Wiki back online!

[Varti]

I'm happy to announce that the OESF Wiki is finally back online. It can be now reached from here:

https://www.oesf.org/wiki/

You can reach it also by clicking on the new OESF Wiki link at the top of the main forum page.

I have upgraded MediaWiki to the last released version (1.23.17) which still supports the old version of PHP installed on our ibiblio account (5.3.28). This version of MediaWiki is an LTS one (Long Term Support) which was supported until last May; I'll ask for a more uptodate version of PHP to be installed, then I'll update MediaWiki to the latest, supported version.
If any of you had a Wiki account, please try to login and report any problem, if you find any.
The pages sometimes take ages to load, I remember this being a problem also in the past; I'll see if the PHP and MediaWiki upgrade will make any difference, and eventually find how to speed up the loading times.
I have changed the Wiki's logo to a new, temporary one, which I quickly made in a couple of minutes (and it shows, heh). Not the prettiest logo in the world, but personally I already prefer it over the old one, but let me know if you still prefer the old one, or if you'd like to contribute with a new one.

The whole Wiki layout requires an overhaul, too: the chapters should be better organised, all the parts related to the Zaurus should be more clearly labelled, the new wiki made by koan should be integrated, and so on. There's also a lot of spam which will have to be located and removed.

In short, lots of work still to be done, but we are getting there. Any volunteer will be warmly welcomed!

Varti

[Varti]

I have done a bit of research on the current status of the Wiki pages. As it stands, we currently have 6,476 registered users, 8 of them being admins, so I believe all the remaining ones are actually spambots. Unfortunately it is not possible to just delete them without breaking the database, since there are other fields in the database pointing to those user fields, including all the spamming pages which are still stored, even if they are not visible on the wiki anymore. The best that could be done is by installing a couple of extensions and merge all those accounts into one, reserved for spammers, but all the user info and the deleted pages would be still stored.

My plan is therefore to wait for the PHP upgrade, store the old database on my laptop, wipe the old wiki database and create a new one using the latest MediaWiki, then proceed with the migration of the old pages, adapting and consolidating all the information into a new layout. This will require a lot of effort, but I really can't wait to have all the info like "what distros can be run on my Z and where to download them", "what accessories that can be bought nowadays work on the Z" and so on, in one place. The database wiping and rebuilding might fix the loading slowness of the wiki, too. We could also move the whole wiki to a GitHub account, but in that case I'd miss some useful MediaWiki extensions like ReplaceText (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Replace_Text) or MultiUpload (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MultiUpload).

Varti

[koan]

Good work.

Another spam page to cull: link

[Varti]

Thanks, spam page now deleted.

Varti

[zaurusrex]

Thanks, spam page now deleted.

Varti

Glad to see the OESF Wiki return. Many thanks for your hard work to reorganize OESF.

The portal also looks good as a starting page!