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!

Guys, Gals, and Robots,

We had a brief issue with the log-in system. The fault was MediaWiki’s—apparently a PHP function was removed in their SVN for some undocumented reason, and for a reason neither Shane nor I can fathom. However, we have fixed MediaWiki’s FUBAR and the single user login should now be working, aside from the minor issue of the cookies. To work around that, please remember to check off the “Remember using this computer” before logging in!

Please shoot us any questions, comments, or concerns either via this blog or at our e-mail address.

Good hunting!

A mistap on the MediaWiki developers removed and important function that works for Centeral Auth. I re-added the function, but I will make sure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else.

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.

As the title says, we’ve got a few updates.

Anyway, the reason why access may be lagging is because we’re testing out a new method of doing database backups, as well as some redesign of the database behind the scenes. (There are a few reasons for this, and now that we have an expert on our staff who knows MySQL like the back of his hand—Michael Casadevall—things will definitely be more optimized. However, before we can get to that plateau, there’ll probably be some growing pains.

So, if you ran into any problems for a two hour stretch from 1-3 A.M., now you know why.

More at… whenever.

I call this the great crash since it was during the Hub. In any case here is the time line of events:

1. The Hub Aired
2. The Hub Ended
3. You (That’s you reading this post connect to site) times 10000000 people.
4. Me and Joe = We try to save some sanity.
5. I do something. The database indexes and data get corrupted.
6. With you all still visiting the website, have trouble testing fixes after doing some imports. So I rebooted the servers.

Anyway. Everything should be back up in running. All sites should be working and back as new (Media wiki type of course) from June 2. So we lost 5 days worth of data. I tried to recover it, but that was no good. So that’s the deal. This effected every wiki, however, no hard data files were lost on the media wiki.

Forums are up 100%.

So, “The Hub” aired and all hell broke use.

As I write this, the wiki’s down because some index files for the database were corrupted.

Don’t worry, the data is still good, but the index files are in the laborious, painstaking process of being rebuilt. Plus we have yesterday’s backups in the event they can’t be repaired. At best, we’ll lose some talk pages and minor edits.

So that’s where we’re at right now. Shane is working on supervising the rebuilding of the database indexes. Only the wikis were affected; the forum and anything not related to MediaWiki is working like a charm.

Updates as we have ‘em.

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!