User talk:SilverSide/Archive04

=Public Comments=
 * Isnt there an owner or such with access to the FTP ? why would it be so hard to upgrade to 1.5 ?
 * Backups n such. is the server backed up, who has physical access to the server, is there an article on the current "situation" of the site anywhere, etc. i hear bits and pieces about issues but no full story anywhere.
 * If the new version of the wiki can be run on the same server somehow, or an alternative server, couldnt there be a redirect made from the current to the new one? which is why you tried the index.html page i guess. CJ 06:53, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)


 * The admin and owner of the site simply got bored. He never visits, and has not responded to the last three e-mails I sent him.  How much do you know about websites?  The general fact is that for a site this large, upgrading would be simple and pretty easy, but  would take some time with the server down to update the MySQL to the new system.  Also, I doubt he has physical access to the server, unless this site is running off of his home computer (which is nigh-impossible) he will no doubt be hosting it remotely.  Anyway, if I could get access to a MySQL database I could simply make a copy of the entire site* and create a new installation of MediaWiki (1.6 beta, which I happen  to have access too) and drop the mySQL statements in there.  Problem is, that wouldn't change what's here, best we could do would be to host it at some other domain (I could get http://blizzwiki.com/ or something) and have fandyllic make the main page a redirect to that site, but there we hit a barrier again, you can't redirect to outside pages. again, not a solution.  Anyway, unless I can figure out what forign country kidnapped the admin, we are stuck at 1.3, and with only one admin at that. --  &#8465;ilver&#167;&#8465;ide|undefined 07:13, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)
 * Some things that might be done, you could do a whois on who owns this domain, find his address, and perhaps if lucky his phone number. i doubt the domain is free,, so he must still be paying the bill for it. On whichever remote location the server does run, as is probable, one can presume that they manage the backups as well, this same service wouldnt be for free either.. it should be able to traceroute to the phsical location of the server and trace what center it is hosted on, contact them, and then track that to the site owner. One cant guess why he doesnt look at his email, but surely a more direct method of contacting should be possible to research... the site doesnt exist just on its own after all. Setting up a second site, second url, second server, would be 1 solution, but it would be an expensive one... as well as odd considering the one this site is currently running on is running fine and is aparently paid for... but how long? nobody knows. CJ 07:20, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)
 * 2nd location would be no problem... I have huge resources at my disposal. Anyway, a whois only shows up the same e-mail as the one he originally replied to and then stopped replying to.  I expect he just dosen't care, perhaps he is filtering us all into junk mail, I don't know.  I hesitate to send him a snail mail, and I am afraid it might also be ignored... --  &#8465;ilver&#167;&#8465;ide|undefined 07:38, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)
 * Might try sending an email from an alternative email, and snailmail.. well, why not. for the future of the site... if he is indeed paying for it and stopped caring, who knows how long the site actually has left until the domain expires? Couldnt hurt to at least write a formal letter. if ya dont send one, you'll know for sure he wont reply. CJ 07:42, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)
 * Dunno - 'll see what I can do. -- &#8465;ilver&#167;&#8465;ide|undefined 07:53, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)

Er.. contacting me in december, in the middle of various holiday crazyness and vacation, is not the best plan. From an email I just sent back to SilverSide:


 * Upgrading to 1.5 is basically done, but there is a problem -- template parsing has changed, and the way people have been using images as links to pages is now broken. People have been creating a template page with just one image, and then doing Target Page and it worked fine in 1.3.  In 1.5, the template gets expanded to wikitext first, and so you end up with [[image.png]], which doesn't work fine.  I was planning on just making some fixes to mediawiki to handle it, but I didn't want to move over and break a ton of content.

So yes, I can make the upgrade to 1.5 happen fairly instantly, but it would break a ton of pages; I'd rather not do that, and figure out a workaround/fix. --- Rustak 08:42, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)


 * The actual benefits and new features in 1.5 should outweigh a small thing like that though. Unless are are more issues CJ 08:45, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)


 * They would, except that there are a ton of pages that use that pattern, and there isn't an alternative. All the various table pages, etc., that use alliance/horde and other icons to link to their pages would be broken, and couldn't be recreated with image links.  That's pretty sucky for something that should be an easy fix.  I'll see what I can do in the next day or so; if I make no progress, well, there'll just be a lot of cleanup that needs to happen :( Rustak
 * If you would finish the update, I swear I would not sleap till I had found and fixed ever occurence of that minor error! /begs *PLEASE* upgrade! Also, check out Proposed icon - I think it's unanimous enough! -- &#8465;ilver&#167;&#8465;ide|undefined 08:52, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)


 * Is there a way to track which pages all used templates like such? And, once upgraded to 1.5 couldnt you write a hack that goes around this issue? If not, oh well, i'm sure SS will actually "enjoy" going trough it all to fix the pages. ( points above )
 * 6 vs 8 votes on the image isnt exactly "unanimous", and the final decision is still Rustak's, but image 1 does look better. CJ 08:59, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)

Let me get this straight. We don't want to do an update because it'll break links. How many links are there like the one you described, Rustak? I don't remember ever having seen any such link. So we shouldn't need a walkaround, or it'd be easy to fix each of those instances. We can deal with messed-up image links. They can be fixed easily enough, and corrected. But there are so many other issues that are messed up about 1.3. And all told, Wikipedia did it; we can too. Why is there any more discussion? (And CJ, I think the unanimity is that it needs to be changed.) Schmidt 12:44, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)


 * Yes, we can track those image links - we just have to figure out what templates use it. We can't do this, however, until the search engine is fixed, and it won't be fixed until we upgrade to 1.5 - make more sense now? and the icon thing I meant that it was unanimous that it should be changed. I have the feeling that rustak used that cause he didn't have the skills or perhaps just not the time to make something more complicated. anyway, *WHICH* one he uses is up to him, I just saying that everyone thinks it needs to be changed to one of those... --  &#8465;ilver&#167;&#8465;ide|undefined 13:10, 3 Jan 2006 (EST)


 * So basically it sounds like a circular problem. Who do we defeat it? Upgrade ASAP, work on it ASAP, and get it corrected ASAP. In the long run, it can only benefit us, with the proper go-to and search box rather than Google. Also, I'd like to be able to see the list of articles in different namespaces: namely, Template and WoWWiki. This would be pretty helpful. And do we really want a workaround? Workarounds are a poor man's version of a correction, am I right? We want the real thing or perhaps better than the real thing; a workaround is not that. Schmidt 00:11, 4 Jan 2006 (EST)