User:Stephane Lo Presti/News/January 2014-December 2015

Wiki "at risk" period on July 8th - July 1st, 2015

Hi everyone,

We'll be doing some configuration changes on the wiki on Wednesday July 8th at 10AM Pacific Time. We're tweaking caching mechanisms to see whether we can improve the situation and avoid the downtime issues we had last week (the update notes overloaded the wiki servers). This should be a fairly transparent maintenance but it's possible that people will be seeing incorrect information during this process.

Thanks!

Upcoming maintenance of the wikis on October 1st - September 23, 2014

Hi everyone,

Software upgrade

We're finally ready to deploy the MediaWiki software version 1.23.2! This will happen on Wednesday 1st at 10AM Pacific Time (5PM UTC, 6PM in Great Britain, 7PM in France and Germany). The maintenance is expected to last up to 90 minutes and the wiki will be unavailable during its duration.

Wynthyst memorial

Don't forget to share you thoughts and memories of Wynthyst on her memorial page:

Guild_Wars_Wiki:Wynthyst_memorial

Thanks again and again for making this wiki the greatest source of GW information and the best community! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 18:09, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Quick update - September 10, 2014

Hi everyone,

I've got some fresh news for the wiki community. Feel free to discuss these on the relevant sections of my talkpage.

Software upgrade

We've been working for a while now on preparing to upgrade the wiki software. This has been a long and tenuous path because we're putting in place a process to test and bring these kinds of upgrades on a regular basis. But we're at the end of it!

We'll be upgrading the MediaWiki software to version 1.23.2 and Semantic MediaWiki to version 2.0. This will bring tons of little improvements with the tools that some of you use and fix a few SMW bugs. I'll post again here when we have confirmed the date of the maintenance.

Wynthyst memorial

Don't forget to share you thoughts and memories of Wynthyst on her memorial page:

Guild_Wars_Wiki:Wynthyst_memorial

I'm glad that IGN was able to talk about it thanks to Colin: http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/09/05/the-people-who-live-forever-in-the-games-they-loved

Thanks everyone for continuing to make this wiki the awesome site and community that it is! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 17:37, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Wynthyst memorial - July 9, 2014

Hi everyone,

I'd like to inform everyone about this memorial page that we created for Wynthyst, who's been very influential in the wiki community and we have all been saddened to learn about the news:

Wynthyst memorial

Feel free to contribute with a few words in her memory at the bottom of this page if you knew her.

Thanks.

Wiki maintenance on Thursday May 29 at 12PM Pacific - May 27, 2014

Hi everyone,

On Thursday 29th May at 12 PM Pacific Time, we’ll be performing maintenance on the wiki servers. This maintenance is expected to last about 6 hours and the wikis will not be available during that period of time. The goal of that maintenance is to update the software and reconfigure the hardware of some part of the wiki infrastructure. While we’ve already performed upgrades “quietly” (without any user-facing visible impact) on some part of this infrastructure, it is unfortunately not possible in this case and we have to take the wiki offline to perform this operation. We’re performing these series of upgrades to our infrastructure to make sure that it is up-to-date and allow us to then perform the series of software upgrades to MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki.

If you do see issues after the maintenance, please report them on the Guild Wars 2 social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and Google+). As I'm out after this maintenance, you won't be able to contact me via my talkpage but there'll be someone to relay any problem to our engineer. Note that the Guild Wars 2 forums will also not be available during that maintenance.

Let me know if you have questions or comments, thanks.

Wiki maintenance postponed - May 14, 2014

Hi everyone,

Due to timing and resource constraints, we have to postpone the maintenance. We'll announce the new date and time when we have the details.

Thanks.

Wiki maintenance on Wednesday May 14 at 12PM Pacific - May 12, 2014

Hi everyone,

On Wednesday 14th May at 12 PM Pacific Time, we’ll be performing maintenance on the wiki servers. This maintenance is expected to last about 6 hours and the wikis will not be available during that period of time. The goal of that maintenance is to update the software and reconfigure the hardware of some part of the wiki infrastructure. While we’ve already performed upgrades “quietly” (without any user-facing visible impact) on some part of this infrastructure, it is unfortunately not possible in this case and we have to take the wiki offline to perform this operation. We’re performing these series of upgrades to our infrastructure to make sure that it is up-to-date and allow us to then perform the series of software upgrades to MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki.

If you do see issues after the maintenance, please report them on the Guild Wars 2 social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and Google+). As I'm out after this maintenance, you won't be able to contact me via my talkpage but there'll be someone to relay any problem to our engineer. Note that the Guild Wars 2 forums will also not be available during that maintenance.

Let me know if you have questions or comments, thanks.

Wiki maintenance (User database split) on Wednesday April 2nd at 10AM Pacific - March 28, 2014

Hi,

If you’ve been editing the Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 official wikis, you know that you only have one account across both wikis. This will change on Wednesday April 2nd at 10AM Pacific when we’ll be running a maintenance to split the wiki user databases of these 2 English wikis (non-English wikis will be unaffected). This maintenance is expected to last about 10 minutes.

When the maintenance is completed, players with existing accounts on these wikis will effectively have 2 accounts, one of each with the same name, passwords and settings, and future changes to each of these accounts (e.g. preferences) will be independent from each other. Players who create an account on either wiki will not have an account on the other English wiki.

The goal of that operation is to remove the dependency of the GW2 wiki on this part of the GW wiki, so that future changes can be prepared more easily for us. For example, Semantic MediaWiki is only installed on the GW2 wiki, so it'll allow us to prepare the next update (to version 1.19) without having to worry about the dependency on the GW wiki database.

If you do see issues after the maintenance, please report them to us on our social media channels Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the GW2 forums. As I'm out next week, you won't be able to contact me via my talkpage but there'll be someone to relay any problem to our engineer.

Let me know if you have any question or comment, Thanks.

Update about our work on the availability issues - March 13, 2014

Hi,

I've got a quick update on the availability issues I posted about yesterday. We're not so sure now that image upload is a probable cause, because the issue occured when there was no image upload. For reference, the issues we've seen on our graphs occured on the following occasions (for about 10 minutes except today):

• Tuesday 11 March at around 12:30PM (Pacific Time)
• Tuesday 11 March at around 1:30PM (Pacific Time)
• Wednesday 12 March at around 8:30AM (Pacific Time)
• Wednesday 12 March at around 9:30AM (Pacific Time)
• Wednesday 12 March at around 1PM (Pacific Time)
• Wednesday 12 March at around 1:45PM (Pacific Time)
• Wednesday 12 March at around 3PM (Pacific Time)
• Thursday 13 March at around 7:30AM (Pacific Time)

We're going to make a quick configuration change on a part of the wiki backend to see if it alleviates this problem. This change will happen today at 4PM (Pacific Time) and should only affect people using the wikis for a very brief time. If you do see issues, please report them to us on our social medias Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Thanks.

Update about our work and availability issues - March 12, 2014

Hi everyone,

To break a bit the pattern of silence, I'd like to let everyone know the work we're doing behind the scenes to make our wikis better. This is mainly infrastructure and backend work at this point, so barely visible to most editors and not impacting players "directly". The goal is to improve reliability, resilience and management of our wikis and their infrastructure.

First we've built better test environments that allow us to streamline update and management. And the first application of this is that we're in the final stages of testing a user table split for the GW and GW2 English wikis (which currently use the same user table stored on the GW database). This will decouple user account creation for these 2 wikis (non-English wikis will not be affected), but should not change anything for players who already have an account on those wikis apart from the fact that they'll technically have 2 accounts (one on each wiki) that are almost exactly the same. I'll post more information and an announcement about when the maintenance for this will happen at a later time.

Once we've used and finalized this update flow, we'll be able to push updates in a more manageable (and hopefully frequent) way. Once the database split has been done on the live wikis, we'll be focusing on 2 things: fixing a reliability issue (see below), and upgrading first the Semantic MediaWiki software (to a much newer version) and then the MediaWiki software.

Last, but not the least, we've seen over the last few days the 5 wikis becoming unavailable for rather short periods of time. Although we’re currently not seeing a pattern from the data we’re seeing, we’ll be investigating what’s causing this. We’ve once seen this happen as there was a long sequence of “frequent” (2 per minute maybe?) uploads of pictures on the German wiki. It may not be the direct cause but we’re not sure that we can easily/quickly determine the actual cause. In the meantime, it’d be super useful if the wikis could investigate whether an AbuseFilter rule can be created to limit the rate of upload of pictures. If this is done, please let me know so that I can circulate it around to all wikis and that our engineer’s investigation.

As usual, feel free to drop a line on my talkpage if you have questions, comments or anything to discuss! Thanks.