We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon

We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon

r_b_bergstrom 31 Jan 2020 07:51

As I mentioned in another thread, I was having trouble with billing for my wikidot account.

Well, I posted the same thing over in the larger wikidot help community, and the responses were pretty disturbing. If what they say there is true, then wikidot management has gone "radio silent" to most communication. Supposedly a host of features are broken and not getting fixed. One such bug they mentioned is search functions, which I can corroborate I've noticed being extra buggy lately and often ignoring pages that I know for certain exist (this has happened both here and on another wikidot wiki I work on). Supposedly there are also issues when trying to send invitations to new users — I haven't experienced that personally, but I also haven't had reason to send an invite in a couple years. The "whois database" lists the registry for wikidot.com as expiring on April 28th of this year. I don't want to be alarmist, and I'll freely admit my level of "research" into this is quite limited (and essentially is nothing more than listening to rumors posted in that forum)… but there's a non-zero chance that wikidot could just vanish at the end of April. We might want to consider migrating the site, and that might take some serious man-hours to do.

At the very least, I would encourage my fellow admins to log in to the admin panel and save/download yourself a backup of the wiki.

Last edited on 01 Feb 2020 17:45 by r_b_bergstrom Show more

Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon

jhubert 31 Jan 2020 17:20

Thanks for the heads-up. I know that I wasn't very active here in recent years - first due to a succession of moves to different parts of Germany and now due to another major project (translating German folklore tales into English), but I really don't want the Arcana Wiki to go away - I still use it regularly, even if I rarely contribute.

As a first stopgap measure, I have created a backup and put it into this Google Drive Folder. I will do so now and then in the coming weeks, and if you have admin rights I encourage you to create your own backups. I also created a Google Sheet to this folder where you can add your own name and email address if a move should become necessary.

Now, the backup format is simple enough that I believe I should be able to develop a Perl script that converts its format to that of most other wiki formats, after which it we need to enter this code into a new wiki platform - tedious given that we have 5008 articles right now, but doable with a day's labor or two. Unfortunately, the backup doesn't save any tags, so I will probably run HTTPTracker over the site for future reference. We will have to enter these manually (in whatever form the new wiki system require), but that's vastly preferable to converting all the articles by hand.

The question is which Wiki system to choose for this project. The one unique feature of Wikidot.com that I'd like to duplicate was that it allowed pages to call up random other pages with particular tags - such as with the Random Nations generator. Does anyone know which other Wiki system does this?

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Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon

jhubert 31 Jan 2020 19:51

Hmmm… DokuWiki and the randominc plugin might work for this, but if anyone knows of any options, I am game.

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The Spambot Death Wall
Arcana Wiki - Distilling the Real World for Gaming
Urbis - A World of Cities - an urban fantasy setting of industrial magic
LiveJournal

Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon

r_b_bergstrom 25 Apr 2020 20:06

We are just a couple days out from the cited expiration of wikidot's domain registry. I have saved myself a backup of the site. I haven't seen a better alternative than DokuWiki, but I've been focused elsewhere and haven't looked as thoroughly as perhaps I should have.

Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon

r_b_bergstrom 25 Apr 2020 20:32

Just on a lark, I checked out wikidot's registry info in the whois database again, and was pleasantly surprised that it was recently updated. While there doesn't seem to be anyone at the wheel collecting money or upgrading accounts at wikidot, they none-the-less just a few days ago renewed their registry through 2022. So, it's likely this particular crisis is averted for now.

It's probably still a good idea for all the admins to save backups a few times a year, just to be safe.

Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon

chimeratech 13 Apr 2023 23:04

Long shot, but any chance the site backup could be re-uploaded? I clicked the link, but it only takes me to the Google Sheets page, not the backup download in a drive folder.

Thanks in advance. Been lurking on and off for a few years and would hate to lose the knowledge hosted on here.

Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon

Professional_Lock_60 20 Apr 2023 01:56

Is the Google Sheets page still being watched/checked for updates. I joined wikidot two days ago and I'm not a member of the Arcana Wiki but I'd still like to know if it needs to be moved somewhere else.