Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I ponied up $5, intend to contribute more, and invite everyone else to do the same!

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Great to have the wiki back, in any form! Thanks Ich, for the great work!

Re: 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.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thanks for putting the time in to put it back up. I'm also happy that you are all right. With everything disappearing I was a bit worried.

Now I have to make good on all those promises I made about stuff I put in my to do list. :)

Thanks for hosting it again!

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

*CHEERS!,YAY!* Thanks a bunch! :D

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Dear Mr Ich,

I think some people didn't like how I asked! I'm glad to see you take it the way it was intended :)

Here's what I don't get/is sad. Your Wiki is, or should be, 99.9% static text. No offence intended, but as I recall it's just clicking on links to other pages (little if any interaction) --- which is fine, and as it should be. A few years ago, as I recall, the site would have been some pages & links, and that could be plonked anywhere. Nowadays, it seems, you all need "engines" & "scripts" to deliver your sites. Hence all the issues about your site being "down". That's the bit I don't get? Let (suitable) pages be just static content, or if necessary generate it at some point and save/offer that?

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

"stop" "misusing" "quotation" "marks"

And you are wrong. 99% of the good sites out there are not just static pages. Without scripts it would not be able to edit them.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

sorry, don't get either of your points

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

He's saying that it is impossible to have a wiki that is "99.9% static text" because the editing function requires scripting. also lol at the concept of pure html in 2012.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com And

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Oops, this does not make sense.
Oh dear, why the unnecessary capitalization?

Perhaps this will help:
http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Grammar-Nazi


ok, I'm just being an *******, sry :p

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

What he means is that the way a wiki works is that anyone can edit it, and if it were just text, this would not be possible.

On a wiki, you can edit an article and add your own information. You can create internal links to other articles and transclude certain pages onto others.

Take a look at how Wikipedia works, and please leave the 90's for the 21st century.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Like others already wrote, far from it. It's probably pretty close to the other way around. Almost everything, including in most parts the graphics, is dynamically generated. There are caching mechanism in place, especially for the graphics, so that it doesn't have to be generated completely if there is a hit, of course. But what is stored in the MySQL database is something called Wikitext, which is being rendered into what you see on your screen. The Wikitext is just some very sleek text with Wiki-specific markup which aims to be very readable even when you edit the source code in the editor, instead of HTML for example, where your actual text can get lost in all the tags and markup it carries. And unlike HTML, that Wikitext has to be parsed by the server, not only on your side by your browser. That whole Wikitext runs through the MediaWiki parser before you see it, and MediaWiki, the Wiki software, has some very wicked Templating mechanism built-in, too. It's a very complex Turing-complete language, if you want, which differentiates it from a WYSIWYG Content Management System where you use a finite set of tools. Oh, and the MediaWiki software itself with the included parser is programmed in PHP, which is an interpreted language that has to run through a PHP parser at runtime before it is being executed, too. So there are a couple of parsers simultaneously at work at the server on different levels whenever the Wiki has to spit something out on your screen.

Of course, the aim is to keep the actual rendering low as much as possible. Which is why I am using something called APC, Advanced Parser Cache, to always keep the things which are used the most in memory. And theoretically, all the rendering should only be necessary if somebody makes a change to one of the pages. But there's just not enough memory to keep all the thousands of pages in memory at once, which is why you do have those load times (and sometimes it seems to get stuck at some point, I don't know why). When I wrote that the Wiki is probably slow either because of my net connection (I doubt it) or the server hardware (quite possible), I forgot one other thing: It might very much be slowed down by the design, too. I am using extensions, like SMW, Semantic MediaWiki, which could probably be used better. I'm using Templates that could probably be optimized. A couple of pages could probably be formatted in a better way, and most of all: The unit pages, which I'm guessing are being accessed the most, are using a design which is maybe not very cache-friendly. It accesses an internal MySQL database of stats and values quite similar to Edi's Dom3DB which I separated from the MediaWiki articles so that I'd have it easy to update those stats and values when a new update to Dom3 changes them. Back when the Wiki was developed, there were more or less regular updates every half year, and quite a lot of little data changes could happen in a patch. Populating that data into the Wikitext from the unit articles would be painful manual labor, or I'd have to write my own parser/robot to find and change that information, so I wrote a MediaWiki extension which grabs that data from another internal database instead. Nowadays Dom3 is pretty much final and there haven't been any major patches to the content lately, so such a setup is not as necessary as it seemed to be at first, and I could probably lose that design. I didn't knew about the power of Semantic MediaWiki when I started this design, too, and I probably could have dismissed this strange design from the start. Like I wrote in my opening post, I think there's probably a lot more powerful stuff to be harnessed from SMW, but I lack the knowledge and the time to learn it outside of a paid work experience myself now.

I'm still hoping that a SMW wizard might come by at some point, weave his magic wand and suddenly everything will just be beautiful and lightning fast... ;) In the meantime, you'll have to live with things the way they are now. Not ideal, but you'll have to cope.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

yeah, I knew what he meant, I was just being a counter-grammar-nazi.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thank you for pointing out the mistakes. I would edit them, but sadly the forum doesn't allow me to edit posts past a certain time frame.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Brxbrx has correctly inferred the meaning of my badly written text.

Momfreeek, would you say you are just trolling here now?

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

no, there was a point. Not on topic but thats in keeping with your own "advice".
I thought steps 2, 5 and 7 seemed relevant.

Just a little forum riposte, I don't mean to be belligerant.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

@Soy
I use quotes (among other things) if the word I'm using is not exactly right. When I say "scripts", I know it might be scripts, or programs, or transformers, or whatever. I don't know if his site is really "down", maybe it's running fine but not available. Seems like standard English usage to me as long as I can remember. You're probably pleased that "Waterstone's" got renamed (or perhaps you'd prefer Waterstone's).

@Elsewhere
As for the points about the (Dom3) Wiki content. Yes, I do realise (especially e.g. with Wordpress) that most stuff is delivered dynamically --- and so much the worse for delivery speed and processing usage. My point was that, as an information source with loads of text and little if any interaction, the content is static in nature. When I read the pages that's what I'm accessing.

At times you ask questions here with no intention other than an innocent & polite query for information and you get shouted at.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

except for that whole users can edit pages thing

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

He doesn't seem to understand what a wiki is.

"A wiki is a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor. Wikis are powered by wiki software. Most are created collaboratively."

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

A couple of other things that maybe you're not taking into account:

1. I could be wrong but I'd be surprised if you aren't using far more power to download and view the site than is used to serve it. All that messing about powering the monitor, rendering html into boxes and text on a square page and smoothing the edges of letters. Parsing a script and piecing together a few lists of characters from a database is not such a big deal. Thats not to say its not worth optimising server usage and the (widely used) solution that turns dynamic content into static content is "caching".

2. Developer time is (in general) far more valuable than processing time. Whatever solution you might think is worthwhile to make the site work better, it would perhaps make far more sense to simply buy better hardware to run the existing, working system, especially for a site used by relatively so few people.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Yeah, but that is wrong use of quotation marks. It is used to indicate either a quote, or sarcasm. There is no way for the reader to know if you mean it sarcastic, as something you are unsure about etc.

So it would be better if you would have just written. scripts(*)

*:unsure if this is the correct term.

This sentence : "I don't know if his site is really "down"," is really hard for me to understand fully. I don't really see what you can mean with "down". I assumed you just used the quotes wrong.

And yeah, I was acting like a little schoolgirl. My bad :D. I get defensive about the wiki... :P

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I believe common usage of quotation marks extends to a lot more than those two, and do not agree with you at all. How about, you use them the way you like and I'll use them the way I do? :) After all, this is English not French...

I get defensive about my punctuation ;)

As for the original missing-wiki issue. I do understand that it requires processing to generate a wiki page. I do understand that allowing the collaborative editing requires processing. For my part, I only want to read the wiki, I accept that altering is unavailable for a while. In general, pages are accessed a lot more by readers than writers (hopefully). I had assumed, perhaps, that it would be easy to generate static pages somewhere --- 100% precisely in a situation like this where wiki (or whatever) software had issues.

Where I work has recently changed over the company web site (hosted externally) from static, actual pages to Wordpress with database. Yes it is better for developers etc., I understand that. But when for whatever reason there is an issue with page retrieval or generation, my (potential) customers who just want to browse really don't care, they'd have been better served with static content and less to go wrong. There's a difference in requirements for OLAP versus OLTP.

Finally, of course I am not complaining or being ungrateful to Ich and others who maintain it. And I never meant to upset or annoy anyone!

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

That isn't how language works. You cannot just use stuff wrongly because you think it works a different way. That way you generate confusion and ambiguity. And as the main objective of language is easy communication. You are misusing language in the most horrible way.

I think Lch already explained that the wiki pages are cached normally. But that he just doesn't have enough hd/memory to keep the entire site cached the whole time. (Also, if dynamic pages have a problem with loading, you want to cache them, not make them static).

Also, in the case of the wiki, you get what you pay for.

And never listen to what your customers say, look at what they do. (Which is a great lesson in life generally. Replace customers with whatever you want. (gamers/family/friends/aliens/etc).

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

It sounds like you've got some specific problems that needs fixing asap. In a system with 1000 things that could go wrong its no surprise that its the latest change that has problems.


I'd say it is. Language is constantly evolving, ambiguity is rife anyway and context is important. Its not a system crafted to perfection, its an evolution of common usage from Ye Olde English. You won't find a smiley in an english textbook ;-)

Common usage is far more important to understanding than absolute rules (FYI: you should NEVER start a sentence with "And" :p).

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I'm not misusing language or using stuff wrongly, and certainly not "in the most horrible way". I don't misuse quotation marks, I have no idea why you think your rules are correct or you think yourself an arbiter on this matter. Instead of you telling me how to write, shall we just leave the matter alone. I've always enjoyed the content of your posts.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Lol, JonBrave I have to say I interpreted your comment as meaning "lch says the site is down but that's probably just another one of his lies - I doubt he even has a 'kid'". ;)

But thanks to lch and everyone else who keeps providing services to the Dom3 community despite no longer being an active player - since they are of course under no obligation to do so. Llamabeast provides one of the two main MP servers and manages CBM and how much does he even play these days? And Gandalf has spent years running the other main server and doesn't even like the MP crowd. :p

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Hi Valerius. Is it me or everyone else who's barmy? ;)

Originally I said:
The "baby" is referring to the web site. Then Ich posted a photo of his baby (which I think is why he said he had been so busy!:)) --- seems to have been removed from his post now --- and so I said:
Which was supposed to be a humorous intimation that the photo might have been of himself (it didn't say), and I was impressed that a baby could write the wiki...

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

then im now declaring the end of punctuation no more capitalizations points commas or other bull we can make up the rules of language while we go along never mind that it is the job of the writer to be understood not the job of the reader if you make your readers work to understand your language you have failed but i agree im just being a twat and and doesnt create ambiguity it is just ugly but it is part of my write like you talk style which is horrible

ps doesnt apply to certain types of literary work but that is irrelevant

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I said "evolution" and "common usage".

Every word and contextual device was invented by someone at some point.. but if its crap and no-one uses it, then its not going to become common usage is it?

Tell me what you think of the smiley :-)

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Its all here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark
from:
to:

Thus, that you misunderstood was not a fault of the writer. But misunderstandings happen, and clarifications are given. And then all is understood which is the goal of language.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

[citation needed]

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

this is a ****ing ridiculous pissing contest. Just give it up and let it rest.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

yeah, surely we understand each other soy? thats the goal isn't it?

But I do enjoy these battles on strategy game forums even if its contrary to the purpose of discussion ^^

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I'd prefer not to step into the grammar war but I think many people would view down being in quotes as expressing skepticism about why the site was down. But this is kind of an absurd debate, so regardless of whether the site was down or "down" we can all be happy that it is now unequivocally up. ;)

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

It would be possible to make a static version of the Wiki, yes. Finding out which parts have been updated and maintaining this static version by refreshing the updated articles would be some challenge. The other alternative would be to spider through the whole Wiki content on regular intervals. I have no intention of doing either by myself, because it has very limited to minimal use, takes too many resources, and because others are already doing this. You can always access the Internet Archive's mirror of the Wiki pages:
The Wayback Machine
Click on the sphere with the latest date and start browsing the Archive.

I think somebody made, or wanted to make, a program which displays the most interesting Wiki pages concerning unit stats etc. in some offline viewer. Some kind of unit editor, I think? My memory might be playing tricks on me. There is another website about data on magic spells, too.

reverend has been converting the nation references into downloadable and printable PDF manuals, see the Nation Reference - ALL AGES for more info. The content might be slightly outdated, though, of course. While looking for these files, I stumbled over a Russian Dom3Wiki, where people started converting some of the Dom3Wiki contents to Russian. :o

There are MediaWiki extensions which allow people to add articles to a collection and then generate some PDF (or other format) file like reverend's nation references. I might install this at some point, maybe.

Finally, there are extensions for hosting/displaying/browsing "offline Wiki" contents, which take a dump of the Wiki database and then display this, without the ability to edit anything. This might make sense if somebody with no internet access wants to access the Wiki contents during a plane flight or so, or in case the Wiki is down and one wants to have a read-only copy, but I think rather then trying to implement this I'll use my time to fix the Wiki completely if it is broken, and for all other purposes The Wayback Machine (see above) should be an adequate solution.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

The Dom3Wiki is down due to a power outage. It might take a day or two until the electrican can fix this. No data is lost. Please be patient for the Wiki to come back.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Wiki is back. (been back for ages).

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Over 200k accesses. What a fine service.

This page was last modified on 22 September 2012, at 11:49.
This page has been accessed 200,956 times.
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Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Yes, the wiki is a most wonderful service indeed - thanks Ich :-)

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I have been trying to update the wiki but it now appears to require email confirmation for edit access. I tried requesting access and even changed my email address and tried requesting access again but I never get the confirmation email. Any idea how to resolve this issue? Thanks.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I'm stopping back into this thread because I get the impression that JonBrave still hasn't learned what a wiki is, and why it can't just have static text.
A wiki is defined not just by user-generated content, but by the fact that content can be dynamically changed by anyone (depending on site-side restrictions).
This is why a wiki cannot simply have static text, or even plain .html
A wiki is meant to allow users to modify pages. Static text makes that a lot more difficult.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thanks for trying to enlighten me :)

I never suggested a wiki should have static content. All I ever said was, I was surprised no "snapshot" was available, when the site was down, which meant there would be no editing anyway. Read-only, of course; doesn't have to be perfect, all I want to do is read. I am now aware that I can try searching some archive sites, which is better than nothing.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

There is not because the amount of programming time (and interest) is limited. At least available to the dom3 community.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Hello all, long time no see - the site tells me that my last activity here was half a year ago. You all are probably aware that I am not active in this community anymore, the only reason being that I have no more time for that. I've kept the Wiki running, though I haven't looked at it much lately, and again I thank Soyweiser for his tireless work on the site.

I am aware that new users aren't activated anymore, but I have had no time to go in and fix that, sorry for the hassle. I won't have much time to care about this in the future, too, but I hope that I can address this at some point. What surprises me even more is that apparently even though users can't confirm their accounts anymore, now and then there are still spam bots slipping through which still manage to leave some spam on the Wiki. If they can confirm their accounts, why can't other users do that? Strange... In the meantime, I did ponder ways to prevent spam bots from registering. As there are a couple of them that can easily be identified (by a human) from their registered user name, looking like "<firstname><lastname><randomchars><somenumber >", I started working on a module which would automatically ignore registration attempts with names like that. This would just be a temporary fix in the weapons race with spammers ofc, and I didn't get to complete the programming, testing and setup of this.

Ideally, I want to disable user registration and have it replaced by an application system. I already did some research on this, probably half a year back, and found out that there exists a wondrous MediaWiki extension called ConfirmAccount which would allow just this. In order to get it installed, the Wiki software has to be updated to the latest version, though, before it isn't stable for the current one, and this always requires some amount of work by hand, there's no "install update" button that I can click. So, my ToDo list for the Wiki looks like this:
1. Upgrade to 1.17
2. Install and enable ConfirmEdit extension
3. Tidy up the old user accounts

Now, something else. There were two donations to the Wiki site, one at the start of the year and another one a week or two back or so, thank you to the donors. I am using the server that is running the Wiki at home for nothing else but hosting the Dom3Wiki and through some occurrence I have started pondering just how much this hosting costs me. The costs were zero when I still were able to host this at the university, but I am no longer able to do this since years. One factor of the costs would be the monthly costs for internet access, though we're running this from our home and can use the existing internet connection that we have, anyway, so we can ignore that. The other factor is power consumption and I have never looked into that, but I have now, and to be honest, it did surprise me. The Wiki is hosted on a laptop with a 72W power adaptor. The server is running all the time, electricity is about 25 cents/kWh as a ballpark number, I don't know exactly, but according to Wikipedia this is about right. Putting those values into an online electricity cost calculator results in costs of about 157 EUR per year, and with a projected 28.5 cents/kWh for this year according to that Wikipedia table (power ain't cheap in Germany, folks!) this is trending towards 180 EUR per year. I was really surprised by those numbers, and after previously ignoring alternatives to hosting from home, I am now looking into having the Wiki hosted elsewhere. Professional solutions cost money, of course, and a first look into Wiki hosters showed me that I'll pay about the same for professional hosting - no longer for the electricity, but for the software etc. While the pledges that llamabeast's wonderful PBEM server has collected are exceptional, I don't expect that donations will cover the costs of that.

One Wiki hosting company called Wikkii.net stands out, as it is offering free Wiki hosting. Who knows for how long, but what I know right now is that what they ask for is very reasonable: Have their banner displayed, next to the unobtrusive default MediaWiki one on the bottom right of each page. It's no popup, nor will there ever be one according to their FAQ, so while the Wiki operated with zero advertisement so far, I'd be very willing to have the Wiki moved there for the prize of one small 88x31 pixels graphic being displayed on every page. The best thing is that disk space and bandwidth isn't limited and the hoster leaves a lot of options to configure the Wiki open to me, instead of having multiple levels of options to choose from, and having to pay more for the better ones. Providing solutions like that means that if there are lots of other users of this hosting then load times might increase for the Dom3Wiki, of course, but I expect that these people know how to deal with that. I've had a look into a site hosted by them, the Asheron's Call Wiki (with an interesting history to it), and browsing around that Wiki has shown me that it seems to be very usable and the advertising banner is indeed not annoying at all when doing so.

I'll be interested in getting some feedback from you guys what you think about that, feel free to respond here. If you want to contact me directly, then please don't send me a PM here, but instead click on my name next to that red "offline" button and send me an email to the email address which is being displayed in the comments on my page. Thanks!

P.S.: Please don't think that I intend to pull the plug on the Wiki. I do plan to preserve the Dom3Wiki and I will continue to host this from home until I have found a viable new home for it. Glad that you like the Wiki!

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

lch, thank you not only setting up the wiki but continuing to keep it running after you have moved on from Dom yourself (the same goes for everyone who keeps things running though they may no longer be active themselves). At first I didn't use it much because I was so used to using Edi's db as a reference but over time, as more things have been added, I've grown to appreciate it as a resource. It would definitely be a shame to lose it and I think your idea to move it to a hosting company is a good one.

What I'm wondering is, after the wiki has been migrated do you think it would be worthwhile to have a backup admin in case you no longer have the time to work on it in the future (though I think that the creator of something has the right to control it and if you would prefer to not to do so I can certainly respect that)? As you noted, Soy has put a lot of work into the wiki and comes to mind as a backup admin. Also Edi, as an unofficial representative of IW. The other thing is that you are among the most tech savvy of Dom players and I'm not sure just how important that factor is in being able to maintain the wiki.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Important as the wiki is, I have to decline. I do not have the time or resources to put into it on top of running the Desura forums and moderating this place (light as the traffic is these days). If I add the wiki, there are simply too many things to keep an eye on and then all of them would suffer.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

There was one user who registered a while back using the normal channels, I think the registration issues have been cleared up.

Odly enough, I recently got an offer at a shared server, which I declined. At 5 bucks a month, I could get shared hosting at that server.

I have no clue how much traffic the wiki attracts. But I would be able to provide hosting for it.

Sadly this would mean two things, A, further decreasing the anonymity of my soyweiser handle, and B, recurring financial obligations of my part. (I'm a poor mofo atm).

But I could be able to host it if the traffic isn't to high.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

As has been standard, any Dom3 project can be hosted on the Dom3minions server. Longest running, most stable, full login server. :angel

I can vouch for lch. He had full administrator privileges there for quite awhile. Not only is that full identity disclosure but he had access to all of the packet traffic passing from everyones computer on my home network and my emails going back to the 1980s. I had no problem with it.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Sorry about necroing this, but has anybody heard anything from lch? I contacted him about hosting wiki about six months ago. He replied to my first email, but I haven't heard anything from him since then.