Hi folks, Executive summary/BLUF/tl;dr: Miraheze announced plans to cease operations in 2023, and electowiki.org needs to move (or shut down), and I'm looking for ideas for sustaining electowiki.org by finding a new MediaWiki host. Though Miraheze JUST announced that they NOT shutting down, it would seem wise to have a "plan B" in the event of another possible shutdown Details: As many of you know, electowiki.org has been hosted by a UK-based wiki farm named "Miraheze" since 2018. Miraheze provides free hosting for MediaWiki-based wiks, and electowiki.org (and the prior wiki hosted on Electorama.com) rely on MediaWiki. MediaWiki is the same website software that the Wikimedia Foundation uses for Wikipedia. I served on the Miraheze board for two years (from the beginning of 2020 until the end of 2021). System administration work and account-management and abuse-management work ("Trust & Safety", as it is frequently called[1]) is hard work, so I've been grateful to the Miraheze folks for providing that service to the electowiki.org community for the past five years. When I dropped off the Miraheze board at the end of 2021, I was admittedly a bit burned out, but it seemed that Miraheze was sustainable. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_and_safety At the end of my Miraheze tenure, I'll admit that I was still a bit baffled at how the site is able to stay online. The annual budget is tiny[2], and everyone associated with the organization is a volunteer. However, having worked with people younger than me for most of my career, I've been constantly reminded of how much chutzpah and energy that teenagers and twenty-somethings bring to computer system administration and computer programming. When they start a project, they often think "we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy"[3] Most of the volunteers associated with Miraheze are much younger than me, and seemed to be fueled by the belief that a volunteer-driven non-profit shouldn't have a problem providing ad-free web hosting for free MediaWiki instances to anyone who wants a new wiki. [2]: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230127-Minutes [3]: https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/761656824202276864 Unfortunately, it would seem that the Miraheze community is continuing to have a hard time addressing the burnout problem with its system administrators and its trust-and-safety team. A few days ago, they published a timeline for when they plan to stop hosting wikis (like electowiki), which called for effectively ending wiki hosting soon.[4] This meant that electowiki.org (as we know it now) was slated to end around the same time, unless we came up with a plan to find another host. [4]: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230615-Statement Many of you recall that Electowiki was hosted by Dreamhost (by me) from 2005 until 2018. Getting an account was very difficult for several years (nearly impossible), because account creation was broken, and in the later portion of the Dreamhost years, it required me to personally modify the Electowiki database. In the very last years (2016 through 2018), I had pretty much given up, and was looking at migrating off of MediaWiki. It had become almost impossible to prevent massive floods of account creation from bots, since it had become cheap enough for hackers to circumvent MediaWiki's fraud prevention mechanisms. I started writing this email before I learned that Miraheze has a new batch of volunteers to take over for the previous batch of volunteers.[5] I decided to finish writing this email, because I wanted to make sure that everyone on this mailing list knows that electowiki.org relies on Miraheze and MediaWiki. [5]: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Miraheze_is_Not_Shutting_Down If nothing else, y'all may want to consider donating money to Miraheze. Their annual budget is about the same as a typical public school Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), but they can't hold bake sales selling slices of banana bread in plastic wrap to generous parents at in-person PTA meetings. If you all have ideas of the best place to host a live backup copy of electowiki, I'd appreciate your thoughts, too. Rob

On 6/20/23 03:20, Rob Lanphier wrote: > If nothing else, y'all may want to consider donating money to Miraheze. > Their annual budget is about the same as a typical public school > Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), but they can't hold bake sales selling > slices of banana bread in plastic wrap to generous parents at in-person > PTA meetings. Thanks for the information; I've just done so. -km