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” →
