O5 Command

Hey guys,

I'll be starting this thread/post to give a basic outline of what I did and when. I'll most likely post requests for information/access/permissions here and post up any relevant information.

Feel free to put up what you would like to see in the new site, and any possible options we can have of replicating what we have here at wikidot.

-Dr_Kens

For reference: Site is at http://www.scp-foundation.com/

11/26/2011
Basic update first: Set up a Google Analytics account to track what sort of bandwidth we're using up and how many unique visitors we get. From there we can decide if we want to use free hosting with it's limited bandwidth or pay monthly for a larger host.

Optimally, we should wait a week or so to get an idea of how much traffic we get.

I also set up a dedicated gmail account for the site: SCPFoundationSite [at] gmail.com

You might as well have Google/GMail run the site's e-mail while you're at it. Just look it up and you should be able to get GMail to act as the domain's mailserver. I don't know if GoDaddy would support that.

And…how are you going to analyze the traffic of an empty site with parked ads? I'm confused.

Right, um, a progress report. OK, turns out that the forum extensions available for MediaWiki are more or less crap, so I looked at integrating with external standalone fora. There is an existing extension to authenticate using phpBB IDs that works (sort of, but still better than any other extension, i.e. it works at all), so at the moment, the most viable option for the new site looks like MediaWiki integrated with phpBB.

Even as the best option, though, it's gonna take a bunch of programmers working on a bunch of PHP code to get the new site to do what we want it to do. This is unlikely to be a major issue, given the size and composition of the user base— we'd just need to announce the search for PHP programmers and go from there.

The bigger question, though, is this: does anybody still care? Now that the angst over both SOPA and the thread-deletion incident have died down a bit, is migrating the site still on anyone's wish list, let alone a priority?

I think we really need to sit down and look at what this is actually going to give us. Yeah, being independent from Wikidot would be really nice. But from my perspective at least, it's not worth the kind of work and changes we'd be dealing with moving to a MediaWiki-based site. At this point, going with what we're currently planning is going to make everything far more convoluted than just staying here.

1. The MediaWiki comment system just really isn't appropriate for us. It's ugly, it's badly formatted, and it's generally weird. With the amount of use discussion pages get, I think we need a better solution.
2. We're going to lose integrated forum capability. Doesn't sound like much, but we do need a forum, and without having it on the wiki, that's another website/forum directory/whatever to put together and operate.
3. Ratings. The site runs on a positive/negative rating system. This is a bigger problem than it sounds. From what I've been told, most MediaWiki rating systems go on a 0-10 basis, which will make administration more difficult.
4. On-site communication. I don't think I've seen this one brought up before, but as annoying as it's been lately, the Wikidot message system is useful. I don't know if there's a similar thing with MediaWiki for members to privately message each other.
5. All the other stuff that's dependent on the wiki but not directly attached. By that I mean everything from IRC bots to connected wikis (the various RPs, the GOC wiki, The Library…). What gets done with all of that?

So here's a wiki for the migration to the new site. It's still pretty bare bones, but it has the major obstacles we'd have to overcome and can provide a framework for discussing the development of the new site. It's also going to serve as a place to direct non-staff who want to help out (and we're going to need them, unless someone on staff suddenly develops PHP coding skills). If you're interested, go apply for membership so you can add your thoughts.

And now that the migration wiki is semi-presentable, I'll work on a Help Wanted post to the user community for PHP coders and whomever else wants to help.