Milliwiki

[oxfordtweed]

I have just received a rather, erm, troubling email about the Wiki for this game. To put it simply, the wiki has grown to such a size that it is against the TOS of the hosting company. I have several options, but none of them is really feasible when it comes down to it. I´ve done all I can to decrease the size of the database on my end, but it's about as small as it's going to get.

My host offers a pro package, but at $25 a month, I can't really afford this on top of all my other bills (that's about what I´m paying per year right now). And even if I could, the wiki is still too large for that package.


I think this is a great thing to have, so I´d hate to have to delete it. So, the only other option is to transfer everything over to another domain. Either way, I have until the 20th of this month to do something before my host deletes the entire database. If someone is willing to take on the wiki unto their own server, they'd need to be able to support about four gigs of MySQL database, and probably more as the wiki grows.

Basically, I´m asking for a volunteer to take the wiki. Otherwise, it's going to be deleted since moving my entire everything to a new domain isn't terribly do-able either. :/

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Eek! Wish I could help. [is not helpful]

[not_my_sandbox]

Zed, the reason the wiki has grown to such a size is not because we have been using it and being awesome, it is because of the constant spam it receives and because I have done nothing in the past several months about it. The deluge just became too much.

I was going to write something up to auto delete the spam but I got busy with RL.

Is there any way you can disable account creation? In a week my internship will be over most likely and I can help you with the mass banning/deletion.

Flynn should join in too. Or maybe anyone else who volunteers and you can promote to admin.

Oh, this is Tom, by the way, just now I have a mun/sandbox account.

Inwardly, I am cheering, as this means that the wikispammers are spamming so much that they are probably dragging all the other unattended wikis down and as soon as the owners of those wikis stop throwing money at the problem, this plague will consume itself and DIE. DIE DIE DIE! *this may mean I am an unsympathetic jerkface

[oxfordtweed]

Yeah, there's a way, but I´ll have to look at it because it's been forever. I've not been paying as much attention to it as I should have done, because life, but at least this means that it's fixable.

[death_gone_mad]

There is still the problem that "deleting" doesn't really free up database space. You can try installing the etension to delete pages permanently [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension%3ADeletePagePermanently] but I think only you will be allowed to do permanent deletesNevermind, you can manipulate the permissions to allow sysops to permdelete :D :D :D :D

[oxfordtweed]

Oh, awesome. I'm glad something like this exists, because otherwise, I was toying with the idea of pulling the wiki down for a few days and just completely reinstalling it.

[oxfordtweed]

I must be doing something way wrong, because every time I try to install it, the wiki just goes down completely.

I have managed (hopefully, since the last time I did it, it didn't seem to help) block account creation. But I have no idea how to make this extension work.

[not_my_sandbox]

darn, I was afraid that might happen.

It looks like DeletePagePermanently depends on SkinTemplateContentActions which is something that was taken out Mediawiki.

I think the best I can do right now is maybe try archive the legitimate articles. I think I remember you also had a sandpipercove wiki that was spam free. Do you think maybe it wasn't spammed because the spammers had not found it yet or was it something else?

Anyway, it looks like account creation is blocked successfully. The last account created was on 14 July 2012 at 19:39 :D

[reindeer_games]

I Have no idea why that one never got hit. I'd done nothing differently with it, aside from not linking it to the back room. And since I seem to recall the character list having a spam problem at one point as well, it seems like a small leap to assume that the spammers went there through the back room.

Backing up the pages shouldn't be too difficult. The images might be a different story. Right now, I think that's the only way to go; just take everything down and start over. The local settings will be the easiest to import, I think, since I already have that page saved to my computer.

[not_my_sandbox]

Yeah, that is probably it. Milliways is too popular not to be noticed by spammers. It raises a problem though. How is account creation going to be handled once the wiki is back up?

[reindeer_games]

Manually, by the looks of it.

[guppy_sandhu]

I'm afraid I can't offer the time commitment to move or host it (sorry), but the only suggestion I could think of was whether it could be split into two seperate wikis, like one for players and characters and one for everything else.

[not_my_sandbox]

The problem is that the wiki isn't getting too big because of us and what we write. Its the spam. Us Milliwaysers have hardly touched the thing.

[cameoflage]

Can we get rid of the spam in a timely fashion?

[death_gone_mad]

I don't know if that will even help. At least when I try to delete it gives me the option to undelete, so the articles are probably still in the database. Darn wiki, why can't I delete things forever???