Help talk:Importing wikis to ShoutWiki

Ok, it's a good starting point, but the step one (requesting a database dump) is only for Wikia wikis. Standard MediaWiki installations have no button to request a dump on Special:Statistics. It must be done accesing the server and executing a php script in the ./maintenance directory that effectively does the dump. So maybe it's worth to make it clear that or move that page to "ShoutWiki Hub:Importing Wikia wikis to ShoutWiki" :P

About the "doing it yourself" section... Does staff import dumps the same way or they have a dedicated server for that? A dump, even of 1MB, can contain several hundreds of revisions. Note that even on small wikis, MediaWiki: messages are dumped, which are a lot of revisions. And on Wikia there would be a lot of talk pages of anons that were welcomed by the welcome bot. That would cause severe strain to the server and slow down things. I suggest to always request importing dumps to staff, unless it's really few pages (extracted from Special:Export) --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 19:32, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, not every wiki admin has shell access — in fact, I administrated a wiki without even FTP access for like a year or so (yes, it wasn't very fun). The server admin hadn't granted me any access to his server and he could easily disappear for weeks, even months, so our only option would have been Special:Export.
In any case, this is a wiki, so be bold! (-;

As for the question, that sounds like something for the techs to answer. MediaWiki: messages shouldn't be an issue on modern MWs as MediaWiki: pages haven't existed since 1.9 or so; before that, those pages did exist but nowadays they're redlinks. I do agree with your point about leaving imports to us; maybe we didn't make it clear enough that the "do it yourself" method should only be used for really small wikis. --Jack Phoenix _(contact) 16:07, 9 November 2010 (UTC)