User:Stephane Lo Presti/News/2014-12-03

Update about our work and availability issues - March 12, 2014

Hi everyone,

To break a bit the pattern of silence, I'd like to let everyone know the work we're doing behind the scenes to make our wikis better. This is mainly infrastructure and backend work at this point, so barely visible to most editors and not impacting players "directly". The goal is to improve reliability, resilience and management of our wikis and their infrastructure.

First we've built better test environments that allow us to streamline update and management. And the first application of this is that we're in the final stages of testing a user table split for the GW and GW2 English wikis (which currently use the same user table stored on the GW database). This will decouple user account creation for these 2 wikis (non-English wikis will not be affected), but should not change anything for players who already have an account on those wikis apart from the fact that they'll technically have 2 accounts (one on each wiki) that are almost exactly the same. I'll post more information and an announcement about when the maintenance for this will happen at a later time.

Once we've used and finalized this update flow, we'll be able to push updates in a more manageable (and hopefully frequent) way. Once the database split has been done on the live wikis, we'll be focusing on 2 things: fixing a reliability issue (see below), and upgrading first the Semantic MediaWiki software (to a much newer version) and then the MediaWiki software.

Last, but not the least, we've seen over the last few days the 5 wikis becoming unavailable for rather short periods of time. Although we’re currently not seeing a pattern from the data we’re seeing, we’ll be investigating what’s causing this. We’ve once seen this happen as there was a long sequence of “frequent” (2 per minute maybe?) uploads of pictures on the German wiki. It may not be the direct cause but we’re not sure that we can easily/quickly determine the actual cause. In the meantime, it’d be super useful if the wikis could investigate whether an AbuseFilter rule can be created to limit the rate of upload of pictures. If this is done, please let me know so that I can circulate it around to all wikis and that our engineer’s investigation.

I also forgot to give an update on the Wiki Weekly Statistics. I’ve stopped doing it due to a high workload and I still have to investigate an alternative route for (semi-)automatically creating this report. If this resource was needed for some rather important work on the wikis, please let me know and I’ll try to go back to posting these reports.

As usual, feel free to drop a line on my talkpage if you have questions, comments or anything to discuss! Thanks.