The new CZ skin is up! (It is now set to default.) So, when you go to the wiki you’ll see a brand new look. This helps to distinguish us from That Other Website.
You won’t see the new skin, however, if you fiddled with your skin preferences, i.e., with this page. If so, and you aren’t using the new skin, you can go to the above URL, click on the “skin” tab, and then select “Pinkwich5″ and click Save. Then you should see the default skin, or in other words, what all new (and un-logged in) people are now seeing.
Thanks hugely to Derek Harkness for coding this up and doing a lot of debugging. It might still have a few bugs. If so, we’ve been using this page of Derek’s to report them. Thanks also to Greg Sabino Mullane for uploading it and doing other techie stuff.
Finally.
To join CZ, you can now apply via a Web form. You no longer have to use e-mail. And maybe more importantly, our fine constables can approve an application by simply clicking a button — and their work is done! Thanks much to Aaron Schulz!
This will allow the same number of constables to handle two or three times the number of applications, and we’ll be able to respond faster, or I think we will — maybe on the order of minutes to hours, instead of hours to a day. That’s what I will encourage, anyway. As a result of this, one of the next initiatives I will be putting time into is — again finally — a big, organized, ambitious recruitment campaign.
Aaron Schulz is a student at my alma mater, Ohio State, and proposed to help with this rather out of the blue last summer. He’s done really excellent work (yet another victory for the Buckeyes!), and the constables are really happy with his ConfirmAccount extension. Here’s a link to it, by the way.
We would have had this installed sooner, but we had to update to the latest MediaWiki version (which is why the wiki has been wonky lately), and that took some doing. Thanks greatly to Greg and Jason for that, and to Zach for pitching in as well.
Apologies but yep the wiki was unreachable for several hours this morning. I don’t know what the cause was. Probably it was somehow related to our recent (labor-intensive) upgrade to the most recent MediaWiki version. Thanks greatly to Greg Sabino Mullane and Steadfast Networks for getting it back up.
In the future, if necessary, you’ll be able to find notes about server outages here, on this blog, or (if the blog is down, too) Citizendium-L (which is hosted by Purdue — partly for reasons of redundancy). If there is an outage and nothing has appeared in either of those places, then please assume we don’t know about the outage yet, and report it. I was offline this morning (writing), so I didn’t catch this until late, and people no doubt just assumed I knew about it and that I was working on it…but I didn’t and I wasn’t!
In case of emergencies, feel free to e-mail bugs@citizendium.org. If you just have an ordinary bug report or feature request, however, please use the Trac system.
Currently Pilot is being backed up in preparation for death and born anew as a dedicated database server.
Mail services were migrated off today in an as-painless-as-touching-a-9-volt-to-your-tongue transitition.
Forge will go away, recommended by Troy, in favor of Trac. See trac.citizendium.org . A small problem will be migrating the old bug reports to the new system and implementing a better authentication system. gForge was cool, but provides overly complex ways of doing things that we are not using.
Code reverts have been made to fix the long diff bug as well as try and fix the occasional wiki lockup problem. Neither bug has reared it’s head since. Greg has fixed the max page size issue.
Disclaimer code has also been reverted so approved articles and the disclaimer do not clash. A generic disclaimer has been added to sitenotice until the hard code is fixable.
…and I am exhausted.
Downhill from here…
-Jason Potkanski
- Confirmation of long overdue Server expansion, in place by Tuesday.
- Proposed addition of three people to Technical Staff
- Tinkered with Spam scoring for Email users of citizendium.org. High Scoring spam and spam thresholds reduced in MailScanner.
- Small performance adjustment to Apache web server.
- Performance adjustments, maintaince and cleanup of Postgresql database server.
Notice: Once servers are in place, site may go up and down without notice as we move services around on various servers.
-Jason Potkanski