The wiki is still slow, but usable.

I don’t foresee this changing anytime soon.

Hopefully once we do the maintenance thing, we’ll see better results, now that we know how we need to better optimize the server.

So edit we all!

The “Apollo” server for Battlestar Wiki will be down for scheduled maintenance on Sunday, April 1st, which will include an upgrade to Apache 2.2.

And, no, this is not an April Fools joke. As far as we know, the Colonials don’t have an April and they don’t do jokes on that day. Again, if they had that day in the first place.

Shane’s Appendage: What we are doing is basically upgrading the server by reformatting the server and removing cPanel. We think we can get better results removing cPanel from the system and just using stand-alone server software for better speed results. We expect at least several days of down time — use the Case Orage blog for updates. This has been a planned maintenance for about two weeks now. We decided that after season 3 was over that we were going to do this. The database is safe from destruction since it is on a totally different server, however we will take all the precautions to backup the look and feel of the wiki before we do anything.

At the moment, all @battlestarwiki.org email address are down. We thought we get it up in a day or so but problems, as usual, have slowed down our efforts. If there are any problems, that need contact with myself or Joe, please leave a note on the blogs, administrator page (notice board), or post a comment on this blog post.

Ok, sorry for the pun, but I was recently contacted by a representative of UGO, who notified me that their “Who’s a Cylon?” feature at UGO.com Film/TV featured references to our Wiki throughout. Needless to say, this is frakking cool.

What’s even better is that we have fans at the UGO offices, which only goes to show that the hard work of our contributors is paying off and being widely recognized from many different sources.

So much for ordinary fan sites, eh?

Feel free to check out the “Who’s a Cylon?” feature here.

To our contributors, I’d like to thank you for all the hard work and time you put into making this wiki what it is! Enjoy!

So say we all!

Well, I found a fix for the speed issues. Apparently, the PHP accelerator was turned off somehow, probably when the server was being configured, I imagine. I have reactivated it and there is a noticeable increase in the speed and responsiveness of the wiki.

So say we all.

We’ve been discovered. The Cylons have finally found our quaint little blog and have attempted to post their propaganda in the form of comment spam. Using the excellent modification to wordpress, SpamKarma2, we have managed to intercept these communications and stop them from being shown to our citizens. A few managed to get through the other day which I manually removed but so far it seems to be holding up ok. If you notice spam anywhere which hasn’t been auto deleted then please let one of the blog admins know. Thanks.

The lockdown discussed earlier has ended.

Judging by the amount of connections, the wiki is still being visited by many thousands of users. However, given the responsiveness of the wiki, I have removed the wiki-wide editing lockdown.

Given the amount of traffic we have incurred, I only foresee even more increased traffic during and after the final episode of the season airs.

Also, on Sunday, March 25th the wiki will be locked around 6:30 P.M. ET instead of 8 P.M. ET as neither myself nor Shane will be available at 8 P.M.

So edit we all!

While the server has yet to crash and burn, we are experiencing record activity on the wiki.

I do not foresee editing being enabled until 8 A.M. to 10 A.M. ET on Monday the 19th. Even after this, I expect the wiki to be slow and may even have to protect “Crossroads, Part I” from editing even after the site-wide lockdown.
A definite decision will be made when I survey the situation Monday morning, after I wake up from my much-needed rest.

So say we all.

It’s back up. One of the log files was above 2GB. That has now been disabled as it was just a log file. I am assuming that this also was the cause of the 403 errors as it was happening right before it did happen. Hopefully everything should be solved.

Right now, there are some minor issues with people pulling up a “403 permission denied” page when loading some pages of the wiki.

To “fix” this, simply wait a few seconds then do a hard-reload (Ctrl-Shift-R or Ctrl-Shift-F5) and it should correct itself.

The issue is presently being diagnosed and we have no ETA on when the minor issue will be identified. Thank you.

The administrators and I have been debating about whether or not to lock the entire wiki during Sunday’s airing of “Crossroads, Part I“. As frequent visitors would know, we have had to lock down the pages of the episodes currently airing to minimize the potential downfalls of the wiki getting overloaded with people rushing to add information. Given the wide-scale importance of this episode and the possible amount of changes as a result, we would rather have an “read-only” wiki so that people can still read information about the show

If the heavy spoilers are any indication, there will be a lot going on during these last two episodes. Therefore, I have made a decision: starting at 8:00pm Eastern Time (ET), the entire wiki will be in lock down on Sunday March 18th and March 25th 2007. The duration of the lockdown will be determined after the airing of the encore, which would be 2 AM ET of March 19th and 26th 2007.continue reading this entry »

A minor exploit in mediawiki was fixed today. It pertained to a registered user being able to create other user accounts. I’ve revoked this ability, as it is unnecessary and could be exploited by spammers.

As I said, it was a minor thing. No biggie.