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Miraheze to shut down

meta.miraheze.org

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Re: Miraheze to shut down

#51

Post by duskwuff »

aerio wrote: post #45
LordShredda wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It clearly says technical burnout. Why do you have to blame GDPR? If anything it was the best thing to happen to the open internet

Yeah, speaking as a European tech lead; GDPR was a pain in the butt a few years ago when it was introduced - and all client websites had to be retroactively fitted with cookie systems, routines had to be implemented, stuff had to be learned, etc. Once sites are planned with it in mind from the get go it's really no big deal, and huge for the end user.

For a wiki farm like Miraheze, GDPR/CCPA/etc compliance is fairly easy. MediaWiki collects fairly little personal data about users, and there are well-defined methods for the site operator to export or delete that data if a user requests that they do so.

Besides, that all kicked in years ago. It's not a new concern.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#52

Post by foobarbecue »

Blahah wrote: post #50
foobarbecue wrote: post #22

Was doing some reverse engineering recently and wanted a quick wiki to put stuff on in case others wanted to join in and contribute findings about the same product. Looked around and Miraheze seemed to be the only real option for free wiki hosting (I tried another one first, don't remember what it was called, but it was bad). Experience was pretty good adding the pages but then I went back 6 months later to try and c…

Confusing - what about the free github and gitlab wikis? And all the free wiki hosts? And tiddlywiki which has been freely hosted tons of places for 20 years or so?

I was actually specifically thinking of a MediaWiki instance. In this case there wasn't a codebase to version control so I didn't think of github and gitlab as options but maybe that makes sense. I don't know about tiddlywiki -- does that work for collaboration? It says "personal web notebook" so I sort of assumed it wouldn't have the multi user admin setup that mediawiki does.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#53

Post by tallies »

culi wrote: post #34
tallies wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression from reading their Discord server yesterday is this: - Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge - Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free wiki host called WikiTide - The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided to call it quits - There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group of voluntee…

My wiki also got affected by the harddrive. They send out a message with everything they knew pretty much immediately even to people not affected by the error and continued to update as they learned more. Not sure why you seem to think it took "weeks". For a volunteer-run service they've actually been quite on top of it and compassionate in my experience

You're right, it was 10 days, not quite weeks. It's not important but here are some of the miscommunications and apologies:

November 18: "The cloud server which hosts one of our database, db141, experienced a disk issue. As a result, a small number of wikis hosted on db141 are unavailable. [...] While cloud14 has been reinstalled, we will have to send the affected disks to professional data recovery. The earliest ETA for having wikis restored is potentially early next week. [...] Our number #1 goal is to restore the data on the disks affected so that wikis are restored versus using a backup which could be various days old"

November 24: An update to the situation was embedded in an unnecessary meeting on Discord: "Our Miraheze Meeting is starting now! Join us while we talk about everything Miraheze, such as recent policy proposals and we'll be providing an update on the db141 issue We'll answer any questions you have and will listen to any comments or concerns."

November 28: "I understand the frustration, and we have not yet given up hope on data recovery, so you can still wait if that is your choice. But I also don't want to give people any false hope. It is not looking super great for data recovery. I won't completely rule it out yet, and I can't say anything definitively. Venues will be opened shortly for requesting that wikis be recreated from scratch (with images at least still intact) if that is your wish [...] in the recent Miraheze Meeting it has been brought up that our communication has been less than ideal, and some feel some questions have been dodged and/or ignored. I have gone back and looked at our responses to some questions, and I can see how this could be assumed [...] I would like to clear one thing up now. Something that seems to keep being brought up is that we sent the drives to a data recovery service. This was not true [...] Owen currently has the drives and has for a few days. They are not at a data recovery service. This was due to some internal miscommunication within SRE, and is something that is being addressed [...] Once again we apologise for this miscommunication and we are working to resolve our internal communication problems [...] Indeed, over the last few days, it would appear that information was not properly being relayed within our own team which led to some breakdowns in communication. Clearly, different members had different insights and views on certain topics. This has led to a strain in communications and we are working to rectify that."

I don't think it was ever explained how the data was recovered.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#55

Post by cxr »

Blahah wrote: post #50
foobarbecue wrote: post #22

Was doing some reverse engineering recently and wanted a quick wiki to put stuff on in case others wanted to join in and contribute findings about the same product. Looked around and Miraheze seemed to be the only real option for free wiki hosting (I tried another one first, don't remember what it was called, but it was bad). Experience was pretty good adding the pages but then I went back 6 months later to try and c…

Confusing - what about the free github and gitlab wikis? And all the free wiki hosts? And tiddlywiki which has been freely hosted tons of places for 20 years or so?

> what about the free github and gitlab wikis

Don't fall for the trap; those aren't wikis. Just because someone (or a company) uses the word "wiki" when describing something, that doesn't make it one.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#56

Post by labster »

As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama.

There are several months of runway, all the servers are still up, and many volunteers are still around. All we need is more leadership that is ready to focus on our core mission of offering free, ad-free, volunteer driven hosting to wikis with a lot of options. With a little networking, the finances are a solvable problem.

I'm in talks with the current board to see if a group of current and former volunteers can take over, either by working in the current organization, or starting a new nonprofit and working from there.

I still think Miraheze could have a bright future, and that this was a series of mistakes that got blown far out of proportion to the actual problems that the wiki farm faces.

AMA. I was not involved in the current crisis, so piecing together what happened has been something of a puzzle to me, but I can try to answer most questions.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#57

Post by Blahah »

cxr wrote: post #55
Blahah wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confusing - what about the free github and gitlab wikis? And all the free wiki hosts? And tiddlywiki which has been freely hosted tons of places for 20 years or so?

> what about the free github and gitlab wikis Don't fall for the trap; those aren't wikis. Just because someone (or a company) uses the word "wiki" when describing something, that doesn't make it one.

Perhaps you don't understand what a wiki is, but there are hundreds or more implementations of every reasonable etymological interpretation of the term. If you have a particular narrow version of it, that's not universal or helpful.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#58

Post by LoganDark »

labster wrote: post #56

As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama. There…

Does "a former CFO and SRE for Miraheze" mean you are an SRE that used to be the CFO, or does it mean you used to be both CFO and SRE and now aren't?

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#59

Post by labster »

LoganDark wrote: post #58
labster wrote: post #56

As the former CFO and a former SRE for Miraheze, I'm going to try to save the farm. I was uninvolved in the current problems, and at first was wondering what was going on so as to save my own wikis. The fundamentals at Miraheze are much better than they look; it's just that certain problems between volunteers got far out of hand, and with an all-volunteer force other people decided to leave to escape the drama. There…

Does "a former CFO and SRE for Miraheze" mean you are an SRE that used to be the CFO, or does it mean you used to be both CFO and SRE and now aren't?

I formerly did both, and currently hold no position with Miraheze Limited. I updated the post to make this more clear.

Re: Miraheze to shut down

#60

Post by cxr »

Blahah wrote: post #57
cxr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what about the free github and gitlab wikis Don't fall for the trap; those aren't wikis. Just because someone (or a company) uses the word "wiki" when describing something, that doesn't make it one.

Perhaps you don't understand what a wiki is, but there are hundreds or more implementations of every reasonable etymological interpretation of the term. If you have a particular narrow version of it, that's not universal or helpful.

I hope you'll consider being more obnoxious and weave even more presumptuous non-sequiturs through your next comment.
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