For those wondering why the Wiki was in its “up-and-down” mode on Saturday—no, you didn’t miss the airing of a new episode of BSG. (The show’s still over, last we checked, sans “The Plan.”) It was merely Super Agent Shane working diligently on our Apollo server, upgrading it with the newest security patches, releases of PHP, MediaWiki extensions… and all that wonderful good stuff that you probably don’t really care about.

However, just to let you know, the only major change you’re likely to see is the sidebars are all uniform now. That is because the dynamic sidebar extension we were using, SidebarEx, presently no longer functions under the current MW installation we have.

Everything else works fine. (At least we believe so, anyway. If you disagree, just shoot us an e-mail letting us know of any issues you’re having!)

Tonight I upgraded this blog to 2.7, updated and installed new plugins, and cleared out all the current subscribed users that were part of this site. This last part you must be wondering about…. about half of the users were bots. I didn’t have time to look over each one, but I did look to see if any had posted any comments. Since there was none, I decided that I go ahead and delete them all. There is a new registration system in place as the old one didn’t do much for us.

So if you want to sign up, go back and do so. You will need to confirm your email address within 5 days otherwise the account will be purged from the system.

I found a script that I didn’t knew exist in the MediaWiki maintenance folder for such a long time. The script easily changed everybody’s old and invalid skins to the skins that are now active. Because I didn’t know anyone preference I have reset everyone back to the default “Battlestar” skin.

With that being done you shouldn’t have anymore errors when trying to log into the wiki. Sorry for the very very long delay. There was over 1500 users using old skins.. and that was just on the English wiki.

That’s right folks. This morning been all about getting the servers in check and running smoothly for the final season of Battlestar Galactica. As I speak this is what is going on right now and what has been completed.

• Battlestar Forum – Upgraded to 3.8.0.
• Battlestar Blog – Upgraded to 2.7.0.
• Battlestar Wiki – Currently uploading and upgraded to version 1.13.3

The wiki is what is taking the longest. If you are at the wiki right now trying to edit or post something, you will notice my sign while I do it so I can work without wondering what is going on. There are other things that will be going on soon and as Joe has already pointed out some things have already been done.

The forum and the blog will get their 3.0 makeover before Jan. 16 with new designs and new “perks” before the start of the season. The wiki itself has already gotten those, minus the fact that I need to create the heads for the light skin versions. The blog (the one your reading right now) will get the biggest design change. So stay tuned for that. If you notice any problems, after the upgrading is complete please post in the areas designated for that site so we can keep track of all the changes and problems.

That’s about it. Take are and have a happy 4.5 season!

As a result of removing the monobook series skins, users using those skins will see a “blank page”. We’re working on resetting everyone’s preferences, but in the meantime please use the following workaround, as Gordon suggested. Here’s the fix:

You can fix the problem by going to this URL while logged in:
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Preferences&useskin=battlestar
This will take you to your preferences page and temporarily override the skin. Once there, select one of the available skins and save your changes, which will update your preferences in our database.

We apologize for the inconvenience and hope you have had a spendid New Yahren so far.

Good hunting!

As you might have noticed, we’ve disabled any “Monobook”-based skins, namely BsgBook and BsgMonobook. For those who don’t know, the Monobook skin is essentially the same skin that Wikipedia uses by default. Given the pitfalls of having those skins during our unique aesthetic changes, and given the weaknesses of those skins in general, we’ve decided to get rid of them.

In place of a lighter skin, we are developing the “Battlestar Light” skin, which uses manilla and light brown colors. Right now, it is mostly functional, barring changes that need to be done to the header and the like.

You can see how the skin looks by clicking here. And, if you’re logged in, you can change that skin by going to Special:Preferences, clicking the Skin tab, selecting “Battlestar_Fluid” and hitting the “Save” button.

Right now, the Battlestar Light skin only has a fixed width format, and therefore isn’t designed for either widescreens or for a “fluid” look. However, given that the skin is based off of Shane’s wonderful modifications of the “Gumax” skin by Paul Gu, implementing those features should not be a major issue once final cosmetic changes have been implemented.

You will also note that we’ve began “Galactiguising” message boxes and infoboxes with a “cut corners” motif. That’ll take a bit of work, but we should have that finished by the end of tonight (on the East Coast).

Have a Happy Frakkin’ New Year!

We updated to a new version of “CheckUser” extension that required editing of the database tables. Not realizing it, I forgot to do it for the other wikis as well. All wikis should now be editable. Sorry for the long long delay!

In talking to a few people who have not been able to access the website since our move, it appears that Plusnet internet service provider—serving the United Kingdom—has an issue with The Planet’s DNS entries. The Planet, as you may be aware, is home to our two web servers. Since Plusnet users can’t access the website due to malformed or incorrect DNS entries, people have not been able to access the website from that ISP.

Plusnet and The Planet are working on a solution right now, but I have no ETA on when Plusnet people can access the website without using web anonymizers or web proxies that do not suffer this problem.

This will also be posted on the Case Orange blog here, since that blog is hosted on a server in the UK, and thus not affected by the DNS woes of Plusnet. So tell your UK friends.

Updates as we get them, thank you.

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.

It took two days, but I have transfered all files from the current apollo to the new server. I have asked Joe to start the DNS change. Hopefully everything should be good when changing over. I expect a few problems based on permissions, but that’s about it. Nothing we can’t handle.

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

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!