[HN Gopher] Miraheze to shut down
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Miraheze to shut down
Author : tech234a
Score : 58 points
Date : 2023-06-16 19:33 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meta.miraheze.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (meta.miraheze.org)
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Was doing some reverse engineering recently and wanted a quick
| wiki to put stuff on in case others wanted to join in and
| contribute findings about the same product. Looked around and
| Miraheze seemed to be the only real option for free wiki hosting
| (I tried another one first, don't remember what it was called,
| but it was bad).
|
| Experience was pretty good adding the pages but then I went back
| 6 months later to try and consult my wiki. It had been deleted
| per an inactivity policy. Fair enough... they did warn me -- my
| own fault for not checking the email account I'd signed up with.
|
| Anyway, I'm sad to see them go because it was a great service and
| I don't know of any replacement.
| bursted wrote:
| There have been semi-regular backups of all Miraheze wikis for
| a long time, if you lost your content, I think, with luck, you
| could find it archived:
|
| https://archive.org/search?query=miraheze
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Yeah, NotAracham from Miraheze was really helpful and pointed
| me to this page: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/User:NotArach
| am/Wiki_Recovery... but I went through it and it doesn't seem
| like my wiki was captured on archive.org unfortunately. The
| .tar backups on archive.org only go up to 2021.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| These kinds of sites always just end up as a paste/upload bin of
| the abhorrent content that you could possibly imagine. I don't
| think it's possible to run this kind of site anymore.
| cxr wrote:
| This is a bummer.
|
| Miraheze is/was a wiki farm that provided a free Mediawiki-based
| wiki to pretty much anyone who was able to articulate a reason
| and fill out a request to be given one. This was invaluable in an
| age where the term "wiki" has become so debased that "a bunch of
| Markdown files in a GitHub repo" is, against all good taste and
| reason, considered a wiki. Miraheze was supported by donations,
| which is almost certainly why it's shutting down. There's no
| reason I can see that it shouldn't have allowed you to set up an
| annual bill-me cycle, but it didn't. And now it's going away,
| unfortunately. It would've be a good candidate for a pay-what-
| you-want model that incorporated usage-based pricing.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Thanks for explaining. This announcement joins a long list of
| shutdown announcements where I find out a thing exists by its
| shutdown announcement, which neglects to explain why I should
| care about it.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _...long term sustainability problems, financial situation..._
|
| Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance says they
| have more money right now than they had at the start of the year
| and twice as much as they had the same time last year.
|
| > _Owen and Alexander are fully committed to seeing the sustained
| growth of Miraheze_
|
| > _Compared to where we were before 2019, Miraheze is in a much
| better financial position, has drastically improved its legal
| standing and compliance and has taken strides to improve the
| technological stack behind the project through the right levels
| of investment being open for technical volunteers to harness._
|
| So, which is it? Are you shutting down or fully committed to
| sustained growth? Are you now unsustainable or better financially
| than ever before?
|
| Nothing about this announcement makes sense to an outside
| observer who has no idea what "taking into account recent events"
| means.
| duskwuff wrote:
| There's some further context at
| https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Stateme...
| -- specifically:
|
| > To clarify a bit on the reason behind this choice, the
| technical team behind Miraheze is currently 3 people (5 if you
| include two unprocessed resignations). Two of those three
| people (myself include) are currently burned out on the project
| and wish to step away.
|
| There's also some discussion of possibly handing over the
| project.
| golph wrote:
| Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these
| minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/202306
| 07-Minut...
| joecool1029 wrote:
| I had figured it was not exactly technical burnout in
| running Mediawiki installs but regulatory burnout in
| following Euro GDPR/cookie banner/bullshit-of-the-now
| requirements. Some of them are easy but the rest phase in
| once you reach a certain scale of users (which it sounds
| like they probably have).
| [deleted]
| KomoD wrote:
| Yeah what is up with that...
| tallies wrote:
| My impression from reading their Discord server yesterday is
| this:
|
| - Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki
| hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge
|
| - Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free
| wiki host called WikiTide
|
| - The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided
| to call it quits
|
| - There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group
| of volunteers
|
| FWIW I had a horrible experience using Miraheze last year:
|
| - September: I created my wiki
|
| - November: Miraheze had an error with a drive and over 25% of
| their wikis were lost. It took them weeks to admit the extent
| of this error and that they had no plans to use a professional
| recovery service
|
| - Early December: I recreated my wiki and rewrote it (250+
| articles)
|
| - Late December: Miraheze recovered the back-ups they thought
| they had lost and said they would merge the new and old
| versions of recreated wikis. Somehow, due to 'someone
| unplugging a hard drive', they lost all of the content I'd
| written since November.
|
| I've since learned my lesson about making local back ups, but
| come on. It was clear there had been tons of technical and
| communication problems for a long time.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| One job! This sounds like an adversarial attack against those
| who would host wikis on their site.
| culi wrote:
| My wiki also got affected by the harddrive. They send out a
| message with everything they knew pretty much immediately
| even to people not affected by the error and continued to
| update as they learned more. Not sure why you seem to think
| it took "weeks". For a volunteer-run service they've actually
| been quite on top of it and compassionate in my experience
| helf wrote:
| [dead]
| Quarrel wrote:
| Certainly it is hard to make it gel on the money side.
|
| From their frontpage:
|
| > If 550 of Miraheze's 300,000+ users gave only PS12 (16.35
| USD) once a year, Miraheze would exceed its budget
| requirements.
|
| So not for want of PS6,600 / year, presumably?
|
| Labour's of love like this can just burn you out. Building the
| right sustaining community is hard, but it also seems like
| they're too big to just fizzle out like this? A shame.
| sterlind wrote:
| Sad news. I started a wiki on Miraheze years ago, that became a
| fledgling community. It became inactive after a few years but I
| really appreciated the no nonsense, ad-free, vanilla MediaWiki
| hosting. They provided an important service for non-profits like
| mine.
| Tomte wrote:
| That's sad.
|
| Some time ago there was some huge fallout/fight visible on their
| Discord which I did not understand (it was all referencing some
| internal Wiki, mailing lists etc.).
|
| That seem to be the "recent events" on first position in the
| announcement.
| gtirloni wrote:
| They mention resignations and burnout but no further details:
| https://www.avid.wiki/wiki/Forum:IMPORTANT:_AVID_is_moving_t...
| kruuuder wrote:
| This is the first time I'm hearing about this platform. Should I
| have been aware of it before?
| Arnavion wrote:
| I only knew about it because a popular mod Space Exploration
| for the video game Factorio has its wiki hosted on it. Actually
| even then I never went up to miraheze.org to look at the rest
| of the site.
| KomoD wrote:
| Doesn't look like anything special, just free mediawiki
| hosting, powered by donations
| foobarbecue wrote:
| That's pretty special, though. A free web service without ads
| or other BS. Please let me know if you find a good
| replacement for Miraheze.
| culi wrote:
| media wiki's a particularly complicated thing to host and I
| don't think there's anything else quite like MiraHeze
| currently. It's been used by everything from video game wikis
| to casual conlangers to even some state governments so I'd
| say it's a pretty big deal
| antisthenes wrote:
| Have all the fan wikis now consolidated under the horrible ad-
| ridden Fandom brand wikis now?
| dublinben wrote:
| There's an excellent alternative front-end for wikis hosted
| there called BreezeWiki.[0] There's a mirror available at the
| very convenient antifandom.com which allows you to easily view
| a better version of any Fandom wiki page you've landed on.
|
| [0] https://docs.breezewiki.com/Links.html#%28part._.Mirrors%29
| bursted wrote:
| I hate how in search results Fandom is always above the better
| wiki about the same topic, that are independent or on better
| wiki farms like Miraheze. Fandom's SEO is brutal. They've
| slowly crippled the website and fucked over the regular users,
| but that doesn't affect them does it? Pinned at the top of
| Google there are always more clueless losers cascading in, they
| can't lose.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Worse yet: Fandom has a policy of not deleting inactive
| wikis, even if the community has deliberately abandoned them
| to move elsewhere, and will treat any attempt to advertise
| that another wiki has been created as vandalism and will
| block users (even wiki admins!) who attempt to do so.
|
| This means that, if a community does decide to move their
| wiki off of Fandom, they have an uphill battle to "beat"
| their old wiki in search results. In many cases, Google will
| treat the new wiki as duplicate content and suppress it in
| search results unless pages are substantially rewritten.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Even worse, Google actively penalises wikis that choose to
| fork from Fandom.
| ignitionmonkey wrote:
| I ran into this issue recently after I realised the Zelda
| Wiki split again after the Gamepedia/Fandom merger due to
| disagreements. Now there are two Zelda Wikis that look almost
| identical, but it's clear the split wiki[1] is the original
| in terms of its staff and layout, and Fandom[2]'s is like an
| afterimage.
|
| Looking at Tears of the Kingdom pages (which released well
| after the wiki split), Fandom is clearly falling behind, but
| it'll likely still hold onto top position and waste people's
| time. If Fandom had the wiki "spirit", it would close its
| wiki and maybe even redirect to help Zelda Wiki continue to
| grow. But they did pay a lot for Gamepedia, so money
| understandably gets in the way of that.
|
| This situation doesn't seem unique. There's an extension
| which redirects/rewrites Fandom to indie wikis.[3] It has
| 4000+ users which is more than I'd expect.
|
| [1]: https://zeldawiki.wiki/wiki/Main_Page [2]:
| https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page [3]:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/indie-wiki-
| bu...
| duskwuff wrote:
| There's a nontrivial number of gaming wikis moving over to
| wiki.gg.
| no_time wrote:
| Not all. There are still some independent holdouts like
| https://yugipedia.com/ and some decent wiki hosts like
| https://wiki.gg/
|
| Gamepedia being folded into Fandom is still a massive shame
| though. From gold to septic waste...
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Wiki.gg was setup by the folks that used to run gamepedia,
| fwiw.
| tekla wrote:
| Oh goddamnit, I run a Wiki for a non profit off of Miraheze. Any
| alternatives that might be recommended?
| ilaksh wrote:
| There might be a Docker image you could use with Digital Ocean.
|
| MediaWiki is also in any cPanel via Softaculous.
| https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/cpanel/install-m...
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(page generated 2023-06-16 23:00 UTC)