers at the time. I won't go into my reasons behind that, as to do so would require me to speak on Josh's behalf. You can ask me about that privately if you want, but please show some discretion. Suffice it to say, had the current setup been proposed to me, I would have gladly handed everything over without any reservations.

Josh and I had shared an uncertainty over how extensive and long-lasting a community a Kirby wiki could expect to attract. The nature of the games, IMO, is such that they appeal to younger plaers, and have less of a series continuity or story-based pull than other Nintendo franchises. That could make for a tough demographic out of which to build a strong, lasting community of wiki editors. After Josh was gone, I have to admit to having taken a somewhat fatalistic view of what I perceived as a lack of strong growth and an absence of regular, good-quality editors who kept up their activity. I had hoped that things would snowball by themselves, and my position solely as a custodian and platform-facilitator would be sufficient. But as time went on, that seemed not to be the case, and it became clear to me that in losing its community leader, a key component of Wikirby was now missing.

At this point I have to say, Vellidragon you (aside from me) are the only other reason that WiKirby still exists. I've expressed this to you via email before, but let me say publicly that your tenacity and enthusiasm as WiKirby's only day-to-day admin has been essential, and is truly appreciated. I know the position all too well, having served a short yet exhausing six-month stint as Zelda Wiki's only active staff member. Fortunately, others stepped in before I was completely overwhelmed and could no longer keep my head above water. So I, too, have felt the resentment towards and absentee owner; I can understand the difficulties of such a relationship from both sides.



So there you have my actions and intentions from my point of view. Make of that what you will, but as I said at the start there are no excuses contained there, and none should be inferred from what I wrote. Perhaps I wasn't the best person to take over running wiKirby in the long term, but at the critical point I was the ONLY person who could do so. I did all I could to keep WiKirby alive; it's alive today, so I feel that in that small way (at least) I succeeded. I hope Josh would understand.

All that remains for me to say is: I'm sorry. I apologies for my shortcomings and the ways in which I failed the community though what I wasn't able to offer. I hope, given time, that some of you can forgive me.

Hi all, not read all of the posts above yet; I've only just become aware today. Don't know about the database errors, because right now the wiki is inaccessible since the domain name expired a few days ago as well! I've paid the renewal now, just waiting for it to come back up. I'm sorry to everyone about that. I dropped the ball. Assumed autorenewal would take care of it, but had forgotten to update my account with my new card details. D'oh!!

I'll be working hard to ensure that WiKirby is back online and error-free ASAP. Unfortunately people had been contacting me using my Hotmail email address, which I rerely/never use. I had given Vellidragon and a few others my personal address (which I check regularly) and urged them to contact me there in case of any issues. To be fair, Velli did do this on the 9th of August, but the email ended up in my spam folder! (apparently you've changed email accounts since we last spoke  )

Anyway, regardless of problems getting in touch with me on this occasion, please rest assured that I'm neither uncontactable nor "gone". Nor am I apathetic to WiKirby's survival. I have no plans to discontinue my financial commitment to the project and would never knowingly leave errors unfixed. I still maintain full daily backups of the entire database and filesystem (although obviously I can't store every day's backup indefinitely due to disk space limitations). I currently have the following backups available should any recovery/rollback become necessary:

wikirby_backup_2012-08-18.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2012-09-18.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2012-10-18.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2012-11-18.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2012-12-18.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-01-12.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-04-02.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-05-01.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-06-01.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-07-01.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-07-02.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-08-02.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-08-13.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-08-15.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-08-16.tar.gz
wikirby_backup_2013-08-17.tar.gz

I'll keep you all updated here with any progress/change.

I'm deeply shocked and saddened to hear Josh is gone so suddenly; I can still hardly take it in. Until today, I'd never expected I could feel such a sense of loss for someone I knew only online. I've long considered Josh a true friend, having known him since he joined Zelda Wiki way back three years ago. We'd worked closely together, particularly since the launch of the wiki project which he was so proud of, and often had lengthy Skype conversations. I'll greatly miss his enthusiasm, ingenuity, and sharp wit and humour. I think it's fair to say that many of us, and indeed NIWA itself, wouldn't be where they are today without his drive and passion.

I will personally ensure that WiKirby stays online and is allowed to continue growing and flourishing; its success stands as a tribute to a truly great and inspirational man.

I can't find a way to say this which doesn't sound negative, and I'll probably end up starting a disagreement, but anyway...

Personally, I don't see this as a productive venture. In what way is the content planned to go beyond what Mario Wiki already offers? Surely they already have extensive info on the games, characters etc. So I don't really see the benefits that this new wiki will offer, just that it will waste time and resources establishing a new project to duplicate existing information. It feels somewhat impulsive and poorly thought out to me. 

Another example of something I think this team could help out with; Mario Wiki's "Rewrite Requested" category. Hundreds of articles which need rewriting to conform with the wiki's quality standards. 

...any help she wants from NIWA, or anything we can do for her to help them out

how's that for timing?

For my part, I'm glad to see this going ahead, and I hope it turns out to be helpful and productive.

One observation I'd make though; the project page seems to set the team's aim mainly as reducing the number of stubs. I feel like that's not really an ideal area for such a team to focus on. In my experience, the growth of stubs into full articles is normally a gradual and incremental process, not a quick blitz attack. But more than that, de-stubbing usually requires extensive subject knowledge. These articles are stubs for a reason; because the majority of the experiences editors at a given wiki don't know enough about the subject to expand on them. That being the case, I don't see how a generalist team like this (whose primary strengths are enthusiasm/hard work and skill with wikicode) can hope to have better subject-specific knowledge than the wikis regular contributors?

It just seems to me like there could be more practical (but maybe less obvious) goals to set. For example, Zelda Wiki has an entire category of Articles needing attention, with subsections like reorganization, neutrality issues and addition of sources. These are the kind of things which can be done with even minimal knowledge of the subject.

Another example which comes to mind is the case of DKWiki; after their move from Wikia, I noticed a lot of their pages still link back to Wikia help guides, or use interwiki link prefixes which no longer work. Again, that's the kind of laborious cleanup which this team could excel at.

I don't want to come off as negative at all, just hoping to give you guys some food for thought on where you could best focus your efforts 

Then we should just let this rest until she approaches us?

Personally, I think that's best. Since Amy's the webmaster and project leader, it would be difficult to make much progress towards NIWA membership without her involvement. I think the wiki will just have to "subsist" until she comes back, with whatever help we can give it (like affiliation, as Ax mentioned)

Sure splitting them is the way to go, but look at what great ideas we came up with! So basically we shouldn't stem good discussion, just move it over

Yes. Shame most of us got our forum powers removed, so only a few of us can do that anymore 

I blame HavocReaper48; damn him! Grrr (I did try to get things back on track, but to no avail).

It's an interesting offer, and sounds like a much more scalable solution in future than much of our members' present hosting. For example, Porplemontage currently is hosting Mario Wiki, Smash Wiki, Pikipedia, Donkey Kong Wiki and Halopedia on a single box (or possibly a cluster). Others such as WiKirby and Lylat Wiki pay for standard shared hosting, while Zelda Wiki and Metroid Wiki remain on the servers of the sites from which they formed (Zelda Universe and ZeldaInformer respectively).

While I'd imagine most current NIWA members are happy with their current hosting situation, our ever growing list of affiliates may well include interested parties. Out of interest, would you be amenable to payment in advance on a month-by-month basis (rather than a commitment for any fixed period)?

My slight concern is that with the initial price tag you've pitched at, your offer is likely to appeal mainly to established independent sites, however the aspect of having no server-side control would be somewhat of a step down from their current level of access. This managed setup would be more appealing to those already operating within such environments, such as Wikia leavers, however they're not accustomed to paying for hosting at all (as already mentioned above).

Also I don't like dealing with username migration issues (ie: people impersonating an imported user, and dealing with username confirmations and whatnot) when it comes to wikis migrating from a WikiFarm I'd strongly prefer to develop an extension that would allow the imported usernames to be reserved and have a special interface to allow those users from the old wiki to confirm their identity automatically without any question as to if they stole the nick or not. That would of course take development time (as would potentially whatever it takes to import images), which I CAN do while hosting other wiki, but wasting time on it before doing any hosting, when it's still questionable as to whether or not the extension will ever be used is a little harder to justify.

Just for information, such a solution has already been devised and used successfully by the recently migrated Wowpedia. Having used the MediaWikiDumper PERL scripts to import the usernames, they allowed users to reclaim their accounts by creating a User Migration Extension.

Speaking for WiKirby, I'm open to your suggested improvement. Adam and I never looked at url mods before WiKirby, and boy was there a lot of reading to do for it. Basically we just settled for what we had. Let me know how to proceed and thanks for bringing it  up!

Ok, doing a double check over WiKirby. Pretty urls look to be configured fine. As for the http://wikirby.info/~wikirbyi/index.php?title=Kirby_Wiki&action=edit urls, it appears that http://wikirby.info/index.php?title=Kirby_Wiki&action=edit works fine...

It looks like to fix the WiKirby long urls all you need to do is tweak $wgScriptPath to not include the /~wikirbyi.

Thanks for the help! I had some issues when we were first setting up, and the only way I could successfully install MediaWiki was using /~wikirbyi in the path. To be honest, I'd forgotten to ever go back and look into it again, since the normal URLs were working. 

Yeah, I noticed that too. Here's how I look at it; they're all Wikia wikis at the moment. So who are we to say that they have to have the same definition on "independence" as we have? For us, it meets complete autonomy and full control. For Wikia leavers, maybe it just needs to mean "no longer ruled by Wikia"? Wikkii may be as far as they go, or it may be the first step on their path to full independence.

The way I'd handle it is just to present the pros and cons fully to them, so they're aware of the implications of each option. Don't forget, installing and hosting your own wiki must be a scary prospect for these Wikia types! 

Update on this; KrytenKoro is now leading a movement to form SEIWA (the Square Enix Independent Wiki Alliance), and plans to discuss this on IRC tonight after 5PM EST (here). They really need to get together all the staff of the potential member wikis, but some input from NIWA would doubtless be helpful too.

I couldn't find any recent or specific moving discussions on FF wiki's forums. But as far as KH is concerned, Neo and I both already chimed in, and Porplemontage recently offered them hosting (search for his name here).

I was just gonna do a forward, but if you'd prefer webmail that's fine with me (as long as nobody else has an issue; I know domain-based emails can sometimes be a contentious issue...)

I've sent you the login details 

Which email address do you want on there? Or maybe we should create [email protected]? 

Yeah, I think this should be an externally visible position. That way, we can actually have a NIWA-specific contact person on the Contact page, which, as Tacopill toints out, gives a better impression of NIWA as an organization.

Well whatever's causing the error seems to be on line 40 of index.php, but you're right, editing core files is usually a recipe for causing more problems than solving them. All I can think is that index.php has been somehow corrupted or modified - did you notice the last modified date before you made changes?

Can you see what's currently on line 40 of index.php, and possibly paste the contents here? What version of MediaWiki are you running? If it's 1.16, then the filesize should be 4,329 bytes and the contents should be exactly as follows:

Code Select Expand

<?php

/**
 * This is the main web entry point for MediaWiki.
 *
 * If you are reading this in your web browser, your server is probably
 * not configured correctly to run PHP applications!
 *
 * See the README, INSTALL, and UPGRADE files for basic setup instructions
 * and pointers to the online documentation.
 *
 * http://www.mediawiki.org/
 *
 * ----------
 *
 * Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Magnus Manske, Brion Vibber, Lee Daniel Crocker,
 * Tim Starling, Erik Möller, Gabriel Wicke, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason,
 * Niklas Laxström, Domas Mituzas, Rob Church, Yuri Astrakhan, Aryeh Gregor,
 * Aaron Schulz and others.
 *
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
 * with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
 * 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
 * http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
 *
 * @file
 */


# Initialise common code
$preIP = dirname( __FILE__ );
require_once( "$preIP/includes/WebStart.php" );

# Initialize MediaWiki base class
require_once( "$preIP/includes/Wiki.php" );
$mediaWiki = new MediaWiki();

wfProfileIn( 'main-misc-setup' );
OutputPage::setEncodings(); # Not really used yet

$maxLag = $wgRequest->getVal( 'maxlag' );
if( !is_null( $maxLag ) && !$mediaWiki->checkMaxLag( $maxLag ) ) {
    exit;
}

# Query string fields
$action = $wgRequest->getVal( 'action', 'view' );
$title = $wgRequest->getVal( 'title' );

# Set title from request parameters
$wgTitle = $mediaWiki->checkInitialQueries( $title, $action );
if( $wgTitle === null ) {
    unset( $wgTitle );
}

wfProfileOut( 'main-misc-setup' );

#
# Send Ajax requests to the Ajax dispatcher.
#
if( $wgUseAjax && $action == 'ajax' ) {
    require_once( $IP . '/includes/AjaxDispatcher.php' );
    $dispatcher = new AjaxDispatcher();
    $dispatcher->performAction();
    $mediaWiki->restInPeace();
    exit;
}

if( $wgUseFileCache && isset( $wgTitle ) ) {
    wfProfileIn( 'main-try-filecache' );
    // Raw pages should handle cache control on their own,
    // even when using file cache. This reduces hits from clients.
    if( $action != 'raw' && HTMLFileCache::useFileCache() ) {
        /* Try low-level file cache hit */
        $cache = new HTMLFileCache( $wgTitle, $action );
        if( $cache->isFileCacheGood( /* Assume up to date */ ) ) {
            /* Check incoming headers to see if client has this cached */
            if( !$wgOut->checkLastModified( $cache->fileCacheTime() ) ) {
                $cache->loadFromFileCache();
            }
            # Do any stats increment/watchlist stuff
            $wgArticle = MediaWiki::articleFromTitle( $wgTitle );
            $wgArticle->viewUpdates();
            # Tell $wgOut that output is taken care of
            wfProfileOut( 'main-try-filecache' );
            $mediaWiki->restInPeace();
            exit;
        }
    }
    wfProfileOut( 'main-try-filecache' );
}

# Setting global variables in mediaWiki
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'action', $action );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'CommandLineMode', $wgCommandLineMode );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'DisabledActions', $wgDisabledActions );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'DisableHardRedirects', $wgDisableHardRedirects );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'DisableInternalSearch', $wgDisableInternalSearch );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'EnableCreativeCommonsRdf', $wgEnableCreativeCommonsRdf );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'EnableDublinCoreRdf', $wgEnableDublinCoreRdf );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'JobRunRate', $wgJobRunRate );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'Server', $wgServer );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'SquidMaxage', $wgSquidMaxage );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'UseExternalEditor', $wgUseExternalEditor );
$mediaWiki->setVal( 'UsePathInfo', $wgUsePathInfo );

$mediaWiki->performRequestForTitle( $wgTitle, $wgArticle, $wgOut, $wgUser, $wgRequest );
$mediaWiki->finalCleanup( $wgDeferredUpdateList, $wgOut );

# Not sure when $wgPostCommitUpdateList gets set, so I keep this separate from finalCleanup
$mediaWiki->doUpdates( $wgPostCommitUpdateList );

$mediaWiki->restInPeace();



Try replacing the contents of index.php with that, and see if that changes or gets rid of the error. Let me know