Hey another update for those who didn’t catch it earlier, but the site is no longer in read-only mode since 3 days ago.

I would have reported that sooner on the blog, but I was writing another blog post simultaneously and I wanted to make sure everything worked as intended before making this post. I really do not want for my site to put-off people because it fails to function correctly.

Regardless, you should be able to resume editing again.

 

I blame myself for this, I should have probably done something about those issues sooner.

Anyhow, have fun editing!  ~Trollpedia’s Admin

Yesterday, you likely visited the site to be greeted by an error message stating that the database is locked.

If you did not know already, the wiki site, Trollpedia, is currently read-only – This is to ensure that no problem are caused by the users while updating the site since editing the articles will update the database all the while I update several components of the site, and I do not wish for Trollpedia to end up on the same fate as Aediot’s Encyclopedia Dramatica.

We are updating our insfrastucture to fix issues that we previously encountered including the Visual Editor not working as intended.

All the planned changes are as follow:

  1. Updating the PHP to a version more adequate for Trollpedia.
  2. Making sure the RestBASE and Parsoid apis work and then re-enable the Visual Editor.
  3. Make the email for password resets and mail confirmation work correctly (Currently they bounce back, we covered that issue in another post earlier).
  4. Add and update a few extensions.

Do note that we currently do not intend to update the Mediawiki version used by the site, I wanna make sure that no issue occurs when I do update Mediawiki to its most recent stable build and many people have encountered and reported such issues on Mediawiki.org.

This might lasts one week because I’m clumsy when it comes to computers, and I never handled servers previously.

New Google Doodle launches series of games around Tokyo Olympics

On July 22th, Google published a new browser game titled “Doodle Champion Island Games“. In this game you play as Lucky, a ninja cat who wants to partake in the Olympics.

The player must complete a series of mini-games based on the Tokyo Olympics games against each opponent who is supposed to be an expert in their respective field.

The game has a splendid intro cutscene animated by Japanese studio STUDIO4°C.

Moreover, this game works as an homage to 16 bits games as its neat aesthetic works well in the setting while not being completely distracting.

If you wanna try it out, it is available on the homepage of Google’s search engine at Google.com.

 

Google has previously published a doodle game based on PacMan to celebrate his 30th anniversary, another one thematized around Halloween which garnered a small cult following and yet another one thematized around Valentines.

 

Google and Doodle Champion Island Games are trademarks of Alphabet Inc.

Silouhette of a scary person in a trench coat.

Big news! I had to block 110 IP addresses in one single day because of the unbearable spam on the wiki! Recently, a slew of Black Hat SEO spammers infested the site, unfortunately for them (and for me), there is the moderation extension and the Abuse Filter, I then check their IP and ban it.

With that said, I had the intention to make this post for a while, so I saved every permalink to each IP I tested on Robtex due to how unbearable it is becoming.

Just look at everything we have gotten in the past few days:

Continue reading “Trollpedia was hit with a wave of obnoxious spam”

Kiwi Close-up

In light of what happened recently, people have campaigned on Twitter to deplatform Kiwi Farms, most particularly by contacting Cloudflare and Dreamhost to hopefully get rid of it. That, however, is a waste of time.

Is it possible to deplatform Kiwi Farms?

When Cloudflare dropped support for Gab.ai, an extremely right-wing Mastodon instance, they instead registered at BitMitigate for DDoS protection.

When Dreamhost dropped support for The Daily Stormer, a Neo-Nazi news site, they instead went for another web hosting provider to keep them afloat. Keep in mind that before even joining Dreamhost, they were on Godaddy which did not want to host them either.

That is just to say that there is a hole for every bird – if you successfully get a hosting provider to suspend an account, then the person behind that account can just go elsewhere until they find someone who are willing to keep them.

There are even web hosting services that completely dismiss DMCA takedown requests, so pirates specifically register there to ensure they never lose anything due to copyright. Pedophiles register to services that have no rules against child pornography, so the web host will never have issues hosting their content.

Continue reading “Kiwi Farms is a behemoth you can’t get rid of”

Hey troll enthusiasts! I am very happy to announce to you all that I just installed DataDump on my wiki, so now I can regularly back up Trollpedia.

Trolls had the luxury to take down the wiki for a while now and undo all the work done there, but they’re too late! But not only that, I could have done something that could have caused the wiki to go permanently offline like Aediot; the previous head honcho of Encyclopedia Dramatica, since I am new to this webmaster stuff.

If I had issues installing it I had another extension ready to be deployed called “DumpsOnDemand” and I still do just in case, though I am more familiar with DataDump, so that is my prefered choice.

In other news

The wiki now officially supports spoilers, I installed an extension for that. That is not really the most important thing it needs, I still have to fix some other issues with the wiki, but it is there if anyone needs it. Otherwise, we have the template available too, which still works the last time I checked.

Peace out!

A custom rainbow flag with a fist on it.

For this new month of June, we dedicated an entire post to help LGBT youth browse social media in the comfort of their homes without being annoyed by a tough guy or an edgelord online.

How to navigate the net safely!

With social media being filled to the brim by malcontents and trolls, that remains a difficult question to answer. This is imperative to be somewhat vigilant online since trolling may seem very innocent at first, and in most cases it is, but some trolls are fully willing to go beyond that and harass, stalk or doxx you.

So, with that in mind, here is a list of ways to stay away from trolls:

Continue reading “Trollpedia supports the LGBTQ+”

There is a gif file on Miraheze that won’t download, it gives me “18 errors – transfer closed with outstanding read data remaining”.

It was completely fine when I sent it to Miraheze 1 year ago, so did it somehow get damaged? Can gif files corrupt themselves or did it get corrupted because of Miraheze? I will not be pointing fingers at the moment because I have no idea why that problem happens.

For reference, here’s the file:

It should display normally since it is an img tag linking back to Miraheze, but that is it really. Now, it is not really important since it was just used once to warn a troll, it is not used constructively anywhere on the wiki, so I’d say whatever.

Screenshot of an email header.

It came to my attention that emails sent from Trollpedia would not come through, in fact, those same emails came back to me with this short message attached:

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.

As well as the forwarded email.

I am working to get this fixed, but in the meantime please write down your password on a piece of paper, otherwise, you won’t be able to recover your account if you ever forget the password.

If you do forget your password and are unable to log in, get in touch with an admin to get your account back.

Today’s blog post is a simple review of two wiki sites I previously used.

Click on “more” further down below to read the review on ShoutWiki.


Miraheze review

Miraheze is a community wiki farm similar in design to Wikia/FANDOM. It is neither a shared hosting service nor a dedicated hosting service, it was simply a wiki that lets you create more wikis on the site. So whenever you wanted to blog you had to use your wiki to do so, there was no WordPress.

As a long-time user of Miraheze, I can say for sure that I do not recommend Miraheze for multiple reasons.

The first reason is simple, the site is very “500 error”-prone. It could not go for over a week without freaking out and preventing me from contributing to my own wiki. I did not think much of it at the time, but in retrospect, it was so bad that I had created a backup, although I never really needed it. The errors would pop up to the point where I created a wiki on Shoutwiki, just in case it suddenly stops working altogether (Again, it was left untouched).

When they upgraded their Mediawiki installation, they did not do so without causing heavy discomfort inside their own community. First thing first, it broke all the wikis so that nobody could contribute effectively due to the captchas no longer showing up, and for a while, all of Miraheze’s noticeboards were filled with complaints from users that would get errors from trying to edit their articles. It has been 1 year since this happened, so I do not recall all the details, but that is the gist of it. You can and should update Mediawiki regularly, but not to the detriment of your own userbase.

Sometimes, they install extensions that can be exploited, however, they somehow let said extensions go unnoticed for several years until they are used frequently across Miraheze’s wikis. So by that point, Miraheze then removes the extension and breaks all the wikis that previously used it, which is outrageous in itself, but they do not wanna clean up the mess they have caused, they expect the users themselves to clean up after their mess. I have gone in-depth about that issue on the wiki site itself and it was a major reason for me to leave Miraheze. Furthermore, that begs the question, how do they verify whether an extension is safe or not? I really wanna know their methods because they do not appear to be effective.

UPDATE: This could have been fixed via MassEditRegex and Replace text, neither of which were suggested to me when I asked for support from Miraheze, instead they told me to download a Python script and deal with it. Considering that this wiki farm has an absurd amount of extensions, most of which I did not need I did not know it had either of these installed, this could have saved me a headache. Replace text is installed by default on Mediawiki, so at least if similar issues were to occur on Trollpedia, I know how to perform a change on multiple pages at once.

Continue reading “Review of Miraheze & Shoutwiki”