Forum:A proposal for the outage

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Update:

Last month the webserver was set in a fast VPS. The address became: freeciv-mundi.org.

This will guarantee maximal uptime (29 days up right now) and faster access.

Davide at debian (talk) 18:33, August 15, 2012 (UTC)

---

A copy of the message I sent to the announces mailing list.

As the time we have been waiting seeking for meaningful news from the
lost website passed inert for two weeks, I considered the possibility to
take active part and sketch down a preliminary stub website aimed to
fill the current gap. I also caught the opportunity to renew the old
forum look and software, and to expand the site structure to embrace in
one place for all the wide community that has always been spread in so
many different places.

The temporary domain name and host is http://freeciv-debian.ns0.it/home. If
your opinions are favorable, we'll search for a professional host and a
new freeciv-like domain name that will eventually be replaced by the
traditional freeciv.org in case its current owner, Paul, will concede us.
Some members have already offered to support with new hosting (thank you
jHeusala), see IRC archives at
freeciv-debian.ns0.it/intel/viewforum.php?f=3 .

Look at the site to see what those new featres are. It is still in full
developement, expecially in the "home" and "intel" sections, but the
forum database can already be considered definitive and safe to post.

I'm searching for contributors. Developement is open to all. Site
internals can be downloaded at
ftp://freeciv-debian.ns0.it/zz/freeciv-website.tar.bz2.

All long-standing sys-admins of freeciv.org are welcome to get full
credentials over server, and forum admins and moderators are immediatly
accounted.

Any idea and opinion is welcome.

--Davide

Davide at debian 19:39, March 28, 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps something important that emerged today in #freeciv channel:

11:01:29 Kamping_Kaiser davide_at_debian: if you insist on rebuilding the wiki rather then linking to it, have you considered asking wikia for the source?

15:44:14 davide_at_debian Kamping_Kaiser: I got that idea too. But there's to consider that Wikia is a commercial service that gets no benefits for giving away databases and potentially shrink its user base. And Wikia does even use custom wiki markup/syntax that isn't directly compatible with mediawiki software, and it is impossible to crawle page sources by simple means. It seems evident Wikia paied attention to limit competitors. From this, I get the conclusion Wikia is merely a commercial organization very focussed on keeping a large userbase.

15:51:31 davide_at_debian About my unjustified insistence on wanting a central wiki website: wow, we have 20.000 (twenty-thousands) m onthly downloads of Freeciv from sourceforge. That's an enormous number. Enormous. But our community size poorly reflects that huge amount of users that tr y out Freeciv for their very first time. It is evident that *something* is wrong somewhere. In my opinion, the issue is the online decentralization that doesn't give a first-sight strong identity of what Freeciv is

16:01:16 davide_at_debian Also, if we would undergo this road, we could put ads on the new wiki the same way Wikia is doing now. That would redirect introits directly to Freeciv rather than wikia. As of now, my estimation in numbers is 7 to 12 Euros/month that would probably cover most of the server costs. That's not a huge amount, but could probably make it easier for our sysadmins to accept being in charge of our server. Those numbers of course have free road to grow, if project is handled with care

Davide at debian 14:18, April 3, 2012 (UTC)