All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XV

[robkelk]

Go figure.

At least notifications are working again.

[Bob Schroeck]

Anyone else think Infinite was fishing for a reason to leave in a huff and accuse us of being like TVT? Given some of the other threads he was in, it was almost like he was looking for something to get upset over, and he got impatient and had to manufacture an incident to satisfy himself.

[robkelk]

Doesn't matter.

If somebody can't act like an adult (which includes leaving gracefully), I don't want to have to clean up after him on the wiki. And if he was being honest about all the moderators on all the tropes site reacting the same way, well... "everybody's out of step except Johnny". He either could not or would not act like an adult.

[robkelk]

It must be the end of the month. 502, 503...

[Labster]

cp2 (North America) does tend to get shut off for bandwidth overages a few days before the end of the month.  And we then flag down an employee via ticket and ask them to comp the last two days until the cycle resets, and then we do it again next month.  This is much better than some other providers, like AWS, who would ask us to deposit additional dollars into the machine.

I'm not really going to be around Miraheze much in the future but it's fairly obvious that they've outgrown RamNode.  They're a great provider, don't get me wrong, but they just don't offer the kind of products you'd need for a server getting constant traffic.  If you have a little side project that can share most of its CPU time and net connection with somebody else's stuff, it's great for small VPSes.  But it has to change, probably based on the fundraiser results.  They don't even sell configurations that are useful to Miraheze, except for the minimal use stuff that's not the wiki itself -- matomo analytics, phabricator, puppet, etc.

I'm not really sure what the plan they'll go forward with, but it will probably involve buying hardware or renting dedicated servers on a monthly basis.  Possibly running VPS software like Xen or something internally so they can divide a machine into different roles.  The buying hardware option is cheapest -- unless something breaks, in which case we either get Southparkfan on the bus/train to the DC or Miraheze foots the bill for a remote pair or hands.  And it also requires the money upfront, which brings up the fundraiser again.  To me the decision should actually rest on how they foresee their professionalism in the future.  Owning property takes a lot more planning and maintenance than using someone else's stuff.

[robkelk]

One project that's been on the spike is now started: "Power Trio" is now about the type of rock group, and the brand-new page "Trio" points to "Category:Trio Tropes".

I request that somebody who has a working bot edit the existing links to "Power Trio" (except for the redirects from "Rock Trio" and "Power Trio (music)") to point at "Trio" instead. There's over a thousand of them.

[Bob Schroeck]

One of these days I have to see if I can get Wonderbot up and running again. Maybe the author of the engine I use finally revised it to work with the changes to Mediawiki that broke it in the first place...

[Labster]

Well, I filled out my last finance page for Miraheze, and transferred everything over today to Miraheze Limited -- or really, to Southparkfan for the servers. I was sadly only able to transfer out about $1000 to Owen, which looks even worse when converted to pounds sterling. The old Paypal account is now closed.

I'd like to encourage people to donate; the current place to do so is at the GoFundMe Page. While ATT isn't a majority of the stuff like it used to be, we're still a significant fraction of the site. (Also, in terms of the "tip" -- anything above 5% is highway robbery for a payment processor. Credit card rates tend to max out around 3.5% + $0.40 for online sales -- though it's often higher to the merchant because of fraud and chargebacks and such. Anyway if you're going to give over $25, drop below 5% "tip".)

Also thanks to Lynn, who said the right thing to me at the right time earlier in this thread.

[LynnInDenver]

You're welcome, Brent.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, we'll just have to see where things go from here on that front.

On a different topic entirely, in the wake of what seems to be an end-of-year rush by spammers to fulfill all their obligations, I'd like to suggest a new policy for the wiki, to be linked off the Terms of Service page. We can thrash out the exact language later, if the idea passes, but basically, it would be an advertising policy -- in short, we announce that we charge an exorbitant rate per unit time (minute, hour?) that an unsolicited advertisement exists on the site, payable by the entity on whose behalf the ad is placed, and that any third party placing such an ad is considered an authorized agent who can enter into such an agreement on behalf of that entity, which they do by placing an unsolicited ad on our site. This agreement can be modified simply by contacting us, and failure to do so constitutes a legal contract, and failure to pay can be pursued in the appropriate civil court.

The idea is to set the "exorbitant rate" such that in most if not all cases the amount due can be sued for in small claims court, for which many districts now offer online or other long-distance filing, and which will rule for the plaintiff if the defendant doesn't show.

Thoughts?

[robkelk]

I just tossed $100 into the pot a month ago...

As for charging for advertising: on first thought, I like the idea. On second thought, do we have time to play wack-a-mole with advertisers?

[Bob Schroeck]

If we share the task among ourselves, no one of us should have too much to do, especially as we'd probably only file against outfits in the US who put their websites in the spam (not the Russian stuff that relies on their IP)... and eventually I would hope that word would get out after a couple judgments in our favor and the number of spam posts would start to drop.

And of course any awards or settlements we actually get would go to funding Miraheze.

[robkelk]

I'm not completely happy with what I've just done with this page - should I have turned it into a disambiguation page and hung three even shorter pages off of that, or should I just leave it as-is?

[robkelk]

This page is down to a half-dozen unsorted examples. Somebody else will have to finish it off for me, though.

(And along the way, I made a brand-new disambiguation page.)

[GethN7]

Important note for all admins:

https://phabricator.miraheze.org/T4864

Basically, due to security issues with the SocialProfile profile editing by admins (it could be very easily used to make malicious edits with no outward logs of who did it), it's requested we send spam removal requests to Phabricator so they can handle it.

I intend to update our page on SP rules to note Miraheze will be handling that till further notice so there will be a log on who editing profiles with admin rights and why to maintain transparency.

[robkelk]

I recall asking this in a previous thread. Now I need an answer.

What are we calling the category that deals with media released between 2020 and 2029, inclusive?

I'd be happy with "The 2020s", but that doesn't match any of the category-by-decade names that we already have.

Whatever we're calling it, all of the new TV shows, radio shows, newspaper comics, web comics, and so on that are aired or published tomorrow go into it.

Oh, and Happy New Year, everybody!

[nocarename]

May I suggest , 'The New 20s'?
If there has been no need to transfer the wiki by the time it comes up again, then that will have been a great success.

[robkelk]

We have "The New Tens" for the years that just finished, so we may as well use "The New Twenties" for the years that have just begun, yes. Thanks.

EDIT: Created and populated with what we have so far.

[robkelk]

I did say that I'd wait until January... so expect a forum post on the matter on January 2.

And I didn't do that.

We're three days from the current set of tempbans ending. I'll wait until that happens - if more bans are required, then it will be more obvious that this particular anon is largely responsible for the proposal to effectively tempban all anon posting.

Just in case FlowMention doesn't work: Input on this page is requested from all mods and all interested parties. Unlike other sandbox pages, I grant permission for all mods to update this page.

It's been nearly two weeks for this, but one of those weeks was Christmas week. May I assume that I can start turning the collected notes into a proper page?

[Bob Schroeck]

I've got no problems with whipping it into a formal page, or even a full-blown policy.

[robkelk]

Woah. Slow/partial page serves and 502s across Miraheze this morning. And it's nowhere near the end of the month.

[Bob Schroeck]

Yeah. I just came by to note the same thing. Whythehell is this happening?

[Bob Schroeck]

It took maybe 45 minutes, but the wiki started responding again.

[robkelk]

They're back...
EDIT: And as soon as I post that, they go away again.

[Bob Schroeck]

Hm. Is there any reason Flow isn't active on the talk pages for Files?