Utility: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki

[lch]

Originally Posted by JonBrave

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)

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.

[legowarrior]

I thought about reposting my answer, but I thought that maybe I didn't understand the question the first time. Still, patience young grasshoper.

[John_Madlock]

Damn, I hope it will be back.

[Rick L]

Sorry for the duplication. I didn't see my original post and decided I had done something wrong when I submitted it.

[brxbrx]

You guys thought about enabling anonymous editing?

[Soyweiser]

That only invites more spam.

[lch]

Hello all,

the Wiki is up and running again. We had this purple bog beast infestation in our home, and although our experts were already on the case, we had to devote all our free time to those experts, too, you see...



Okay, jokes aside, I am very sorry for the long downtime. When the captcha extension made trouble I turned the web server off, thinking that I could get to fix that problem soon - which regrettably was not the case. Yesterday I did some upgrades to the underlying operating system and since I started the Web server again, with the Wiki still in its defunct read-only state, hoping that I could run some reparations before announcing "The Wiki is back" to the outside world, I already received an email from llama and even some donations from community members. Those donations will go into the "new HDD for the Wiki" fund, thanks a lot.

(tech talk mode on)
Now that I had a closer look at the situation, the problem was that the Recaptcha extension was being incorporated into the official MediaWiki code, and those updated files have been pulled through SVN updates like they should. The configuration files still linked against the files from the old recaptcha library, though, and those started to fail working correctly at some point. Pretty resistant to any hotfixes. Now that I had enough distance to this, I finally noticed the misconfiguration.
(tech talk mode off)

I will work some more on the underlying Wiki software when I find time for that, but right now you're invited to start using the Wiki in its current form, and please report if you receive any other errors.

[Hrum]

Congrats lch!

And thanks for all your work on the wiki.

If you didn't already know how much everyone gets out of the wiki, you can tell how much we love it on the rare occasions when it's unavailable. As anyone who has any background in IT stuff knows, this is normal for all of us users - we express our love for the service you provide by kvetching when it is temporarily unavailable. The enthusiasm of the kvetching is a reasonable gauge for the intensity of our love.

[JonBrave]

@Ich,

Many thanks for your work, and the return of the site. Now that I've seen the photo, I had not realised that you were so young when I asked in a post about how long the site was down, may I say your IT skills are remarkable for someone of your age.

[oldrocker99]

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