Talk: Announcements/February 2005 server move

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I don't know what anyone else thinks about this issue. But I just wanted to say that, although adverts have a knack for being annoying at times, if it means realistically sustaining Memory Alpha, maintaining the wealth of information and maybe most importantly keeping the community alive, it cannot be a bad thing. I can always try growing to love Google ads... :-) -- MiChaos 22:39, 9 Feb 2005 (CET).

No problem - good idea --80.134.40.212 22:50, 9 Feb 2005 (CET)

To me, the important thing is to keep the site going. If that means ads, then that's what it means. -- Balok 22:51, 9 Feb 2005 (CET)

But, something occurs: will this impact the "fair use" of the images. As things stand now, one could make the case that the site is not for profit. While that does not protect someone from legal action by the holder of IP, it usually discourages it for a number of reasons. But once ad revenue enters the picture, Paramount might become actively interested in shutting the site down. Even though you're not placing the ads, you are in essence profiting from them inasmuch as you receive value for them. -- Balok 00:14, 10 Feb 2005 (CET)

I agree with Balok that while the ads are a neccessary evil, some concern should be given to the questions of fair use laws now that Memory Alpha may not qualify as "non-profit". I think the best way to approach the dilemma would be to consider the advertisers as donors to a non-profit (Memory Alpha) through a third party (wikicities). Also, there are countless Star Trek-related websites which are hosted by Geocities, Tripod, and a host of other free web hosting services which have ads. - Andrew 2-10-05 15:29 PST

The content itself does count as non-profit, so the ads provided by the hosting company will not affect the ability to license the site in a particular way. I've included below part of an email from Eloquence about this. Angela 02:51, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

CC-BY-NC states:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

Since *you* are the ones operating the site and maintaining its content, and you are not violating this clause, I don't believe there's any problem. You could not put ads on the site yourself, but you can make use of a service which does. Wikia/Wikicities is a "common carrier" like Geocities and does not exercise licensing rights of its own.

It would be like uploading a Memory Alpha article to Geocities webspace, which is also funded by advertising, and which I don't believe would be a problem. It is however of key importance that the two of you continue to be responsible for the site's content, and Wikia provides only "content-agnostic" hosting services.

--Eloquence

Welcome to Wikia. I hope the move goes smoothly for the community here, and we're glad to have you as part of our project. Feel free to contact me about any problems involved with the new hosting. Angela 02:51, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Thanks for helping us out! And thanks for the very smooth server move. -- Harry 07:18, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

With exception to below. --Gvsualan 07:36, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

To answer Balok's concern above, I don't believe that we will have any problem at all regarding Paramount and our use of advertisements. Already there are many more Trek-oriented websites out there that directly receive revenue from their advertisements. Some even sell other related stuff from their websites. And yet Paramount hasn't cracked down on any of them. I think that a small stream of revenue from text advertisements would be relatively low on TPTB's hit list, even if they did decide to start attacking fan websites. So we've got nothing to worry about. Especially because all of the ad revenue goes directly towards supporting the site host, not the site owners. -- Dan Carlson | Talk 20:22, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Uploading error

Uploading appears to be offline yet (see below) --Gvsualan 05:11, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

[error message removed]

I'm not sure what's causing this. I tried to change the permissions on the image directories, but that didn't help. Unfortunately, it's 3am where Jason is and he's the one who does all the technical stuff for Wikia, so it'll be a few hours at least until this gets fixed. Sorry! Angela 11:16, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Upload is now fixed on all three wikis. Angela

MA/de Administrators and Errors

As it seems the Administratorship of MA/en has changed. Also the site is lacking all Memory Alpha styles and German user interface. I wanted to repair that mishap, but I can't because I (as Florian K) have been striped of our powers. -- Kobi 08:49, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Admins should now be back on de as well as en. nl had some problems so is still locked to editing. This should be back as soon as possible, but I can't make admins until it is back. Angela 11:16, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Good to see MA back online, guess I'm addicted. There are some other issues still open: The project still is "Dememoryalpha" instead of "Memory Alpha". That makes all existing relations to "Memory Alpha:" namespace unusable and effects all other system-messages including the project's name. Furthermore we've grown over night to about 15times more users than before (88 users to 1350 users). [1] Looks like MA/de uses the same user-database like MA/en and MA/nl. Bug or feature? Yet there are some things to celebrate: seems like we've lost no data, I guess MA/de is unicode now (UTF-8), there are new features from MediaWiki 1.4beta6 and Statistics are now working (first time since May 2004). Please set the project-name back to "Memory Alpha", there's still much to translate on the screen-texts of MediaWiki. (edit: My fault, en as default language, even effects on MA/de) -- Florian K 09:09, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

I've fixed the "Dememoryalpha" sitename problem. The Project namespace pages should be working normally again now. Angela 11:16, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

The users are a feature. IIRC, all Wikicities communities share a single logon. So everyone is a user on every wiki. -- Harry 09:59, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Related to the single user-database is the fact that the admins list was lost during transition. It has been largely rebuilt for en, but we're still working on rebuilding the de and nl lists. I'm not sure the original lists of people still exist, so we might need a list of admins (or at least one bureaucrat re-instated so they can rebuild the list themselves). -- Harry 10:15, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Memory Alpha:Administrators (de) ;) We had no other Admins on MA/de other than Florian and me, while Florian was a Bureaucrat. -- Kobi 10:29, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Many thanks for fixing those issues so quick! -- Florian - Talk 11:41, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Strange skin error

Hi all. I came across one very strange error concerning the skinning. I use to log-in at MA/de, come along to MA/en and log-in. As soon as I will reload the page, it shows me a white page with black text, looking much the same as wikipedia, without the book-background. Kobi and I had this with Firefox and Opera, I tested it in this second with IE. Seems like all those styles are empty:

<style type="text/css">/*<![CDATA[*/

@import "/en/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Monobook.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css&smaxage=18000"; @import "/en/index.php?title=User:Florian_K/-&action=raw&gen=css&ts=20050211152518&maxage=18000"; @import "/en/index.php?title=User:Florian_K/monobook.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css";

/*]]>*/</style>

This is a code-strip from the HTML-code. At least this one should be filled, compared with the german counterpart. -- Florian - Talk 15:32, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

It's related to the defined language in the preferences. If I have it set to "en" instead of "de", I get the same problem vice versa; white german page, correct english page. -- Florian - Talk 15:38, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

I came to a clue when I wanted to copy your MediaWiki:Copyright. Due to the multi-wiki-language setting MediaWiki tries to please every user with his own mother-tongue. In MA/de there is a de:MediaWiki:Copyright in german and de:MediaWiki:Copyright/en for english-speakers. Which means there must also be a de:MediaWiki:Monobook.css/en in MA/de and MediaWiki:Monobook.css/de in MA/en. This problem covers ALL MediaWiki output, such as copyright-warnings, portal-name, etc.

Please create a copy of <obsolete css link removed> in MediaWiki:Monobook.css/de. It wouldn't harm to copy some important MediaWiki-Texts to MediaWiki:somthing/de, too. -- Florian - Talk 18:54, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Does this now work?. -- Michael Warren | Talk 18:56, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Yes, great. Finally, I can put away those sunglasses. ;-) -- Florian - Talk 19:00, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Fire Fox

Hey, I currently have to use IE to view this site, otherwise it looks a mess. Seems the new set up does not much like my firefox, don't know if others are having this problem, thought you'd like to know. Tyrant 01:12, 12 Feb 2005 (GMT)Tyrant

I've been experiencing Firefox problems, although it might be due to the DNS move -- many commen site functions link back to the path http://memory-alpha.org/ -- but that links only gives the locked database on the old server -- you have to use the address bar to change the path to http://www.memory-alpha.org and refresh to see any chagnes -- Captain Mike K. Bartel 01:15, 12 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Wow that was simple, i feel silly now. It worked, all is well. thanks Tyrant 01:17, 12 Feb 2005 (GMT)Tyrant

Watchlists gone?

The move seems to have gone pretty smoothly, with only one artifact at this end: my watchlist seems to have been scrubbed. Will I have to find the pages I was watching and add them to my list again manually, or will the old watchlist be restored at some point? -- Josiah Rowe 23:06, 12 Feb 2005 (GMT)

I have also apparently lost my Watchlist. I really liked using it to keep apprised of pages I had edited. Is there any hope in gettting them back? -- Famartin 05:55, 14 Feb 2005 (GMT)

I'm really sorry about this. I can imagine how annoying it would be to lose a watchlist. I expect it is tied to the user IDs changing when the database of users was merged with Wikicities. I'll try to find out today whether this can be fixed. It ought to be possible to get them back somehow. Angela 07:38, 16 Feb 2005 (GMT)

This should be fixed now. Please let me know if there are any outstanding problems with watchlists. Angela 18:01, 16 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Page size problems

Hi, I know I'm pretty new on this site, but I thought I could make some contribution. I've noticed some pages without Google Ads on them, is this meant to happen? Also, on some of the smaller pages, the side-banner covers up some of the important text on the bottom of the page. Another point, text on some articles seems to have been displaced at points, where the Ad bar and the left-side bar squeeze the text into a column. Thanks for your support. zsingaya 19:52, 14 Feb 2005 (GMT)

The Google ads are there to pay for the hosting of the site. I think the banner problem can probably be fixed in <obsolete css link removed> but I don't know how. Perhaps an admin here could try to reduce the z-index to get it to float behind the content instead of on top of it? Do you have an example of the a page where text is being displaced? Angela 07:41, 16 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Lapling is an example of the column on the right overlapping the bottom bar. Phaser cannon and harvester don't even have any adverts. I've got a yahoo geocities site, which is free, and they've recently implemented a retracting side-bar of adverts, which doesn't affect the size of the text in the window at all. Wouldn't that be better? Zsingaya 12:00, 16 Feb 2005 (GMT)

I've added #footer {margin-right: 120px;} to <obsolete css link removed>. Does this solve the overlapping problem? If so, it should be copied to the de and nl sites too. Not all pages will have adverts on - only those which trigger certain keywords will have adverts. In other cases, the column will be blank. Angela 19:00, 16 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Duplicate Text in Footer

The copyright notices appear to be duplicated in the footer. Also, the MediaWiki and WikiCities buttons are often overwritten by the advertising gutter. -- Balok 15:17, 16 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Both of these are fixed now. Angela 19:00, 16 Feb 2005 (GMT)

That was fast! Thanks! -- Balok 19:45, 16 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Upload File page links appear broken

The 'Upload File' special page links appear to be broken. There also seems to be some visible HTML tags. As this is a 'Special Page', I can't look at the source to see if I could fix it, so I'm mentioning it here. -- Balok 01:22, 17 Feb 2005 (GMT)

This is because the wiki is now using a later version of MediaWiki which, for security reasons, makes less use of raw HTML. Such messages need to replaced with wikitext. I've fixed the upload one, but if there are any more, please let any admin know so they can fix it in the MediaWiki namespace. Angela 04:42, 17 Feb 2005 (GMT)