Monday, October 13, 2008
By popular demand, I added a website projects list to keep a rough tab on the stuff we have planned for the website. I'll keep this updated with things over time. I think it will be a good motivation for me to do some more side projects at night, which I don't mind because there are a lot of things I've been meaning to do anyways.
Other than that, things keep rolling along on this end.
Of note-really-interesting-interest, I think I got a new title. I say I think because I don't really care how people refer to me as long as I know what I'm doing. But for wiki purposes, I've flipped from "Website Producer" to "Content Manager". The change is meant to reflect the fact that I no longer just handle website and wiki stuff. I'm also manning the ship on producing for our marketing and visual services teams, so my focus just got a bit bigger. It's kinda like in Civilization when a city gains culture and it's borders expand. It's still the same place, but it now encompasses a little more land. A dumb analogy, but it works I guess. We're all gamers here ;)
Friday, October 3, 2008
Hiya guys! I don't have much I'm able to report on right about now, so I'll just hit a few points that you guys may be interested in.
- As you may have read earlier, we've completed the first stage promised wiki upgrade. With this step, this site just got a massive upgrade to disk space and hardware. We've also made some important changes to the way that the databases are handled, so things like experiencing performance burps when the site is backed up should be things of the past. Since we can now backup on the fly, we've increased the frequency of how often we do it, which will be really good for all of us if something catastrophic happens down the road. In all, we're super excited about the changes (Our IT wiki guy and I were IMing back and forth like a bunch of dweebs when it was all done...it was pretty silly).
- As you may also have noticed, the site had a bit of an issue yesterday. What initially was intended to be a quick security fix from MediaWiki ended up being a big downtime. We were able to get everything back up without any loss of data. In fact, the only minor change that came of it was a version rollback from 1.12.0.1 to 1.12.0 (which doesn't visibly affect the site). From what I understand at this time, the issues yesterday had to do with the security fix not playing nice with our caching/netscaling. We'll be doing some follow-ups on Monday to see what we can do to prevent stuff like this from happening in the future. I'm sorry for the wiki withdrawals you guys had to go through during the downtime. I totally understand how that goes. Whenever the wiki's having issues, I feel like someone pacing around in the waiting room of a doctor's office :)
- We are actively looking into when we'll be upgrading the site to the next version of MediaWiki. Right now, the versions are in a weird holding pattern. They're on a stable 1.13.2 release, but the juicy 1.14 version (which adds all kinds of awesome functionality) has actually been running on all of the Wikimedia sites since July. I'm not positive when the stable version of 1.14 release will be available since they're flipped to a system of rolling integration with quarterly snapshot releases. Long story short, version 1.13.2 doesn't really offer a lot of new and exciting things. It's a pretty big task to upgrade this site because of it's size and massive importance to the game, so we're pondering whether it may just be better to wait for 1.14 rather than go through the long process of upgrading the development site/testing/taking the site down for maintenance/etc. If anyone has any really compelling arguments why we should push for 1.13, let me know and I'll toss them into the discussions.
- As I mentioned in one of my talk page replies, I'm actively working with Regina and several other folks to get a good set of answers to the questions that were raised on my talk page about the ArenaNet namespace, suggestions, skill feedback pages, and other topics on that subject vein. Everything in that thread was passed along in an email to a large number of people, and that spurred a few big meetings on the topics. The subject actually branches out a lot further than you'd initially realize, so it's taken a while to get everything ready for comment. We definitely didn't forget, though. I don't have an exact timeframe for when the response will get back up on the site here, but I just wanted to let you know that it's coming.
- I saw the proposal you guys had to change the logo of the site for Halloween. I really dig the idea (I don't need much convincing on Halloween stuff. It's my favorite holiday), so I mentioned it to Regina and AJ. We'll see what we can do ;) ;)
Anyways, that gives you guys some information about recent happenings. I'll make it an active goal to get back to commenting more during the week, or on certain days at the very least. As I've said before, I always check the site throughout the day (I'm an RC junkie too, I admit it). Sometimes it's just hard to get to replying to things quickly, since a lot of the questions I get require input from other people and a fair amount of thought before I can answer. And don't worry. I still promise that I'll get back to renders someday...hehe.
Thanks for being awesome, though, guys. We're coming up on 17,000 articles. That's a pretty amazing accomplishment, and really says a lot about the incredible devotion everyone here has for the game and the wiki itself. I'm really looking forward to what the future brings for both wikis. I love being a part of this community and just wanted to say (since I'm in a sappy Friday mood) that all the hard work everyone does is really appreciated :)
Have an awesome weekend!
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