Forum:ShoutWiki doesn't work

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Hi. ShoutWiki doesn't work. Either it displays Error 503 Backend fetch failed, or it loads the error page very, very slowly. Do something please. --Sdobnikov (talk) 06:21, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

It has been very slow recently, with 30 seconds plus to load a page at best, or a fail. People are simply going to look elsewhere rather than wait.

I have had endless complaints from my users about the load speed and I really am thinking of migrating to Miraheze. Shoutwiki has been a great platform, but Having put years of work into my Wiki I don't want to lose it, so perhaps it is time to move on. Anyone got instructions as to do a the sort of "Dump" needed to move - both content and images? Hooligan (talk) 10:19, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Hey Guys do we need to move? - I am really concerned that Shoutwiki is falling off a cliff and that I and others will lose years of content. Email me on nameunknown@btinternet.com and we will see if we can put together some kind of plan for saving the content of users and exporting it to a more sustainable platform. ShoutWiki has been great, but it is now mostly 503/4 or minutes of waiting for a page to load. We do not want to lose our content or do something to preserve it? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Hooligan (talk • contribs) 13:03, 10 December 2023‎ (UTC). Please sign your posts with --~~~~!

I would strongly advise all wiki creators on the ShoutWiki platform perform any tasks necessary to migrate to another platform. The performance issues on ShoutWiki have been highlighted since September. To my knowledge, there have been no significant actions taken place that have alleviated the issues that are still, to this day, being experienced and complained about. The fact that this main ShoutWiki site, ShoutWiki's OWN wiki site, is experiencing the same issues found on the other Wikis hosted here should be a cause of significant concern to the persons involved behind the scenes that are running this. I get that this is a free service, but the service itself may as well just not exist in its current state as users of the wikis hosted here are going to get too frustrated to even bother visiting them anymore.

I would urge everyone to take the initiative and start elsewhere. As has already been mentioned, there are other free platforms out there. I, for one, personally hope the PokeMMO wiki gets moved to a functional hosting platform. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.28.140.23 (talk • contribs) 17:37, 10 December 2023‎ (UTC). Please sign your posts with --~~~~!

Upon checking this again this evening, page loads suddenly appear to be fine both here and on Pokemmo wiki, so I'm going to assume whatever problem there was has now been resolved. Hopefully it'll stay like this because now the platform is what I consider useable again. Thanks staff. --86.28.140.23 23:22, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

you can try to use Myht.org --Msnhinet8 (talk) 10:00, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Lcawte update 11/12

Slowness seems to be mostly load, which is sporadic. It sounds like it's been particularly bad the last week or so? Work has had me running around like a headless chicken recently - I turned my personal computer on once last week. Last night, I had a review of the logs and banned a couple of offending heavy-hitting IPs, mostly from less reputable cloud providers, which had some immediate effect. I played with a few config changes as well, and it looks more reasonable this evening when I logged in.

The login problem seems to have hit Miraheze a while back, and I've copied their fix today - you may well still need to clear out any old cookies, but the new session storage solution should hopefully do the trick. Hopefully. I am also doing some final tests tonight on the new, stronger server, which I should already be in production use, but life. Also, I have some hardware (from my personal funds) that I will use to play with some new tech to allow more seamless moves/scaling whenever there's a 26th hour added to the days on Earth.

• Side note: Turns out the support ticketing system (which I look at sporadically, sometimes action and rarely reply to) was broken for a *long* time. Fixed on Monday when I last was on this PC (as people may have noticed by a flurry of ticket creation emails) --Lewis Cawte (talk) 20:17, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Update 19/12

So, today was the day. Sudden urge to get this sorted, wasn't the best of times to do so, but, ultimately I just need to do things when I've got the energy/opportunity at the moment. I didn't intend to break everything for half an hour, but unfortunately, despite throwing the servers into load balancing, the "warming up", so to speak, was too much, and it all fell over for a bit. Some lessons learned. We got there eventually, and read-only was a help. Let it stabilise for a bit. The new production server is finally live, and trusty old bellow is seeing out its final days while we fully decommission it. It's now not handling production traffic. The big difference is the databases sitting on SSDs, which gives a nice speed improvement to any request. Fortunately, the spec on these is high enough that we should be good for a while before we run out of space again, and as per above, I'll be playing with some new scaling methods in the future so we can continue to build out the infrastructure with less impact. --Lewis Cawte (talk) 21:38, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Certainly a significant improvement. Many, many thanks. I'm sure there is a massive "to do" list but what I have noticed recently are a huge number of new users appearing and either posting links to porn or inexplicable pages in what seems to be Polish. I'm deleting them every day. Some kind of an easy guide as to how to make the user sign-up process just a little bit more of a hurdle would be great. No rush. Hooligan (talk) 16:35, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

"Easy" is probably never going to happen. Fighting spam is a war that only escalates. Check out Special:AbuseFilter (on every wiki). The official information page is mw:Extension:AbuseFilter, particularly mw:Extension:AbuseFilter/Rules_format. --Saftzie (talk) 21:43, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice Sfz - have a good holiday (citation needed) Hooligan (talk) 00:38, 31 December 2023 (UTC)