Just received an e-mail from ACS’s technical support saying that the error that prevented their userbase from accessing the WIki has been fixed.

As for others from other ISPs that may be affected, please know that we’re working with the affected ISPs as much as we are able.

Good hunting!

Our own DrWho42 has created a Battelstar Wiki fan page on Facebook. Check it out here!

So… apparently the Wiki Frakr is barred from being linked on MySpace. Consequently, any attempt to link to it from your MySpace profiles, posts, or bulletins will not work.

We can’t control it, but we can let you guys know about it. So tell Tom and his buddies to go frak themselves.

Now that Sci-Fi Wire has issued their low-key press release-slash-news blurb about the Battlestar auction*, I’d like to take the opportunity to formally announce Battlestar Wiki’s (and my own) involvement with it.

If you check out the Battlestar Props website, particularly the “About” section, you’ll see a familiar name there. Yes, that’s me. It’s not a Cylon copy.**

Anyway, I’ve been very, very silent about this for about a month and a half now, mainly because I had my personal doubts as to whether or not this was going to come to pass, and the fact that NBC Universal are the people behind it… Not to mention the fact that I have my own boss, PropWorx CEO Alec Peters. Afterall, everybody’s gotta serve somebody.

In any event, I’ll have much, much more to blog about—via the Battlestar Props website—when I get up to Vancouver. (Yes, I get to go to Vancouver. More on that later.) The Battlestar Props site will be

The slew of behind-the-scenes information I—and, by extension, all of you—will have access to will be tremendous, and will go up on the Wiki. A small, but influential core of volunteers have already been working on getting things prepped for all the information that’ll go online on the Battlestar Wiki, the new Props wiki (still under construction), and the Battlestar Props website. Of course, new volunteers are welcome, and you’ll likely get something out of it (DVD boxset or something like that, hell, maybe a prop, who knows), although all the volunteers are working pro bono. There might be some fame, maybe a splinter, but I’m not in it for the fame. I’m in it because I’m a fan who passionately loves—and hates, at the same time!—the show, and having funded and helped to build the Wiki, we’ve reached a plateau that very, very few fan sites will ever reach.

For me, having never dreamed something like this was ever possible, I find myself continually astonished and deeply humbled at all those who have aided us in our mission to chronicle the series.

Now, before I go off ramblin’ like an prideful father, I’m going back to the tylium mines of Carillon while I still have energy left in me to work through the night.

Updates as I get them! Good night and good luck, and thank you for your belief in us!

* The announcement was supposed to come out Friday. Or at least, that’s what we were told.
** As I am the Final Cylon (hey, I’m not in that infamous, vastly overrated “Last Supper” picture!), I do not have copies of myself available. Sorry. I’ve always been a Cylon, and have been from the start. [cue Watchtower music]

We have completed the move to our new, roomier servers. Everything is working, and most everyone should be able to access the wiki and our other websites. However, it may take as much as 48 hours (on the outside) for the new DNS entires to fully propagate.

If there are any issues, feel free to post them as a response to this blog.

Just to keep everyone appraised of the situation, we’ve determined that there’s some error that is preventing the fwrite() functions of Apache from working on our “Apollo” server, despite recompiles of Apache, PHP and its various libraries and services.

Therefore, poised with the fact that this cannot be corrected without a clean reload of the operating system (as well as an OS upgrade from RedHat 4 to RedHat 5), we’ve decided to take the opportunity to procure a new server to replace the old one. (We will still have the old server until everything is transferred to the new server, so as to make things easier for both our visitors and the maintenance staff behind-the-scenes.

This will be an in-house process, and as such there should be very little downtime. Right now, The Planet (our data host) is working on configuring the new server to our specifications. Once this is done, we’ll begin work on putting the finishing touches on it and transferring data files form the old server.

By the way, nothing on our database server will be affected in this process, as that server (”Athena”) will not be touched.

In the meantime, there is talk about retiring the “Apollo” name and renaming it on the Battlestar Forum here. If you want to help us determine whether or not we should keep the “Apollo” name, contribute to that thread.

In any event, we expect that everything will be finalized by Thursday or Friday. The only major problem that may occur is repopulating the DNS to direct the domain names (battlestarwiki.org, battlestarforum.com, et al.) to the new server instead of the old one.

If, for some reason, the servers go down, please check out our “Case Orange” blog at http://bswiki.woo-yay.net

For those of you questioning why things are slow—for instance, why you’re receiving delayed updates and (for you new users) registration information—here’s why.

We have been visited by between 20k-30k people on both Saturday and Sunday. At least the Wiki has. The Forum has definitely increased in activity, and our IRC chat on Friday night (which started at 9 P.M. ET, went well into 2 AM ET on Saturday morning!).

Just to give you an idea of how this compares, the weekend of the Season 4 premiere (”He That Believeth In Me“) saw 20k unique visitors come to the Battlestar Wiki. Now, the mid-season finale, “Revelations“, actually saw an increase in on those numbers. The difference, according to Quantcast (which directly measures visits), being about 1 to 2 thousand additional viewers.

The chart below, which you can see for yourself here, is reproduced below since I don’t want to be embarrassed a year from now when the chart gets updated and the old data pushed aside. The peaks, as you can imagine, correlate to when the episode was aired in the USA. (As you can see, the trough was Memorial Day weekend.)

Now remember when I said “30k”? Well, having recently loaded Google Analytics code into the Wiki’s template (the gizmo that generates the look of the website, otherwise known as the “front end”), they claim we have received 30k visitors. A difference of 10k from Quantcast.

I can’t compare HTBIM to Revelations traffic here, since the Google Analytics code was loaded just a week and a half ago, but here’s the chart from the “Revelations” weekend. (The popup denotes the Saturday following “Revelations”.)

A few updates on what’s happening here on our end:

• On Friday, June 13, we’ll be hosting an IRC chat at 8 P.M. ET. Check out the Battlestar Forum’s IRC information page for more details.

By the way, we didn’t get to be one of the top five finalists for “Best Website” from SyFy Portal’s Genre Awards. However, no loss there, since we’re not in it for the awards.

Good hunting!

Anyway, onto better matters that aren’t technical…

I was reading Mike Hinman’s SyFy Portal website and came across the fact that they are doing their annual SyFy Genre Awards.

Now they have a “long list” of their nominees for various categories—best actor, best actress, best episode, best whatevah—and Battlestar Wiki has made it on their long list of nominees, under the “Best Genre Website” category, along with at least 20 other sites.

If you want to read that list, go here.

SyFy Portal will be announcing the final list (which consists of five nominees per category) this Wednesday on SyFy Radio. Read more here.

There is a 98% chance of a sitewide wiki lockdown for Friday’s episode starting at 9pm EDT because of potentially huge spoilers on this episode in which information could ruin another’s viewing pleasure. We will let you know for sure Friday afternoon on what we decided to do, but right now editing will be allowed. As always, the episode page itself (The Hub) will lock down and other pages might also depending on what happens during the airing.

We have now worked in global permissions on all wikis. This allows us to setup “rights” in two different ways. Local vs. Global. Local would just be on the wiki we set it on and Global would allow you to have the same permissions if you transversed through the different languages.

There is currently no official policy on how people get assigned to this status, however one will be created at Battlestar Wiki:Global Groups on the English Wiki, where the details are being worked on on the notice board. (All sysops and users on all wikis should take part in this discussion on the notice board to form this policy. It’s extremely critical to operations.

One thing for sure is this. If you are a sponsor, your permissions will be set globally so you can view all the wikis without looking at Ads. If this is not working, please contact us on the notice board so we can fix this ASAP.

Right not if you do not select the “Remember my login on this computer” when logging on, the cookies disappear and you “logoff” as soon as you hit the refresh button or goto a new page. I have sent the error to the development team. This is a temporary fix for now until the normal process of “Login” and the cookies expires after the default time are back to working again!