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With no news on the upgrade, I applied the patch I linked, and it seems to have worked.

I'm a terrible person for not fixing this until now.  I really need to work out a way of getting notifications for every new thread.

Any news?  Looks like there's a hacky patch available (from here) which might apply to the current version, if it's going to take much longer.

*Things to do (and perhaps obvious things to do)

I think this is rather important for some people, but not others.  Pikipedia split from Wikia, and the old wiki still gets editors from time to time; recently, one started editing at Wikia and refuses to stop, because there's not much to do at Pikipedia (and because if people see the Wikia site first, he doesn't want them to think badly of the Pikmin community).

At Pikipedia we have a page for 'current projects', but I don't think it's really helped with newer editors finding things to do - instead, they'll just look around the articles and determine from that whether they think there's something they could help with.  Maybe it's just not easy enough to get to the current projects page.

*Maybe having not just the wiki but a place where people can talk about the series (there is a Legendary Starfy forum on these boards but it doesn't get used much)

I think this is very important, again speaking from experience with Pikipedia.  I think I would've stopped editing and left the community ages ago if we hadn't had the chatroom (IRC channel).  I don't think it helps a great deal with getting visitors to stay, but it does help with getting frequent editors not to leave, or at least to kind of hang around even if they stop editing.  For a small wiki, all you need is a couple of people in the chatroom every day and it feels much more like a community and less like 'just an encyclopaedia'.

A fair amount of our recent (last year or so) activity has been from people doing ROM stuff and coming to discuss it in the chatroom (we had some test levels discovered, music/sound file reverse engineering, that kind of stuff).  Even if these people don't make edits, just being there definitely adds something.

--

I asked around and got this:

Code Select Expand


[16:57:20] @Espyo tips for popularity...
[16:57:32] @Espyo well, I want to say that the mistakes page [1] I made is pretty awesome and interesting
[16:57:41] @Espyo but there's no factuality about it
[16:58:01] @Espyo other than that, the front page I say would be a good place to keep clean
[16:58:11] @Espyo that change in the news style [2] was a good one, I think
[16:58:34] @Espyo I guess being very accepting of newcomers is also good
[16:58:41] @Espyo I made the quick start page [3] with that in mind
[16:58:52] @Espyo the number of people that don't even understand the concept of editing is huge
[16:59:02] @Espyo so I'm hoping that page is a real game-changer

[17:06:02] @Espyo I think some more "real world" pages would help
[17:06:11] @Espyo like glitches
[17:06:17] @Espyo people are pretty up and about glitches
[17:06:22] @Espyo I think I factually checked that at some point
[17:06:27] @Espyo or maybe it's just a "feeling" thing
[17:06:33] @Espyo I mean, there ARE a lot of glitch videos out there
[17:07:03] @Espyo but yeah, if the Starfy Wiki's got the basics down
[17:07:19] @Espyo I strongly suggest they approach the technical side of the series
[17:07:30] @Espyo numeric values, figuring out how some game mechanics work

[17:08:09] @Espyo oh, and topics that help speedrunners
[17:08:19] @Espyo if they really expand on that, that can be a "market" they can conquer


[1] http://www.pikminwiki.com/index.php?title=Mistakes_in_the_Pikmin_series
[2] http://www.pikminwiki.com/Main_Page
[3] http://www.pikminwiki.com/index.php?title=Help:Quick_start_guide

Pikipedia was pretty much the same until Pikmin 3 came along.  Everything was there, pretty much - plenty of reorganisation, rewording, restructuring to be done, but no new content.  In a way, that's a good thing, but it's got to be harmful when the community kind of disbands - maybe there's something such wikis can do to retain a community even though there's no editing to be done.  Maybe try getting into unused/prototype game content, or ROM editing or something?

Heh, it's not my name, that's why I brought it up.

Yeah, I know; by that I was really saying that it's not ready yet, but it's starting to get used, so it's getting there.

Although I will say that those are some pretty good ideas, Steve.

...Not that I mind, but why are you calling me Steve?

Of course, I'd like to point out that you should always set $wgReadOnly before backing up anything, which will also prevent file uploads. That will narrow your main point of contention to others changing the files as you back up.

Ah, yes, of course.  I'm not too familiar with MediaWiki on the backend, so even after you mentioned it in your opening post it slipped my mind.  That would certainly make things easier.

As far as btrfs goes, does it support journaling? I would never recommend a filesystem that doesn't, regardless of what cool features it has. Things break eventually, and journaling has proven invaluable in figuring out why on more than one occasion.

Yes, btrfs is quite a new filesystem, so it's pretty much a given.  Last I checked, it wasn't quite ready for use in production environments, but I think some bleeding-edge Linux distributions have made it the default.

Hmm, files changing as you back up; I hadn't thought of that.  There are probably solutions out there that cope with that, but if you can reasonably expect files not to change very often at all (which they won't here, I don't think: images will be added, but that won't cause any breakage), it shouldn't be much work to write a script to handle it.

Just store modification timestamps (or checksums, if you want) before backing up, and then again afterwards.  If any files that existed before changed, undo the backup (really easy if you use a snapshot-capable filesystem like btrfs on the destination), then try again (probably with exponential backoff or something, if you can be bothered).

Hmm, that's an interesting point: what if you want to end up with a single file, but still benefit from rsync's deltas.  Perhaps mount the archive and mirror to the mount point?  (A quick search suggests 'archivemount' could do it.)

^Wouldn't you want to use rsync or equivalent instead for that?

Following that, wouldn't you end up with .git/ in your w/ (and possible .gitignore or .gitattributes in places)?

Fez.  I love how the main mechanic isn't what the game's about.

I just got around to English Country Tune.  Some of the ideas are really nice - it took a while before I got the gravity of the larvae, but larvae and whales are rather interesting mechanics, especially when it gets 3D.  Planting and cutting I'm not so sure about - I feel more like I'm just brute-forcing those puzzles.

(This post probably sounds crazy if you haven't played the game.)

Moved to The Lounge because silly.

Agreed, but I wasn't really aware this was the case, and what RAP said here doesn't  read quite like that to me.  Where have you got this impression from?

Hmm, seems to be in the top 5 results for most related searches in DuckDuckGo.  I guess you're talking about Google, which is ranking results differently, somehow.  IIRC, (amongst other things) Google ranks sites based on how many high-ranked sites link to them - DKWiki's link from Bulbapedia and the like should help, but Wikia wikis are linked from Wikia central and loads of other Wikia wikis (I think they put random links in sidebars and things?  Tried to check, but it's hard to tell since images no longer work at Wikia for me, and the whole network is fundamentally broken...).

WRT 3, pretty sure he meant the page content, not the appearance.  Yeah, that's some weird spam right there.

It is a little strange, isn't it?  I can't provide a definite answer, unfortunately.

Right, so does anyone know how to contact Wars Wiki admins?  Maybe try putting something on their talk pages.  Who provides the hosting?  The two things that need doing are to revert the spam and to install an anti-spam system.  A brief look at recent spammed indicated it's only on the spammers' user pages, which is good.

^This.  Most of those topics were years old.