Tag: Website

Trollpedia is read-only

Posted on by Trollpedia 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.

Kiwi Farms is a behemoth you can’t get rid of

Posted on by Trollpedia Admin
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.

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Review of Miraheze & Shoutwiki

Posted on by Trollpedia Admin

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.

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