.com.unity Forums - Utility Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki

I didn't have much time to write something that night, but I'll try to answer some comments now. I'll answer them here to keep all things concerning the Wiki in one thread instead of having it scattered across multiple topics.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Soyweiser (Post 802215)

Apparently it is a bit harder to fix than originally thought of. Relax, and wait. It will probably be back, ad if it is down for good, well just ask Lch for the backups and try something else.

It was mostly lack of time and ambition - look at that pink bog beast pic... I could have and should have left the Wiki in its read-only state, but when I turned the web server off I really thought it was better to provide no service than to provide crappy service. I wasn't sure if the database and system would suffer and might become corrupted while people tried all kinds of things to deal with this, too, which was another reason to turn it off.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JonBrave (Post 805395)

Please don't shout at me for asking this... :) How/why is the website actually down during "fixing" whatever was decided to be fixed..? Any website you know of, they/owner leave current system up while they make changes for new one, then go live. This baby's been gone for weeks & weeks, what can be so difficult?

You know, that would be exactly what I'd have asked if I was in your situation. There should be a "live" version and a "testing" or "development" version of a website, and changes should only be pushed from the "dev" to the "live" version when they're finished. When I was working on web design things, I always kept things that way. With the Wiki, I haven't done such a setup, mostly because it was overkill and because I am usually not working on the live code, but just install and upgrade code from the official SVN codebase now. When I started on the Wiki, I didn't need such a setup because nobody knew about it and I was free to do whatever I wanted to do without the need to have a working "live" version while I'm developing. Now that there is some customer/user base who needs to access the Wiki even when I'd need to work on it, I would favor and use such a setup, yes. In case I ever intend (and have time) to work more on it, I think I'll work on a cloned version like you have considered, yes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by brxbrx (Post 806323)

This is excellent news. Has anyone thought of transferring the wiki to a free wiki farm? We'd have to deal with advertisements, but otherwise it would be both faster and free (like this one).

I have considered hosting the Wiki on a free Wiki farm when I started building it, of course. None of those that were around at the time seemed to offer what the Dom3Wiki demanded, though. Usually "free" either means that you have to live with a limited, crippled version of usually an upgradeable (for a cost) package, or something that makes money from advertisements. Since many things that I used on this Wiki have always been very experimental, which included Semantic MediaWiki at the time, I couldn't use a host that doesn't allow full control over the system, and one that makes money from ads was out of question, too. The StrategyWiki was the example of what the Wiki might look like then, and even the people that build up the Dom3 section of the StrategyWiki, like Horst F. Jens, have been very unhappy with the amount of advertisements that is exposed there now. Sure, you won't see most if you use a good ad blocker, but not everybody has that. I rather want full ownership and full control of my site than having to live with a contract that I don't like. Before the StrategyWiki was there, people asked Shrapnel about hosting a Wiki themselves, I have heard. But they would need more staff to be able to do that, which means that they won't do it, because they can't.

I have considered to have the Wiki hosted on a free webspace provider, too, of course. Why I didn't use one is mainly the same reason why I am cautious of free Wiki farms: I don't trust them to live very long. I am into Web hosting since a little over 15 years now, and I've used some very cool free web hosts during that time. I've seen dozens of those free webspace providers fall and vanish over time. Very large ones, too, with ten thousands of users and many more sites. There is no such thing as a free lunch, there has to be a way to pay the bills, and at some point a free web space provider might decide that it's no longer possible to keep things free, might it take one year, two years, five years or more. Even Wikipedia regularly has to ask people for money from donations to be able to sustain itself, and it's a lot of money that they need.

I would want that the Wiki would be more performant, of course, and I'd have been really glad about the offers for hosting it that I got from people here now when I started. What I want most, though, is that the data is safe, and by now I very much want to have physical access to the box in order to ensure that. Maybe the Wiki will be transferred into the hands of somebody else who I can entrust with it later. I hosted the Wiki from a Pentium III in my office in college at the start, I have since upgraded it to a notebook that I had left over, stored in the cellar at my home. How fast or slow the Wiki is might either be because of the hardware, be it CPU or memory, or because of my DSL connection. I don't have the spare money to upgrade it to something better, and I won't hold it to ransom to force people to cope with those costs. It is, as somebody else wrote, solely there out of goodwill. If I would consider the productive time alone that I put into creating it, it should never have seen the day of light. That would surely have been better for me. :) As you might have noticed, I am very much retired from the Dom3 scene. The Wiki still is still far from being as cool as I wanted it, and unfortunately I'm lacking the time and dedication that I had as a bachelor to make it much cooler. But I'll keep the Wiki up and support it as long as I can, and I'm especially thankful to those community members that spend their time to expand and update it and make it better. Seeing that it is being used like that is even better than any thanks or donations thrown my way.