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Forum The future of our wiki



This discussion pertains to the future of the wiki and its community. Please follow it closely! If you know of any active editors who aren't yet aware of this discussion, please inform them about it! If you prefer not to follow this main discussion, but would still like to keep informed of major developments, consider following this page instead.

The staff and a new skin

As some of you probably already know, Wikia has recently introduced a new skin (aptly named Wikia) for use by all the wikis on Wikia. The skin just became available to all wikis today (including ours) and in a little less than a month, it will become mandatory for every wiki on Wikia to use this skin. If you haven't already, you can see what the new skin looks like right here by switching it on in the Skin tab of your preferences.

If you've been watching the staff blogs lately, you'll know that this change has been met with a lot of resistance. (To put it mildly.) There have been numerous complaints about the new look, just a few of which are:

  • Article width is fixed to just 660 pixels. (In other words, the article can only be 660 pixels wide.) This leaves most of the screen unusable for actual article content on any modern computer monitor, and causes crowding in many articles.
  • The sidebar is now almost 50% wider, causing it to use up almost ⅓ of the already reduced screen area. The sidebar has also been moved to the right side of the page.
  • Because the sidebar and the content area are centered together on the page, the article content is actually off-center. This causes infoboxes and other floating elements that should be aligned along the right side of the page to be displayed in the middle of the page.
  • A Wikia banner has been placed on the very top of the page, drawing attention away from the wiki's own branding.
  • The amount of space dedicated to ads has been increased.
  • Relatively little customization of the new skin is possible, and even less is permitted.
    • Wiki administrators are no longer allowed to place site notices (or anything else) along the top of the wiki's pages.
    • Wiki administrators are no longer allowed to remove 'core features' for all users by using custom CSS or JavaScript.
      • Image attribution is enabled for all wikis. This means that every image displays the name of the user who uploaded it right in the article. Because of the above rule, this behavior cannot be disabled for the wiki globally.
  • The logo area has been resized.
  • The new skin will remove widgets and their functionality. (A big one people are disappointed about losing is Shoutbox.)
  • The links for moving articles, viewing page history and viewing links to a page are only accessible in drop-down menus.
  • All wikis are being forced to transition to the new look except...
    • ...one wiki, and one wiki only, Uncyclopedia, which has been exempted from the switch.
    • The staff is unreceptive to repeated pleas from editors not to make this skin mandatory.

What this means for us

A change like this is obviously going to break the layout of a lot of the pages on Wikia. Even if the wikis can be rearranged to look appealing with the new skin without sacrificing content, it's going to take a lot of work to get it there — work that the wikis' respective editors are supposed to oversee.

All of this has many users questioning whether they want to remain on Wikia. A growing number of entire wikis are either considering moving to another site, or have already decided to do so.

So the question arises: What about the Dragon Ball Wiki?

Do we stay and tough out the new changes, or do we leave and continue to develop our wiki elsewhere? Either course is going to have its share of hard work in store.

Are the staff like Old Kai, about to make the ultimate sacrifice to breathe new life into our wiki — or are they like Frieza, ready to deliver a deathblow to our community and force us to find a New Namek?

Corny comparisons aside, whether we go or stay, it's important that we're united in doing so. I was going to make a list of various pros/cons to leaving Wikia, but the WoWWiki (which is also considering leaving Wikia) has already done a pretty good job. Most of the items in their list would apply to us as well, with a notable exception being that we don't have a domain name to lose.

For the moment, I'd like to avoid discussing the question of "Where will we go?" Before we think about that, we need to decide whether we want to stay or leave. If we decide that we'd prefer to leave, then we can consider how feasible it is for us to do so. (Part of which will be considering where we would go.)

I'm interested in hearing from everyone on this, but in particular, I want to hear from you active users and administrators. You make up the core of our community, and you will be the ones who make or break our transition, whatever it ends up being.

How we feel about this

Sign your name under the appropriate heading.

I am going to leave Wikia even if the community decides to stay

I would prefer to continue our wiki elsewhere, but I will yield to the community's decision

DestructiveKrillinDestructoDiskTOMdisk 03:03, November 7, 2010 (UTC)

I would prefer to stay here and work through the changes, but I will yield to the community's decision


SuperFusion 11:05, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

Blalafoon: Talk :Blogs SS3 Blalafoon sigVegeta-1 sigFrieza 1 sig 22:08, April 30, 2011 (UTC)

I am going to stay here even if the community decides to leave

  • Radaghast 12:17, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
  • Gokufan3 04:04, October 12, 2010 (UTC)
  • Wolf Girl 21 01:23, October 13, 2010 (UTC)
  • Jeangabin666 08:38, November 2, 2010 (UTC)

Discussion

To be honest, I'm not impressed with the new skin. On a purely subjective level, I don't find it to be aesthetically pleasing, and even if we work very hard to try and make our wiki look good with it, I doubt it will hold a candle to what we were capable of with the old skins. By design, the new skin is simply less flexible. The fixed width and the blaring sidebar are the biggest deal-breakers for me. It might work on Facebook and Twitter, but this is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a social network or blog. Our focus should be content, and the amount of content space that has been sacrificed for the sake of ads, links to other wikis and pure emptiness is shameful, IMO.

But what disappoints me even more is the fact that the staff expect us to bend over backwards to make all of this work. They made a decision to force this on everyone (except Uncyclopedia) without giving the people who actually work to provide their site with content (us) a choice in the matter. I respect the staff's right to do as they please with their website, but in all fairness, they wouldn't have a website without us contributing to it, and leaving us out of the decision-making process really seems to go against the whole wiki way of forming consensus and acting on it. It also makes me wonder what other mandatory changes may be forced upon us in the future if we stay here. (How long before they decide that the new skin is no good and decide to make us rearrange everything again?) Don't get me wrong — I don't hate the staff at all, and I don't think they deserve all the hostility they've been receiving over this, but I still can't agree that this is the correct thing to do for Wikia.

If we stay, then right off the bat, we're going to have to redesign our logo and use the new skin's limited theme designer to create a new theme for the wiki. Most of our templates will have to be redesigned, and a lot of our articles' layouts will need to be restructured. Speaking for myself, I'd rather spend all that time and effort fixing up the content of our wiki.

So, I guess you could say I'm in favor of moving our wiki somewhere else. Even if we set aside the issue of the skin and the staff, moving to another location could open up a lot of new possibilities for improving the wiki, depending on where we end up going. If we end up administering our wiki directly rather than joining another wiki farm, we'd have a lot of freedom to add new functionality to the wiki and tweak things to our exact liking (a freedom we're quickly losing here). A lot of the process of moving the wiki can be automated, so it's not as though we'd have to move things one article at a time. While it would still involve some work to get things set up somewhere else, our hands are kind of tied in that regard since we're going to have our work cut out for us even if we stay here.

But unlike the staff, I care a lot about our community's feelings on the matter, and I won't be leaving without you. So, what are your thoughts? -- Nonoitall talk contr 22:42, October 6, 2010 (UTC)

I personally hope that the new outlook will not change our ability to fixate the main page; for example, our setup of the news section, the polls, the facts, the quote, etc. are all an integral part of what the wiki has become. We don't want to remove this feature even if it's moved to another location; I'd prefer to keep everything intact on the main page no matter how the wikia affects our outlook. I hope this isn't going to be altered. I'd really hate to halt the progress we've made with out constructive sections and links. If it's just the general look of the wikia itself... it shouldn't bother our initial input and how the articles are already formatted. - User:PrinceZarbon/sig 23:10, October 6, 2010 (UTC)

Honestly I don't like the new look at all and think the one we've had looked fine. I wouldn't necessarily be bothered and leave over it but I do infact don't like it. When you guys say move the wiki elsewhere what exactly do you mean by that? - User:Slayer25769/sig

That means moving the wiki to a different website. Assuming we move the wiki, the wiki's contents will be copied to another server. (This can be done fairly painlessly using a database dump, so we don't have to worry about copying individual pages or anything like that.) Users from here will register over there and continue to edit there as they would here. If you register with the same name on the new wiki as you have here, your edit history should even stay with you. (Even if you change your user name in the transition it might be to keep your edit history though. It probably depends on where we go though.) User rights can also be carried over to the new server.
Like I said above, I'd like to wait until we know that we want to move before we discuss where, but some popular destinations among other wikis that are moving are ShoutWiki and Wikii. Still others are signing up for hosting so they can administer their wikis themselves. -- Nonoitall talk contr 00:46, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
I had heard about the new skin, but I didn't think it was going to involve such drastic changes. Specifically, the fixed width thing is, to put it mildly, just plain stupid, considering that every PC screen now is wide (of course, it must have some reason, but I think any reason they could give me is going to be weak). The bigger bar and the mess up with the alignment are a pain two. These three things are, for me, the worse things about the skin. I think that most of the other things could be overlooked.
I don't really see why they are forcing everyone to change. Ok, they can do it, and ok, I guess they want uniformity. But at what cost? At least two very popular wikis are talking about leaving Wikia. Do they really think changing the skin is worth loosing hundreds, or thousands of users? I really used to think that Wikia wa THE way to go for aaall wikis, so I'm really appalled at this.
So, my choice, which is not listed above, would be to make the admins change their minds and allow each wiki to choose its skin. But I guess there is a very low possibility of that happenning, thus this discussion. I could hope that in seeing all this wikis leaving, they could see the errors of their ways, but that may be wishful thinking. Anyways, if they can't be budged, I choose to move somewhere else, if the community thinks so too. We could also stay, but it would be.... unpleasant. On the other hand, moving does have its drawbacks, besides the move itself... such as loosing the integration with other wikis (at least for us who work at several Wikia wikis), and possibly the publicity and amount of traffic given by being at Wikia. Not to say that a new home could or could not be stable, depending on how established and mature is the wiki provider.... But, if we can't stop this from happenning, I would prefer to take all of this somewhere else, if the rest are ok with that.--Sega381 02:02, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I'm placing all of my thoughts on this together right now. But before I present my opinion, I have a few questions about the whole issue: Did the Wikia Staff give any instruction on replacing or fixing templates, article structure, widgets, etc, or have ALL of the details been left for the users to take upon themselves? Who is this "Wikia Staff" anyway, and how did they come to this decision? Who did they consult within the Wikia community as a test of how the change would be received by the general populous of users? How does the change affect those that have made the decision for the change (i.e. the Wikia home page, and Wikia Community Wikis)? And lastly, how did the Uncyclopedia get exemption from the change, and is it possible for us to get an exemption? GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 02:32, October 7, 2010 (UTC)


Personally, i like this place. Though the increase of spammers who call Mr Popo a Somalian Pirate are kinda annoying, we have a decent and mature community that knows how to respond to those issues.


As for the layout, it's not the best, but i like it-MKCSTEALTH

@Sega381: Yeah, the staff told me in no uncertain terms that no amount of negative feedback would change their minds, which is kind of what bothers me more than the skin change itself. I don't relish the thought of moving the wiki at all, but I also don't like the thought of being jerked around like this even more in the future (especially when we aren't the ones who are going to see the increased ad revenue).
@DragonBallZGTGoku: The staff have put together some token advice for transitioning wikis. It's more of a brief explanation of what's different rather than a real guide, IMO. But for the most part, the details are in our court. The staff are Wikia's employees who administer any major changes to the wikis. Their explanation for the change is primarily that they feel it will modernize Wikia's look and that they want Wikia to look exactly the same for everyone regardless of screen size. They also state that maintaining Monaco (the current default) is too much work for them.
On the other hand, the new skin increases ad space, moves those ads closer to the center of the page and also rearranges links in such a way that users' interests can be tracked and targeted by ads. So, I leave it up to you to discern their true motives. As to who they 'consulted', they tested the new skin on five wikis in a public beta. Despite escalating concerns from many users, which have sadly become abusive with the continued unreceptiveness of the staff, they've continued pushing for the new skin.
As for Uncyclopedia, the staff claim that it was allowed to keep its current MonoBook skin because it is a parody of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia uses MonoBook. But again, one member of the staff is "a big fan of Uncyclopedia", so again I leave it up to you to discern why they received special treatment. The staff has made it clear that Uncyclopedia is the only exception to the rule, and that they will maintain MonoBook for them. (Personally, I think it's kind of odd that they can maintain MonoBook for Uncyclopedia and not us, but that's the staff's decision.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 03:21, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

I Personally don't want to leave wikia but if this new format ends up being permanent and people generally don't like it then I think moving the site somewhere else would be good but only as a last resort. My question is what will happen to the current site standing here if we move, will it just sit here and stay inactive. - User:Slayer25769/sig

...Unfortunate. I find the unreceptive nature of the staff to be, pure and simply, unprofessional and insulting to anyone who wants to call this place "community" driven. I recommend we move to another site and try and take as many other Wikis (that relate to us, or could be helpful for traffic reasons) with us during the move. Beyond that, though, I also recommend, assuming a move to another site, that we remove the code from Wikia as we move it over to the new location. I see no reason to give Wikia the satisfaction of being able to ever advertise the information in the Dragon Ball Wiki, or take any traffic and user attention from our new endeavor. With that being said, and as harsh as it may sound, I am a firm believer in the community nature of our particular Wiki, and I will comply with whatever the community as a whole decides on. The Wikia Staff may have forgotten what that means, but it doesn't mean we necessarily need to sink to their level either. Well, those are my thoughts on the matter, and, needless to say, I'm greatly disappointed in the actions of those setting example to Administrators on all Wikis on how to maintain a community group. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 03:45, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Yo.

I was alerted to this while browsing another Wikia wiki today. I have to say, at first, I was wondering what the big deal was. It's an ugly, very plain skin to be sure, but it didn't seem like to affected much of anything. Then I noticed the "Discussion" button disappeared, replaced by a tiny "Talk" button. Deciding this required further reading, I went ahead and read over all the changes this mandatory skin was bringing. ...I am quite displeased with this forced change, needless to say. Not only is it ugly, but it can't be altered to look any less ugly? The now-giant advertisements are irritating and the fixed width is just a stupid idea, considering most of us use widescreen monitors nowadays anyway. All and all, this is a move of YouTube-styled stupidity, in my opinion. Thus, I say if we can relocate, we should relocate. It won't be easy, or pretty, and will probably take at minimum a full day, but it seems to be the best option. But if we can't relocate, then I guess we'll just have to learn to live with it and try and fix things up to accommodate the rather...ridiculous...new constraints placed upon all Wikia wikis. ~ Doc Lithius [U|T|C] 05:12, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

will if you guys do move how will find the new wiki am not what to do or say —This unsigned comment was made by Ssjgohan (talkcontribs) on 07:25, October 7, 2010 (UTC) Please sign your posts with ~~~~ next time!
@Ssjgohan: If we decide to leave then we'll discuss where our new location will be. Keep you're eye on this forum thread to be kept in the loop! -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:03, October 7, 2010 (UTC)


@Slayer25769: Nothing special will happen to the existing wiki if we copy it to another site. It will basically stay the way it is and people will be free to edit it. DBZGTGoku suggested removing the articles here as we leave, which is tempting to me as well, but if we're united in our exodus, I imagine vandals and spammers will do the work for us. (How long do you think the wiki will stay in good shape without administrators and a community looking after it?) On the other hand, we could just keep an eye on this wiki, and when we notice a promising contributor we could invite them to our new location. -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:19, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Not alone

This isn't the only wikia going through this stage, Halopedia is having the same discussion. I'm not surprised there isn't some sort of empire, that is going to over throw Wikia HQ. Whatever happens, the team that have made this wikia have been awesome, and the community that has supported it has been equally good, you have all done a great job, well done. Whatever your decission is, I will follow it. - Zemwot, out.

Not much input from me

I don't have much input on this particular wiki. But other wiki are having similar discussions, bleach and naruto have their own, yugioh doesn't seam to have caught up. All I can say is on the chance the Narutopedia does happen to move the dragonball wiki and any other anime wiki is welcome to come along, adding a few similar wiki when one of the top traffic wiki is already there doesn't change much. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Oct 7, 2010 @ 02:49 (UTC) 02:49, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Wow that's awesome news! If our decision is to move, I bet getting together with a few other wikis (especially anime/manga-related ones) would really help us all out. Thanks for passing that along. -- Nonoitall talk contr 03:21, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Surely if many Wiki's decide to move, they will change the rules?  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  07:16, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Considering that the current count of wikis either leaving or considering it is 33 (not counting us), it looks the staff still aren't interested in changing their minds. Even WoWWiki is looking like it will probably leave, and they're one of the biggest wikis on Wikia. :-( -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:03, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps they don't see the threat as real, and think that they won't carry out the move. At any rate, I literally just previewed the new skin, to which I am disgusted. The real thing for me about the skin is the article size. The thing that springs to mind is, if so many big Wiki's are going to move, whats the point of having the adverts, when the amount of traffic coming through Wikia will be severly dented? On a more personal note, I myself cannot see me working through these changes, and will probably leave to set up another Dragon Ball Wiki hosted somewhere else, im afraid to say. :(  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  09:13, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

As many of you have seen, I don't contribute to the wiki as often as I used to and that's for one reason. Every time I log in, I see more and more useless blog posts and that really bores me. Changing subject, I agree with many of you, we should move everything elsewhere, but if the community stays, I will do the same thing. If we move, I will be able to change username, something I wanna do. Thank you very much.
10:25, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Well i'll do what ever the community decides, if we chouse move the wiki i am still going to be a constribor on this wiki where we move it,if the wiki won't move than i'll stay here.ASSJ R GThe Ultra ThunderSSGTransfo4Edit Countcontribs 11:27, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

While I agree that the new skin is kinda shitty (even though some of the issues reported above are simply not true — for example, the one that says that the sidebar will be on the right) and the decision of enforcing it everywhere seems rushed, I'm deeply invested in Wikia (administering several wikis here and occasionally contributing and drawing for several others), and there is just no way that I will move elsewhere even if the Dragon Ball community does. This should not pose a problem to any of you since I've only been using this wiki for reading and browsing in the recent years. And of course, if you ever need any help with adjusting the current logo (which was made more than three years ago by yours truly) to fit a new design or something, or need any other similar services, I will be happy to help, whether it will be on dragonball.wikia.com or at any other place on the internet. Nameks do not surrender, they regenerate. --Radaghast 12:17, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

If you ask me,I don't want changes,it would be better just to get used to changes. Raging Blast 12:20, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

I know this is a stupid question but one thing, if we do leave, will the skin be the same as it is now as we always had it? Bardock. 12:50, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

That is a good question, but considering we will try to move to a web host that do allow admins to define such things, I guess we could keep the same one (or a very similar one).
Btw, does this mean that Wikia will no allow users to change skins anymore? Or maybe that all new user-skins will be small variations on the Wikia skin? One of the things I like about Wikia in its current state, is that even though they are all inside Wikia, they do have different looks, which adds to each of them having a unique feel. I have the feeling that this would be completely lost with this new skin, as the idea is exactly in the oppossite direction, to have every wiki look more similar and make Wikia more important than each individual wiki.
The worst thing is the narrow fixed width. If they would just give up on that point, I think I can live with all the rest, however silly or annoying they might be, though it would be of course uncomfortable.
On another topic, I guess we could blank the wiki when leaving, but I think the staff has the power to bring it all back, no? If we actually had the power to purge the wiki (which I am not sure, as blanking it would be easily reversible by undoing it all), I guess they have backups. So I don't see much point in wiping everything, except maybe as a sign of protest.--Sega381 12:57, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Bardock@:I don't know


DBZGTGOKU@:about what you said of moving to another site and take with us as many other wikis that are related to db,well as you may know me Gokureturns and some other user have a wiki about db the name of the wiki is:dragonball wars here's the link,should we also move our wiki with along with this one?ASSJ R GThe Ultra ThunderSSGTransfo4Edit Countcontribs 12:58, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

If we can keep the old look by moving to another wiki, I will go for the move idea. But if the stay idea has more votes, I'll stay of course. And if we can copy all the articles! So I'll go with the moving idea. Bardock. 13:01, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

I have decided that moving is in fact a better idea since I now see that this has spread with a lot of other wikis. Now that I see that there are other wiki hosting sites than wikia, I may decide to move my wikis as well. - slayer

@slayer: sorry i for some weird reason i had to remove your sig otherwise i couldn't edit this, i'm sorry.

Actually I don't even understand why they wanted to change the skin in the first place. Every wiki dislikes the new one! By the way if we move to a new wiki I'll change my username, I don't really care my edits will dissapear. Bardock. 13:52, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Changing the skin would just be a waste of time... Ive been here about a year and this skin is awesome. I dont like how people think they can just switch things around like this. If uncyclopedia can keep theirs then why cant we keep ours? DB is way better than some fake wiki. Why does wiki hace to be duches?Dbzfreak81 16:30, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

To be totally honest, the more I see of the new skin (now having previewed it on our very own Dragon Ball Wiki here), the lower my opinion of our Wikia Staff drops. I am strongly considering moving my vote to moving to another Wiki no matter the community decision (though the community seems to be leaning the same way at least right now). I love our community, and I can honestly call it that (something I think the general Wikia Staff no longer can). I find it hard to believe that a Wiki such as ours, dedicated to the input of all users (as long as it is cordial) for the benefit of the ENTIRE community should be held under the control of those who obviously do not understand (or don't want to understand) the meaning of such communities. I am yet to find ONE SINGLE comment, much less an entire Wiki, claiming that the change is beneficial to Wikia as a whole, an individual Wiki, or any individual user. All Wikis staying with Wikia have come out and stated that they are doing so hesitantly, or with apprehension and dissension among a large portion of the community. There are ZERO Wikis that will be unaffected by the change, as ALL Wikis will end up losing traffic simply from the slowdown the new ad-space will cause, and the decreased font sizes and text space (And don't even get me started on the fact that most of the "ad-space" is going to be white space for some of our larger articles: Check out the Goku page in the new Skin). In preparation for the changes, I'm adding our Wiki to the List of leaving Wikis with a "Pending" marker next to it to note that we are still discussing. I have also added a message to the main page Wiki News section to let all visiting users know about this discussion and the possible repercussions of the new Skin updates. And, back to my original statement, if no one in the near future can find ANY positive comments regarding the new Skin (that doesn't come from one of the ignorant, misinformed, unconscionably stupid Wikia Staff members pushing this down our throats), I fully plan on changing my vote to "Leaving Wikia regardless of the community decision". I will join any other users wanting to leave to place all of the Wiki's information elsewhere, leaving this Wiki up and operating if that is the Community's will. Well, that's it. I've said my piece. The more I write, the less intelligently insulting I will become. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 17:46, October 7, 2010 (UTC)
I truly dont like the new look or the staff cause they are FORCING this upon us and they dont reply to all of our comments the negative one's and the important one's and when they do its eitheir a small short one(That barely means anything),completely ignores the question or is sarcatsic completely immature for the such called staff.So Im sick of them especially Sannse for blocking and said I was spamming what a liar.Lssj4 18:37, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

I never understood why they actually wanted to change the skin in the first place, nobody likes it! Bardock. 19:04, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

Could anyone answer to my question above?ASSJ R GThe Ultra ThunderSSGTransfo4Edit Countcontribs 19:06, October 7, 2010 (UTC)

If we do move, when are we going to do it? - User:Slayer25769/sig

@Radaghast: Yeah, I was about to not contact you about this since you haven't been active lately, but then I noticed you were our logo designer and figured you should probably be informed about the discussion. :-) It's true that some of the sidebar's functionality has been moved to the top of the page, but the actual structure of the page still has the big region reserved on the right, for links to other wikis, and of course, ads.
@Bardock.: Monaco (our current default skin) is also one of Wikia's creations and we will lose it when we leave Wikia. (Of course, even if we stay we can't avoid losing it.) However, if we were to move, we could still use MonoBook, which is fairly similar in layout to Monaco (certainly much closer to Monaco and far more customizable than the new skin). It's the one that's used on Wikipedia. Depending on where we go, there may also be other skins available, or we may even have the option to create our own.
@Sega381: According to the staff's timeline, wikis may keep Monaco as their default skin until October 20th. At that point, users will still be allowed to select Monaco in their skin settings, but the default will be the new skin. After November 3rd, the option to use Monaco will be completely removed.
@Raging gohan: It's up to you to discuss the change with your community and make a decision there. If the DB Wiki ends up joining forces with other manga/anime wikis, I'd imagine there's a possibility yours could too though, assuming yours decides to move. (Bare in mind there's a lot of 'if' involved in that statement, since we're not even sure if we're going to join up with other wikis yet.)
@Slayer25769: If we decide to move, then we'll have to discuss where we'll go (though we've already had a few promising ideas mentioned about that). Once that's decided, I'm guessing it will probably take a few days get everything set up at another location. Once that's done, we should be all set. -- Nonoitall talk contr 01:01, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

Are they thinging about not even puting up the new skin --ponds11 01:05, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

if this keeps up more pepole joining well we all need to move to a bigger website --02:07, October 8, 2010 (UTC)Zarles the defenderzarles the defender

Wikia, unfortunately, is the largest website of it's kind. Any place we would move to would be a decrease in traffic due to the size and overall traffic of that Wiki system already (not to mention the decrease that will come with moving in general). GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 02:24, October 8, 2010 (UTC)
Yes — temporarily at least — we can expect to see less traffic if we move to a new location. It will take time for people and search engines to catch up, and depending on where we go we may end up in a more or less visible location than we're at now. I can't say I see Wikia's new skin doing much to help our user base if we stay here though. -- Nonoitall talk contr 07:25, October 8, 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for explaining nonoitall, I understand now. Bardock. 13:46, October 8, 2010 (UTC)
Since the moving idea has like 10 more votes, we are probably going to move. I'm happy with this because in this way we don't have to use the new skin... And the monobook one isn't that bad, it's different but I think we will all get used to it after a few days. ; ) Still, I don't see why wikia actually made the new skin and wants to remove the other one... Bardock. 17:56, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

Well, they claim that it would take too much work to maintain two separate skins at the same time (even though they've done it numerous times in the past). I agree with Bardock, though, the number of votes for moving is far beyond any other. When does everyone think we should start discussing our new location, and whether we leave this Wiki up and active? GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 18:41, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

Tomorow.ASSJ R GThe Ultra ThunderSSGTransfo4Edit Countcontribs 18:58, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

Apologies for responding so late, also sorry if I have poor grammer in the following statement (I can't really type due to my hands being taped up from blisters)
I have just previewed the skin and I must say that I am disgusted. I simply cannot see the point of a wiki that looks like facebook. The only reason I can think of that a wiki would want to have that skin is it was a wiki about facebook or twitter or something, and it wanted to look like it as much as possible. The actual design is awful and bland. It just doens't have the zest that a website needs to be friendly. Perhaps the worst thing for me was the little buttons down the bottom that appeared to be link to FB saying things like 'Share' and stuff. This is not a social network, so I don't understand why they have to advertise them.
I have never really liked the wikia staff so this is a huge drop in my respect for them. If they want to make this seem like a community, or a family even, then they need to listen to the consensus of everyone. Everyone here has already said this, so I will not repeat it again.
I personally think that we need to move, not just for the wiki's sake but so we can we can start fresh, so to speak, and improve this wiki far beyond anything we have now. Perhaps, on a personal note, if we move to a new wiki I shall get more active than I currently am now. We need to discuss where we shall move, when we shall move and the different time zones. Seeing as how many users live in different time zones (myself being an example), we will need to plan this move carefully so as to make it as efficient and short as possible.  SSWerty  05:19, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, you are all right, we should begin to discuss where to move soon... And like SSWerty says, it will be difficult to discuss with all users at the same time since we all live in different time zones... Anyway I want to I can't be online next monday until and including friday... I'm having a school exhange... Bardock. 07:25, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

Not to put a downer on things, but I don't think we should be too hasty. I mean, it was only a couple of days ago that the Staff announced this. My opinion is that we wait and see what happens. If there is definitely going to be no change from the staff, I think we should then consider our moving options. We have at least until November 3rd at any rate to get things sorted.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  13:19, October 9, 2010 (UTC)
You're a little late Lewich we already decided to move now we're looking where to move.ASSJ R GThe Ultra ThunderSSGTransfo4Edit Countcontribs 13:23, October 9, 2010 (UTC)
@SSJ4Lewich: thanks for explaining!
@everyone: sorry but i'm absent this week, i want to wish you all a lot of succes in the entire discussion, speak you later. Bardock. 19:26, October 9, 2010 (UTC)
@Raging gohan: Keep your pants on! ;-) The discussion is still open to input, and we still have to determine whether it's feasible for us to move before a final decision can be made. But, yes, for the moment it appears we're mostly in favor of moving.
SSJ4Lewich: While the staff only made their more public announcement a couple weeks ago, they have been beta testing this skin for a while, and all along they've been receiving negative feedback from users on it. Last I checked there were around 40 wikis on the list who either planned to leave or had already, so if Wikia planned to make a concession, I think they should've done it by now. -- Nonoitall talk contr 20:48, October 9, 2010 (UTC)
@everyone: I kinda know how we feel about this new wikia stuff, which seems hard of getting use to, and we wish to have the old style back. We just need to be patient about these things and wait for the final outcome, which I know a lot of you said that. Wolf Girl 21 01:29, October 13, 2010 (UTC)
@Wikia New Look: I kinda don't like this new look at all. I saw this at a bunch of places, including the SMBZ wikia as well as this one. I must say it's not that nice at all. I actually still use an LED monitor (or CRT, whichever, they both have those blocky backs and such) so i dont think the format of the page affects me that much, even though the front page gets squished a little. I chose Monaco as my skin anyway. Since i like where the buttons are and it's much easier to navigate it honestly. The history page is even missing from the new look =o when i was editing General Blue's article yesterday. So in all of how the new Wikia look is, I'm in with the community, I will follow it even if it moves. I am in the agreement we should move to another place as well. I'm with the Ratchet and Clank, Narutopedia, SMBZ wikis and i heard that the R&C wiki is deciding to move as well. My decision is to go with the community's decision, if we were to move or not. I'll stay with it. TanorFaux 20:25, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

Where we will go

More input is still welcomed above, but I think most of our active editors have had a chance to have their say, so why don't we get started on this facet of the conversation. Since it seems that most of the discussion and votes are in favor of migrating, let's talk a little bit about our options.

Move to another wiki farm

Quite a few of the wikis leaving are going this route. Most wiki farms use ads to cover the cost of hosting, and this is managed by the staff of the wiki farm. We probably wouldn't have any more control over the wiki than we have now, though depending on where we go, the staff may be more or less receptive to our wiki's needs than the staff here. This is probably the easiest option, but there are a few caveats. One problem is that there aren't really a whole lot of well-established wiki farms that have proven themselves reliable and feature-ful enough to support our wiki. ShoutWiki is a popular destination among those leaving, but they've only been around for a little over a year and some doubts have been raised as to their integrity. (See Dantman's comment about ⅓ of the way down that page.) Also, Wikia is by far the largest wiki farm on the web right now, and going to any other wiki farm would undoubtedly make us less visible.

Votes

  • Jack678 12:59, October 16, 2010 (UTC)

Go independent

Some larger wikis like WoWWiki are considering this. This entails paying for hosting and administrating the wiki completely on our own. Basically we'd sign up for either a VPS or dedicated hosting plan and we'd get access to a remote server that we can install MediaWiki (the software that runs our wiki) onto and run the wiki on. By far this would give us the most control over the wiki, but it's also the most complicated option. It would be up to us to set up MediaWiki on the server and configure everything correctly. Most technical issues would have to be solved by us. I have some limited experience administrating Linux systems and I'm familiarizing myself with MediaWiki installations, but I doubt I have enough technical knowledge to competently tackle that task alone. It would also be up to us to pay for hosting. We could try to pay for this ourselves, or we could do this with ads, but it would mean striking deals with advertisers ourselves. I'm not sure how much an adequate/reliable hosting plan would cost. Dantman might have some insights on this.

Votes

Join up with other wikis

Rather than independently hosting the site alone, we could potentially join up with another wiki or a few other wikis. Dantman mentioned that Narutopedia is also considering leaving Wikia, and that if they do, we're welcome to join them. Since we'd be part of a relatively small group of wikis, chances are we'd have more control over our wiki than we would on a wiki farm. Since the wikis we'd be joining with are anime/manga-related, we'd be among fairly like-minded communities with similar goals for their wikis. We'd have to coordinate with the other wikis on the details of how the wikis will be administered and how the hosting costs will be covered, but it should be cheaper to host a few wikis together than it would be to host them separately. (Like most things, bandwidth tends to be cheaper when you buy in bulk.) Since we'd be joining two or more communities together, we could pool our talents and chances are what one of us lacked in technical skill could be made up for by another member of the group.

Votes

"Where to move?" Discussion

To me, the final option seems the most promising (if Narutopedia's move pans out). We'd be gaining a louder voice than we currently have with wiki farms, but at the same time we wouldn't have the burden of having to manage things alone. Since we'd be part of a larger community outside our own wiki, it would be important for us to be cooperative and yield to the consensus of that larger community, but I'm confident in our administrators' abilities to do just that. On Narutopedia's forum thread, they have a poll regarding donations to cover hosting costs, and I was thinking if we're going to propose joining up with them, we should probably individually consider whether we'd be able to contribute a little toward that each month, if the need arises. (I don't know that it will, if we even go that route, but just think about it privately if it's something that would be realistic for you. Don't feel guilty if it's not.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:32, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

I've just read everything, but to be honest I have a few questions:

  1. If we join up with the narutopedia, will it be like a fusion of two wiki's? there are dragonball and naruto articles on one wiki?
  1. Do we users have to pay for going to a new wiki?

Further I understand everything, but if someone can answer those questions I think I know where to choose for. Bardock. 10:51, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

@Bardock, I believe what he means is that we would still have our own Wikia, but rather would be hosted at the same place as Nuratopedia. And I don't think we will go down the road of paying for hosting.
@Nonoitall, I actually host a mediawiki on my server at home, which has all been set up, although relatively new, and not complete. So if we did decide to go down the road of hosting it ourselves, I'm pretty sure I can help you with the server side, I do have experience of Linux operating systems. Also, if you would like to the see the site hosted on my own servers, to see what its like, I can easily give you the link in an email.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  13:35, October 9, 2010 (UTC)
There's still another possiblity: We can recreate the site on website making place such as Webs and GoDaddy. <.:-NomadMusik-:.> 18:34, October 9, 2010 (UTC)
I figure that joining up with the anime-mange wikis might proove to be a good idea. As reading through that. Perhaps the shortages of wikis on Wikia (via exodus, migration or stopping), wikia might finally realize what they have done and if they do make the changes, but realize a few months later that things aren't going the way they thought, they miiight bring things back as they were or bring back the option to format as the individual wiki pleases. Though I guess whenever they do decide that, it's probably going to be too late, and already 5/8ths of the wikis on wikia has had already moved. And, I doubt those who moved won't return, for if Wikia goes back and changes it once again. Then it'd be a waste of time going back and then moving forth again and again. So Wikia staff, nows your chance to see the best way out of this hole you're digging, because that mountain of gold isn't down there. TanorFaux 20:58, October 13, 2010 (UTC)
@Bardock.: SSJ4 Lewich is correct. While our wikis would be hosted on the same server, they would still function independently from each other.
@SSJ4 Lewich: That's great news! That makes the independent option a whole lot more realistic if we end up going that route. (I'd love to take a look at your hosted wiki if you don't mind sending the link, too.)
@NomadMusik: Thanks for joining the discussion! I believe that would be along the lines of going independent, yes? -- Nonoitall talk contr 20:48, October 9, 2010 (UTC)
I don't know about GoDaddy, but you can go independent from Webs (for a price though.) <.:-NomadMusik-:.> 14:12, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

Damn it, I took it offline yesterday, since it was only a test :P. But like I said, I would b e more than willing to assist you in the role of setting up, if we decide to go down that road, and it suits you.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  09:23, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

That's okay. It's good to know we probably have the technical manpower to go that route. That being the case I'm pretty much right in between wanting to join other wikis or go independent, and can be swayed either way at this point. Anyone have experience shopping for hosting and know what would be required to run a wiki of this size? (Of course we should think with expansion in mind.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:51, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

Im researching it now!  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  10:20, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

Just a question, Lewich. Does this server of yours cost us money? If so, how much?  SSWerty  05:57, October 12, 2010 (UTC)
I believe SSJ4 Lewich was just referring to a box that he runs at home. (Pretty much any network-attached computer can be a server.) That being the case, I don't believe he was suggesting that we operate the wiki on his server (which probably doesn't have the same QoS as a real hosting company could provide), but simply that he could help to administrate a server if we sign up for access to one. -- Nonoitall talk contr 08:01, October 12, 2010 (UTC)
Yes, this is correct. At any rate, I doubt any home network would be able to handle the demands on bandwidth.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  12:40, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

Ahhh I see. I misunderstood what you said before, taking it as meaning that you run another website/wiki from your own server.  SSWerty  06:04, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I thought it might come across as that. No worries :)  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  11:07, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps we should approach this a different way. If Narutopedia decided they wanted to break away and host themselves, would anyone here be opposed to our talking with them about joining them? (Subsequently, if we can reach an accommodating agreement, then we would join them.) It would be good if we could at least start investigating that avenue.

Also, on the independent front, Dantman seems to think we'd need more than just a dedicated server to house our wiki. If that's the case, it quickly complicates things since more servers means more money. I imagine it would preclude our paying for the server solely via donations, so that means we'd also have to strike deals with ad companies ourselves. Which again makes me lean toward joining up with other wikis. -- Nonoitall talk contr 07:17, October 15, 2010 (UTC)

Well, lets think through this empirically. How much money are we thinking we would need to spend to get the server space, software, networking hardware, etc. that we would need to sustain an independent Wiki? And then if this is an insurmountable amount to gain solely from donations as you have said, how much more would we need from add space, and who would be willing to reach out to ad companies (I will put forth my volunteer for that spot) to gain whatever else was needed? I know there are companies that would take a look at both the size of our Wiki and the general fan-base of the Dragon Ball franchise favorably to advertise to. Basically, we need to analyze this in the near future, or face the consequence of continuing this conversation on the new skin we are avoiding. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 20:02, October 17, 2010 (UTC)
To be honest I don't know for sure. Most of the dedicated server plans that I've seen that look like they would suit us are around the $100-$200/month range. (US dollars.) I can only assume a more elaborate setup would cost proportionately more. Though some of those hosting plans also advertise load balancing, which implies multiple servers. I've never had to shop for hosting though, so, while I know a little about running the software, I'm at a loss as to exactly what hardware we'll need. -- Nonoitall talk contr 04:20, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

Okay, more research needs to be done. Obviously strict donations would not be able to cover such a cost. Advertisers would been to be contacted, and likely sooner rather than later if we are going to get this thing up and running in a timely manor. I figure the companies already connected with the Dragon Ball franchise (Spike, Bandai, Namco, Gamestop, Viz, Toei, etc.) would at least be interested in talking with us to see what we will be able to offer in terms of a new or at least continued consumer base. There are likely other companies that don't currently have direct affiliations with Dragon Ball that might be interested in the type of consumer the Dragon Ball name draws in as well. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 04:54, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

I'd just like to say, that while it is possible to go down that road of having to buy all the hardware etc, there are hosting sites that have everything set up for you, you just tell them the extensions you need installing etc, and it's very cheap compared to what you are talking about. Just thought I'd throw that in there. Unless I have the wrong end of the stick...?  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  09:49, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

Dedicated hosting is expensive and less flexible. My recommendation is virtualized hosting, VPS or Cloud Hosting. And I'd say Cloud myself. Right now we use Rackspace Cloud at work, though after some research when we go into production I may wan't to make a good guess at what set of servers we'll be running our own app on and compare it with ElasticHosts. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Oct 19, 2010 @ 10:01 (UTC) 10:01, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

@Dantman, Yes this is what I was trying to say, although I didn't know it was called virtualized hosting :P.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  11:25, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

Well it's not really "virtualized hosting" as a name. I just pieced together two words, "Virtual" is a generic, VPS stands for "Virtual Private Server" rather than having a "Dedicated Private Server". Virtualization is basically a case where you take a number of really really big machines, you make them pretend they're hardware for a bunch of different machines, and then sell off portions of the pretend hardware to people instead of the machine itself. That way everyone gets a dedicated chunk of the machine and you can give out more chunks without one person needing to pay the huge cost of a dedicated physical server. And everyone gets the advantage of having a private installation of an entire OS that they don't need to share with other people.
Cloud Hosting is a whole newer more recent level. Everything is virtualized like VPS' are but as simple as I can explain it cloud hosting is setup with two notable differences. In cloud hosting first of all, you pay for what you use. Rather than paying a fixed fee be it a monthly or annual fee for one VPS, in cloud hosting the system lets you quick and easily provision new cloud servers, delete them, resize them and so on, and you are billed only during the time that the machine actually exists and is taking up resources. So if you create a machine and only use it for an hour then delete it, you only pay for that hour's worth of use. Better cloud hosts also virtualize things even more, rather than simply acting like a better priced vps, your virtual machine isn't stuck on a single machine, when it's offline no ram/cpu resources are dedicated to it, and when you start it up the virtual machine may actually end up being run by a different physical machine then it was the last time you ran it.
Though talking about "[...] tell them the extensions you need installing etc [...]" makes me think you were thinking of something completely different. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Oct 19, 2010 @ 11:56 (UTC) 11:56, October 19, 2010 (UTC)
@Dantman: Interesting. I had been under the impression that VPS was for the most part inferior to dedicated hosting, but I think I understand what you're getting at. Wasn't really familiar with cloud hosting at all but it sounds intriguing. (Kind of a migratory, on/off VPS that you can quickly buy more of or less of, depending on demand, if I understand correctly?) On my talk page you mentioned load balancing and multiple servers. Does this basically mean purchasing multiple servers (whether they be cloud servers, VPS servers or dedicated servers) and manually setting up each server to fill its appropriate role? Up until now I was thinking in terms of a single machine, but I guess I can see that if you want to isolate the various server functions from one another, multiple inexpensive servers would have advantages over a single expensive one. (Did I get the gist of that right?) -- Nonoitall talk contr 12:21, October 19, 2010 (UTC)
A little, though to be honest, there's a LOT more to cloud hosting, real cloud hosting that is, how "cloud" some of the cloud hosts really are sometimes varies. Cloud servers "are" good for temporary use, but that's not their only power. Firstly, it's usually easier to create and delete cloud servers than VPS, you'll see the term "scaling" a lot, generally the idea is that with cloud hosting you can make the size and number of servers you have grow as you grow and require more power. But also, with a VPS host if you want to drop your current server and replace it, you usually need to either take the current server down completely and set up a new one (in the meantime everything on it is down), or you need to sign up for a second VPS, which usually you'll have to pay another year, or at the least month of service for. While with a cloud server you can create a new one, migrate at your own pace to the new one, then delete the old one, and only pay extra for the period of time you're running two. In the cloud servers can also be treated a little more ephemerally... load balanced apache node you trouble, can't figure out why it's acting buggy? ;) delete the server completely and just create a fresh node to serve it's purpose.
For load balancing there's multiple things. Load balancing a database means in this regard having one master mysql server, and some extra mysql slaves. You "balance" the "load" by spreading reads across the slave servers so one isn't tasked with doing everything for everyone. Then there's load balancing your apaches, usually this is done at the varnish/squid caching layer where your varnish/squid servers spread requests across multiple servers handling the apache role handling requests. There's also real lower level balancing where multiple machines share the same IP address (the load balancer and the varnish/squid servers), the first machine you get to doesn't do much, it's dedicated purpose is to take a connection from a user and hand it off to one of the varnish/squid servers, then that server takes over and talks directly to the client from then on. This layer also drastically spreads out load by not forcing a single varnish server to handle all of the http handling. You usually have a setup at this layer for "fallover", basically instead of having a single failure point at the first server users connect to you have two servers paired together. They both serve the role of taking user requests and passing them onto the varnish/squids, but only one actually gets user connections. The purpose of having two is basically they both watch each other, when the inactive server notices that the server it's paired with is no longer running (it went down for some reason) it catches on and sends a signal that re-routes all the traffic that was going to that dead server to itself now taking over. "fallover", if one server dies, the other one takes over. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Oct 19, 2010 @ 12:55 (UTC) 12:55, October 19, 2010 (UTC)
@Dantman: So, given our current size, how many servers do you recommend having, with each one serving what purpose? I know we want to think with expansion in mind, but relatively speaking, we're not a huge wiki, and with cloud servers being easy to add in the future if the need arises, could we start out pretty small for now? At present, I don't have the expertise to do much more than a basic LAMP+MediaWiki setup. I'm guessing SSJ4 Lewich has a similar level of skill. (Is that correct, SSJ4 Lewich?) And unless someone else in our community has more technical knowledge than he's letting on, I think we two are the only ones (aside from yourself) with any experience in this area. If our skill is almost adequate and we just need to learn a few other tidbits to be able to get set up, then I'd say we can do it. On the other hand, if our knowledge doesn't scratch the surface of what we need to do to get set up right now, I doubt this is really a practical option for us to consider unless you have time for a lot of hand-holding.
(And if it's the truth, feel free to just come out and say that going independent isn't feasible for our wiki at this time. If that's the case, we should spend our time exploring other avenues.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 08:37, October 20, 2010 (UTC)
Yes, like I say, I know how to set up a mediawiki, and can maintain everything server side, and do have a considerable amount of hardware experience, but not in this area.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  10:29, October 20, 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, you two seem to have the most expertise of this kind going into the process. I have a ton of programming experience and networking (both electronic and interpersonal which could be helpful in gain ads, etc.) but I don't know much about servers or their inner workings at all. I'm always willing to learn and will volunteer to be whatever help I can be. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 20:45, October 20, 2010 (UTC)
That would be great :)  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  09:41, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

@SSJ4 Lewich: Do you have experience with multiple MySQL databases and Varnish/Squid caching like Dantman was suggesting we have? I know what he's talking about, but at this point I wouldn't know how to get that part set up properly. Anyway, if we do have someone who can maintain that technical element, then the question that remains is how many servers we're going to have to start out with and how much each one is going to cost. -- Nonoitall talk contr 21:29, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

@Nonoitall - I have experience with SQL databases, but not the caching. And that is assuming that we are going to go down the independant route?  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  10:12, October 22, 2010 (UTC)

I am pretty sure that I have reached the limit of my knowledge regarding servers and hosting clients to the point where I'm not really sure what to look into anymore. I don't know enough to move forward and learn more on my own at this point. Does anyone with more knowledge have more information about the process, or maybe something I could learn about to help with in moving it forward if it has reached a standstill in general? FriezaDBKVillainsThe Reaper!! Lucifer-death talk cont. 03:45, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure where you're knowledge is at, so I'll try to cover all the basics. But keep in mind that I learned about two thirds of this stuff in the past few weeks, so I may not be the most reliable source of information. (Of course, all of this applies only if we're going to host the wiki ourselves.)
First off, there are two broad things that a person can be talking about when he refers to a "server":
  1. Software: A program that basically sits around and waits for a client to ask it for something. (It 'serves' clients by either carrying out tasks or providing information for them.) For example, an web server's job is to listen for requests (usually from the internet) and then send back a web page. (There are quite a few other things that web servers can do too, like accept post requests and file uploads.) In that case, your web browser is the client. There are also less public servers such as MySQL. I don't know enough about MySQL to go into too much detail, but suffice it to say, it basically obeys clients requests to store, recall or discard information in a database. In that case, the client is a program (like MediaWiki) that needs to store information (like articles, revisions, user info, etc.).
  1. Hardware: The machine(s) that run the software servers. Practically any computer can act as a server. A dedicated server refers to a whole computer that is dedicated to one party's server tasks. They are fairly expensive. A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is basically a virtual machine that runs inside of a real computer and acts like a distinct computer itself. Hosting providers can install dozens of virtual servers on a single physical one, and rent them for much lower prices than a dedicated server would cost. The downside is that the virtual machines have to share the resources (RAM, CPU, hard disk space, bandwidth) of the physical server that they run on.
So, anyone who has a computer has a server waiting to be made, basically — it just takes the right software. There are three major pieces of software that are directly required to run MediaWiki:
  1. A web server: This actually listens for requests from the internet and serves pages. Probably the most common one is Apache. Lighttpd is another neat one (very resource-efficient).
  2. PHP: PHP is a scripting language that's used primarily to write dynamic web pages. Basically, by inserting some PHP code into a web page, a PHP-capable web server can be prompted to generate unique content within that page before it sends it back to the client, instead of just sending back the same old static HTML page every time. PHP essentially becomes an extension of the web server. Believe it or not, just about every page on this wiki is actually one page called "index.php". The server executes PHP code within that file to generate all the articles, talk pages, edit pages, etc. that you see on the wiki. That "index.php" file is part of MediaWiki. (MediaWiki is written in PHP.)
  3. A database server: I don't know much about database servers, but suffice it to say, their job is to obey requests to store, recall and discard information in a database. When MediaWiki needs to store or retrieve information (like when a user modifies an article or wants to view an article), it connects to a database server to do so. The database server of choice is MySQL, though PostgreSQL has recently become supported by MediaWiki as well.
So, get those three components together and plop MediaWiki into your web server's root folder, and you've got yourself a MediaWiki host. (I'm oversimplifying things a little, but it's actually fairly easy to get things working if you follow MediaWiki's documentation.) Since all the required software is cross-platform, you can run MediaWiki on just about any system, though Linux tends to cater better to servers.
Anyway, that's the basics. Keep in mind that you can run all of that software on the same machine, and that's probably the simplest way to do it. Simple doesn't always work though. Above we were talking about a couple of other things that may come into play. Varnish and Squid are both web proxies. (We would use one or the other. I'll only refer to Squid here since I like its name better :-P, but keep in mind Varnish can do everything I talk about too.) If we get a lot of traffic to the site, it's possible that the web server could get bogged down. (Remember, MediaWiki runs on PHP, and PHP runs on the web server, so those three components must be together on the same machine if they're to work together — and that means that the same machine that's generating pages with MediaWiki/PHP is also serving those pages to users.)
Since our traffic could overwhelm a single machine, it may be necessary to have multiple machines — each one running a web server, PHP and MediaWiki. These servers would not be listening for requests from the public internet. Instead, it's Squid's job to be the internet-exposed server that actually listens for requests. When it receives a request, it picks one of the backend MediaWiki servers and simply forwards the request to it. In this manner, the workload can be spread across multiple MediaWiki servers, each of which 'takes turns' answering a request. It also means that if one MediaWiki server goes down, the other one will still be there to keep the site up and running until the issue can be resolved.
Squid can also cache commonly requested pages and remove the need for them to be repeatedly generated by backend servers. Let's say our main page gets visited 1,000,000 times by anonymous users over a certain period of time. Since the page is identical to any anonymous user, Squid could simply store a copy of it. Then whenever a request comes in for that page, Squid returns the stored copy instead of asking a backend server to recreate the page.
Since MySQL runs independently of the web server and MediaWiki, it can also be on a different machine — as long as all of the MediaWiki servers can access that machine. Also mentioned was the possibility of having multiple database servers. I don't know much about how this works, but I got the impression that maybe MediaWiki itself has support for this? Similar to having multiple web servers, this would also have the benefit of spreading read requests across multiple database servers. (Write requests would still have to be processed by both servers to keep them in sync though.) In addition, this would also mean that we'd have a backup database server in case one went down.
Personally, my (limited) perception is that multiple servers (and by that, I mean multiple machines) are overkill — at least for right now. IMO we should start small and expand as needed, careful not to blow money on things we don't need. But Dantman knows more about hosting than I do, so I'm still waiting to hear his recommendation on what he thinks we'd need to start out.
Now, as to getting things moving, there are a few things we'd need to do. (1) We need to figure out what kind of hosting we really need. (2) Assuming we can afford it (which is again possible if we're keeping things minimal), we need to get the software all set up on the server(s). I can probably manage this if we're going to forgo Squid. Otherwise, there's more research I'd have to do. (Keep in mind we can always add a Squid server later if the need arises.) (3) We need to transfer this wiki's contents to the new server(s). I've semi-successfully done this on a server here at home using Wikia's dump, but there are a lot of things that are evidently missing from their dumps, such as images and pages from some namespaces (like Forum pages and Property pages). I just got a tool from another user today that uses MediaWiki's api.php to generate more complete dumps — will see if I can get that moving sometime in the next day or two.
(4) User migration. Depending on how completely we can export the wiki, we might even be able to reserve accounts for existing users. If not, we can at least have a couple days for 'private registration'. (A short period before the wiki goes public to give existing users a chance to reclaim their names (and associated edits) before we open our doors to the general public.) Also we need to think about a domain name. ***PLEASE NO SUGGESTIONS HERE*** We should discuss that privately to prevent someone else from grabbing whatever name we decide on before we have a chance to. -- Nonoitall talk contr 05:53, October 28, 2010 (UTC)
  • Having multiple MySQL servers uses a technique called "replication". Basically all writes to to the "master" server, and the "slaves" watch for updates on the master server and replicate them into their own data. This gives you one central point to write to, and multiple places you can read to. The slaves also act a little like a hot backup, and if you need to you can change config to make one of the slaves the new master server if your old one dies.
  • Squid is the older of the two. MediaWiki was originally designed for squid, but that was because varnish didn't exist at the time the code was added. The quick bit to understand, a "reverse-proxy" sits in front of something like a webserver and acts like the server everyone accesses to access one site forwarding those requests to the actual server. A "forward-proxy" (iirc, I might have the name wrong) instead is used by a few people to proxy just their requests to just about anywhere on the internet rather than serving a select set of sites to anyone, it re-serves the internet to a select group of people (when people talk about an "open-proxy" or an anonymizer it's usually a shared -- or in the case of open-proxy, insecure and usually infected or poorly secured system -- forward-proxy. Squid is a forward-proxy server with the capability to be configured as a request caching reverse-proxying server. Varnish is designed from the start to act solely as a caching reverse-proxy, so it is more efficient at the task. Varnish is a little newer in config (though I could never find my way around that mess Squid calls configuration), crucially/Artur (Wikia's sysadmin) is the one who actually started the project on configuring Varnish so it could be used with MediaWiki. Wikia started using Varnish because back when they were using Squid they were having some issues where squid performed fine while it was being hit by millions of people, but when the requests started to thin out squid started getting more slugish and when there weren't that many people reading Wikia requests were slower to respond. Varnish IS a quality system though, I'm actually using it myself.
  • There's an even more advanced set of topics in ipvs based load balancing servers using heartbeat for "fallover". When you get into multiple varnish servers usually you'll want to end up jumping into that too.
  • With a VPS keep in mind that when you setup a VPS or a cloud server portions of the hardware are supposed to be "dedicated" to you, ie: even though the server is virtual and it shares resources with other servers, the resources that you paid to have are supposed to be dedicated to you, even if another vps on the machine is under load that portion of cpu,ram,disk which you claimed is supposed to always be available to you even if other virtual machines are under load. In some cases you actually get the benefit of being able to "burst" over the limit and use more resources than you actually paid for if other virtual machines you're sharing with aren't using them at the moment. (^_^ If you want an analogy... You have two octopuses with 8 tentacles who are capable of writing simultaneously using all of their tentacles, however there are only 8 pencils so they both only get 4 to write with... but octopus b isn't writing at the moment so the teacher lends some of his pencils to octopus a so that octopus a can write faster while octopus b doesn't need them ;) heh, bad analogy though, I just wanted to say it) The actual only real notable downside I know of to VPS/cloud is that the hardware is virtual so there can be a little bit of overhead with things like IO which can slow down some things... er, like ulra-high performance distributed filesystems... (ie: running a virtual filesystem on a virtual filesystem)... heh, but honestly even in that case it's not a big notable deal until you're actually big enough to require dedicated machines. Even running a distributed filesystem on virtualized hardware only lessens the potential performance (ie: it "might" be a little faster on physical hardware) but it still performs perfectly fine on the virtual hardware. When it comes down to that it's not a case of buying dedicated hardware instead of virtual hardware, it just matters in the case where you are deciding if you want to virtualize your physical hardware or use the physical hardware itself, in that case if you're running a distributed filesystem it's probably more efficient to just stick the thing on the physical hardware rather than virtualizing it into chunks.
  • Don't forget Memcached, MediaWiki's parser is a turtle and a pig -- Tim might have slimmed out that pig a bit, but still... once you get moderate load you'll be begging for Memcached before you are begging for anything else. I usually setup memcached even for insignificantly small wiki. There's also the image software (imagemagick, and either rsvg or inkscape, both have advantages).
  • Also keep in mind that Varnish/Squid (reverse-caching proxies), MySQL (databases), and Memcached (caches in general) are RAM hogs... generally they want to be able to consume as much ram as possible (because the more ram they have, the more efficiently they can serve out data without needing to touch the disk, or in Memcache's case, it will ONLY store data in the RAM, once you run out it starts getting rid of things it could have kept around to speed up people's requests with) so keeping them on one server for too long isn't a good idea because in a way they'll basically be arguing over the little amount of ram you have.
~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Oct 28, 2010 @ 07:15 (UTC) 07:15, October 28, 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for elaborating and explaining about MySQL databases. There are obviously a lot of places where we can optimize the wiki's responsiveness, many of which come at the cost of RAM or disk storage. From what I understand object caching is probably the most important place where we should do this. Since we want to plan for the possibility of multiple web servers, I agree we'd definitely want to go with memcached there. I imagine some sort of PHP caching like APC would be advisable as well, right? I think I can get those two things set up.
What are your thoughts on Lighttpd? I've heard it's quite a bit lighter weight than Apache, and can cache pages itself. Could this potentially stave off a need for more than one web server, at least for a while? I guess ultimately I'm still wondering how many machines you'd advise to start out, with each one performing what task(s) and requiring what resources? BTW, any update on Narutopedia's leaving/staying? -- Nonoitall talk contr 11:12, October 28, 2010 (UTC)
Mhmm, running php with a apc/xcache/eAccelerator/etc... is the natural thing to do, theres generally no reason not to run one, generally unless they forgot everyone already does run them. MediaWiki can also use their object caching abilities, but generally I wouldn't bother relying on them, they break apart as soon as you add any other servers.
I liked nginx better than lighttpd, no memory leaking issues. Webserver based caching generally isn't useful. nginx/lighttpd are more efficient, but that just makes them much better at serving static files than Apache, they work beautifully for running image servers (iirc Wikimedia and/or Wikia is probably running one of them off their image servers) but when it comes to MediaWiki, most of the time is spent in php so supposedly a better webserver doesn't really help. And unfortunately MediaWiki also has some issues with the php-cgi (fastcgi, what you'll be using with nginx or lighty) it generally has a habit of crashing the process so it doesn't work as well as it does in mod_php. So unfortunately there's no real good reason to use nginx or lighttpd over apache when it comes to serving MediaWiki, they're only useful when you separate the image servers from the php servers.
We ran a survey on the Narutopedia, didn't look so good unfortunately: w:c:naruto:Forum:Narutopedia look survey. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Oct 28, 2010 @ 21:12 (UTC) 21:12, October 28, 2010 (UTC)
"I guess ultimately I'm still wondering how many machines you'd advise to start out, with each one performing what task(s) and requiring what resources?" :-P -- Nonoitall talk contr 21:31, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

*cough*DANTMAN!*cough* :-D

Okay, well maybe I should just make a proposal and then you can tell me whether I'm hot or cold.

To start out, two cloud or VPS servers:

  1. Web server
    • 256-512 MB RAM
    • 20GB+ disk storage
    • 1TB+ monthly bandwidth
    • Runs the following:
      • Squid or Varnish (purely for caching, but also to make it easier if/when we have to add another web server)
      • Apache + Apache's PHP module + APC + MediaWiki
      • Memcached
  2. Database server
    • 256-512MB RAM
    • 15GB+ disk storage
    • 300GB+ monthly bandwidth
    • Runs the following:
      • MySQL

What needs changing? -- Nonoitall talk contr 10:45, November 2, 2010 (UTC)

IMHO it's better to use cloud, you want to start out somewhat small but have a lot of room to expand depending on how much load you get from readers.
  • You don't need squid/varnish if you're just using one webserver. When it comes to Squid/Varnish in this case you actually want it doing caching for readers and on another server or else it's going to be fighting with Memcached for RAM. When you set one of those up you usually have multiple apache servers on different machines, so setting squid/varnish up on the same server as the webserver beforehand doesn't make config any easier.
  • Database servers don't need any monthly bandwidth, all traffic to the database should be done over the internal network, which is much faster, safer than the internet, and doesn't cost you bandwidth. Proper firewalling is important to.
  • I never liked the bandwidth allotments like that cloud hosts simply give you a rate for what you use anyways.
  • Unless you're using a really good cloud host (which are trickier to get and usually have higher base prices) the disk size is usually locked in a ratio with the ram size of the server anyways so it's not much to bother considering right now.
~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 3, 2010 @ 00:15 (UTC) 00:15, November 3, 2010 (UTC)
I guess I'm still a little hazy on understanding cloud hosting. Let's use Rackspace as an example. They have a plan with 256MB RAM with 10GB disk storage. They also have a plan for 512MB RAM with 20GB disk storage. Hypothetically, we subscribe to the former plan. We soon realize that the RAM and disk space are insufficient for what we're doing. Do we subscribe to a second identical plan, or do we upgrade to the latter plan? (Or are the two synonymous?) If we subscribe to the latter plan, would it still manifest itself as one server (with more resources) or two servers (with the resources split between them)? -- Nonoitall talk contr 20:54, November 6, 2010 (UTC)
You resize the server to the new size. Cloud hosting is calculated hourly for the server's you've run, and summed up into one bill. There's no "plan", think of it more like a pay-as-you-go phone than a 2-year contract. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 6, 2010 @ 21:06 (UTC) 21:06, November 6, 2010 (UTC)
Okay, so with cloud hosting, would we always be working with one server (or at least, one logical server)? That being the case, would everything be installed on that one server (Apache, MySQL, Memcached), and we would just resize that server to have more resources when the need arose? -- Nonoitall talk contr 22:51, November 6, 2010 (UTC)
No, multiple servers with things separated. Depending on what kind of resource you need (ran out of image storage disk space, not enough power in the apaches for serving out pages, not enough ram for caching, need more read load distribution for the database, etc...) you would resize servers and add new ones to serve the same purpose. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 7, 2010 @ 06:25 (UTC) 06:25, November 7, 2010 (UTC)

It seems like everywhere I've looked, cloud servers are usually a fair bit more expensive than their equivalent plain old VPS servers. The enhanced scalability would be an asset, but we have to think realistically on the financial front too. What if we got like three of Virpus' 512MB VPS's to start with, with one for a web/Memcached server and the other two for a pair of database servers? Would that be a reasonable place to start, with the possibility of getting two more of the same servers (another web/Memcached server and a Varnish server) when it was time to expand (if that time came)?

(Am just wanting to explore this option while we wait to hear back from FUNi.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 00:03, November 11, 2010 (UTC)

Anime Wiki Alliance

Hey,there.I'm Raging Blast and I started one idea with Piccolo The Super Namek.We are going to ask all popular anime wiki's admins to unite and ask Wiki staff to keep the old look only for anime Wiki's.For now,One Piece admin has joined our group.Any help from admin's would be very glad to hear! Raging Blast 17:16, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

I'm not an admin but I hope I can be of any use! I already reacted on that blog of yours. Bardock. 17:52, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

http://daizex.fanboyreview.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14753 | This should be discussed about for the time being. Goku ssj4 kamehamehaSPVII Logo NewSilverPlaqueVII;talk contrib SPVII Logo NewVlcsnap-2009-12-24-23h25m18s11318:50, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of a petition when the exodus of whole wikis isn't fazing the staff, but I just thought I'd mention that the AWA acronym is already in use by the Anti-Wikia Alliance, so you might want to pick a different name to avoid confusion. :-P -- Nonoitall talk contr 20:48, October 9, 2010 (UTC)
Let's try this: Anime Alliance Against Oasis. <.:-NomadMusik-:.> 14:47, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

What's all that about?

Just got my computer fixed and now people are talking about leaving the Wikia.. what the hell's going on? Dodoria21 17:58, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

He dodoria21, you mist quite a lot. i shall try to summarize the situation in a short way:

1. wikia has installed a new skin, this skin is very annoying and every wiki will get it, the only way to make sure we won't get the skin is going to another place (moving the wiki)

2. the skin we have no will be gone, even on that other place. but on that other place we can get a skin which is a lot easier (not as easy as the monaco skin we have now, this skin is called monobook and it's pretty easy) it's the same skin as wikipedia has.

3. well now we are looking for a new place where we can go so we can use monobook.

i hope you understand it Bardock. 18:46, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

Go here this will fill you in.http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Sannse/Important_Updates_on_Wikia%E2%80%99s_New_Look Lssj4 18:48, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

i've posted a few comments there lssj4, the entire idea is... insane... Bardock. 19:24, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

@Dodoria21: Make sure you've read over the discussion above and the included links and it should bring you up to speed in no time. :-) -- Nonoitall talk contr 20:48, October 9, 2010 (UTC)

wait just wait one minute werewmoving our site i know its getting crowded but how are we going to move all the user names email adresses and all that junk it just not likely man not likely i just dont know how evry ones going to do that--Zarles the defender 02:22, October 10, 2010 (UTC)zarles the defender

@Zarles the defender: Don't worry about it. We can easily create a datadump to completely carry everything over automatically. The individual users won't have to do a thing. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 04:35, October 10, 2010 (UTC)


Okay I get it now, but what's that bad about the new style? and how many users have left already? is this wikia already got damaged that badly or something? Dodoria21 20:51, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

The new skin will not become the default until October 20th and the old skin will not be removed until November 3rd. You can see how the new skin makes the wiki look by switching it on in the Skin section of your preferences. So far around 40 wikis are either leaving or considering it. See above for a few of the key complains. -- Nonoitall talk contr 08:01, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

someone already made a Dragon Ball wiki on ShoutWiki

It's here, the user who made it is Gotehagetanks but this person never has contributed to here. This was recently made and has no content on it at all so is it going to be where were moving or is this just going to be unrelated. - User:Slayer25769/sig

Well no decision has been made here about where to move, so I doubt it is one of our users. I have noticed a number of threads relating to this whole subject on the Daiz-ex forums. I have a feeling one of their users has made the Wiki either preemptively, or to actually try making their own Wiki like they've been "talking" about (I say "talking" because their idea of planning tends to really be just complaining about our Wiki without ever doing anything or even really thinking about what they should do) for a long time now. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 01:00, October 11, 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, whoever it is has nothing to do with us. -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:51, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

xD That is mine wiki! I made it just to try out how Shoutwiki works.I am Gotehagetanks on many pages,just not on Wiki. Raging Blast 11:22, October 11, 2010 (UTC)

Lol DragonBallZGTGoku ftw. -- Darbura1688.10X.Ka.me.ha.me.ha.....talk.....contrib. 23:43, October 11, 2010 (UTC)
Haha. -- Nonoitall talk contr 08:01, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

Hehe, I get the feeling that came across even more sarcastic and bitter than I meant it too :P. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 16:48, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

Wikkii

If we move lets go to wikkii it has alot of good things like unlimited storage and many things go there and check all its fetures.Lssj4 12:47, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

Yes I too found this, infact Nonoitall, I'm sending you an e-mail.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  13:14, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I found this as well. I'm not so sure about it though. I'm not sure I like the feel of it. Can't really explain that. Personally, I'd rather avoid the possibility of having to move again (due to staff treatment or changes again) by going independent. Sure it's more work, but I think in the long run it will give us more benefits. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 16:50, October 12, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah it does once monaco is gone maybe we,ll leave I just cant take the new look wiki is a encloypedia and a social place now its truning from being 60% encloypedia and 40% social into being 70% social and 30% encloypedia.Lssj4 16:58, October 12, 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, I've seen Wikkii as well, but share some concerns with it. From what I can tell they don't have a lot of extension support, so I'm not sure that they'd support all the functionality that our wiki's articles make use of. (The word "unlimited" has always frightened me when it comes to the internet too, since there are always limits.) Still, if we decide to move to another wiki farm, they might worth considering. -- Nonoitall talk contr 01:54, October 13, 2010 (UTC)
If we did decide to go in independant though, who pays the fees? :(  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  11:10, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

Ultimately it will depend on how much the cost would be, and that depends on what kind of resources (bandwidth/disk space/ram/CPU/etc.) our wiki will require. I should probably poke Dantman again and see if he has any thoughts. -- Nonoitall talk contr 04:47, October 14, 2010 (UTC)

Borrow

Can I borrow some of the information at the top for my wiki? Pleease? -- Mojo22106 04:26, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

Of course. It's stated rather well, so why not? GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 04:51, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. :D -- Mojo22106 06:15, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

No, its copyrighted by Nonoitall. You will have to ask his permission...:P  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  11:09, October 13, 2010 (UTC)
Haha, yes I think you have an infringement lawsuit in store, Mojo22106. :-P -- Nonoitall talk contr 04:47, October 14, 2010 (UTC)

Rebellion?

Is it true that in 48 hrs there's gonna be a rebellion?Like people from every wiki attacking community central?I really think so and so I really might join if so cause I wanna fight for monaco until its death.So this is what I want to say:

We want Monaco to stay and as of now.If we dont get it we might rebel(Maybe not me but someone).Oasis is horrible it HAS to go or like PTSN said there will be a rebellion in 48 hours or maybe not until Nov.3.Give us Monaco or we will leave we want it NOW!Im getting really mad the staff banned people forever and deleted their stuff where getting really rowdy now.This must stop theirs profanity and fanarts of bad things about Oasis it has to go now.More people like Monaco out of the New look and Monobook ok so now the staff is in for it.Staff be prepared in a very soon time.Give us Monaco or we will REBEL its gonna be a armageddon!!!I just dont really now if I will rebel but I will make my choice later.Ss4 gogetaLssj4 16:38, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

This is a terrible idea. There is no reason to attack the Wikia Community like this. The staff have not noticed, or at least chosen to ignore the actions and pleas of the community in the past. There is no reason to antagonize them further, it will only result in further bans and bad blood. We are obviously moving this Wiki to some other location. I strongly suggest that you not join in on any actions taken out of anger against the Wikia Staff or the Wikia community in general. It will not have your desired effect in the slightest. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 16:56, October 13, 2010 (UTC)
I agree with DragonBallZGTGoku. We may move and be annoyed at the changes and the way they have been imposed, but acting like vandals won't do any good. Several people have already crossed the line by turning criticism into offensive personal insults, at least in some of the Community Central blog posts. Besides the fact that it won't do any good, blindly attacking is childish and immature, and just shows that they lack the ability to act without resorting to violence.--Sega381 17:52, October 13, 2010 (UTC)
I kinda agree too... I mean, I like PTSN's cockiness... but rebellion isn't really the best idea. It's best if we go strategically... not the offensive. That's how some of the best users (some with over 5k edits) on other wikis got banned, such as The Solar Dragon and Smiley12 on the Simpsons Wiki. The strategic way is to move to another wiki farm, wait until Wikia learned it's lesson, and just wait for the results. <.:-NomadMusik-:.> 20:03, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

Hi, I just wanted to say that users here are free to stay (which we hope you do) or move on to another wiki hosting site. The wiki will stay open though for the community members who do decide to stay. I would encourage all of your to test out the new look, especially the Theme Designer (and if you are not an admin here, you can test it on the theme designer wiki). I put in a temporary theme option, but there is a lot of possibilities, so please don't take this as the final look. Let me know if you have any questions. Best, --Sarah (Help Forum) (blog) 22:37, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

I also disagree with any sort of 'attack' on the staff. (Speak of the devil. :-P) Thanks for your input, Sarah. However, speaking for myself, unless the staff is prepared to make some significant concessions to the dedicated communities who have made Wikia's success possible, I'd rather continue to work on our wiki elsewhere. -- Nonoitall talk contr 04:47, October 14, 2010 (UTC)
As Co-Chief of this rebellion along with Raging Blast, we fight until we're banned! I organised the Wiki Revolution in 48 hours. Now 30 hours left. Piccolo The Super Namek

That is an incredibly immature plan of attakck, Piccolo The Super Namek. Once again, I recommend you abort any plans you may have. It will only draw bans, and will obviously not change the minds of the Wikia Staff, as none of the other attempts have as well. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 20:02, October 17, 2010 (UTC)

Decision?

This has been a very long discussion in regards to the consensus. Many contributors have brought forth their opinion on the matter. I'm still not sure where we stand about this... as a community. Just to be sure, however, maybe it would be wise to show the final decision on the matter so people interested won't be lost as to what's going on. I myself don't know where the overall majority falls and am curious to know as an end result, what we'd do to avoid losing our current setup and organization. I just hope we don't stumble upon more confusion as time passes since we want to avoid problematic situations at all costs. We're going to want to keep our members informed with the status of the changes and maybe the main page would be the best resource to do so in terms of stating our final decision. Any thoughts as to what we're doing would always be much appreciated my fellow comrades. - User:PrinceZarbon/sig 18:02, October 13, 2010 (UTC)

As far as actually leaving for another location if possible, I'd say consensus is in favor of that. Right now the question is where we will go if we leave, and we could still use some input on how everyone feels about that. -- Nonoitall talk contr 04:47, October 14, 2010 (UTC)
================================================================
Ive got a good idea! make a poll with different choices to move to(such as wikii) sorry late coming into this but i readd everything! i wish i woulda known about this sooner...... aanyways, consider that poll idea Jack678 11:54, October 16, 2010 (UTC)

I think we should stay...

First of all,when you get used to skin,it isn't anoying as it can bee,and with some good background,it will look good,I'm sure about that.Anyways,if you don't think like this,on Shoutwiki I made a dragonbal wiki and they are going to make Monaco soon,I think.Raging Blast 12:01, October 16, 2010 (UTC)

Agree. A lots of websites have previously change their skin, it only takes time to get used to it. Jeangabin666 12:10, October 16, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah,like Facebook,changes the skin once a year.Same with Yahoo answers etc...

i still hate it and will neva except it User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig12 12:14, October 16, 2010 (UTC)

i agree. i put my name down 4 wanting to leave but yielding to the communitys decision, but i wont except it ever its not like yahoo and facebook. its NOT a social network.let me repeat. its NOT a social network!this site is an encyclopedia style place notsocial network where would anyone get an idea like that? User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig12 12:42, October 16, 2010 (UTC)

ummmm.... let me see...

  • its style is like a social network
  • it has "share" as an option at the bottom of the page
  • it has a gigantic space alotted to advertisements
  • a video on wikia said "a place for people to talk about the stuff they love
  • anyone agree?

think about this

diid you see my poll idea ? its not that i necessarily dont like the new skin, i liked the old one better, and lots of work would have to be done to fix the problems created with the size thing. plus, i dont like how they made the skin like wikia is a social network. it didnt used to b abot that. i suggest we make a poll with decisions of where to move, and one with u shouldnt move. wateva gets the most votes wins! common- almost the whole community has put down there name for leaving we should now be deciding where to move to


No blogs = not worthy.

You'll get used to the new style soon.Dodoria21 10:26, October 19, 2010 (UTC)

You want blogs on an encyclopedia? You know, if the community doing the encyclopedic content left it would be perfectly valid for the users left behind to re-purpose the wiki and focus it around things like those blogs you like. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Oct 19, 2010 @ 10:33 (UTC) 10:33, October 19, 2010 (UTC)
Agreeing with Dodoria about the skin, I think this converseation is worthy to be here. So... I guess your not worthy enough?
I hate this new skin. Just saying. And i'm not digging the new layout either-Mkcstealth 11:48, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

Leave the wiki/Paying for it

I disagree with the votes to stay. The reason I want to leave isn't necessarily because the skin is ugly (It is very ugly though) but because the Wikia Staff imposed these changes without any regard to the people that actually spend time contributing to their sites. The communities have no say in the big changes that happen to their own sites and if we stay here that will not change. Thunderbender18 15:15, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

As much as I like the idea of leaving the site, when it comes down to it, it's going to be difficult because it will be so expensive. Obviously we will need advertisements to pay for it but I'm not sure that'll be enough. I think contributors dedicated to the exodus will have to step up and take some of the financial burden as well. Thunderbender18 15:15, October 20, 2010 (UTC)

Wowwiki > Wowpedia

Btw, Wowwiki has already moved (or forked if you will, but the userbase has moved) over to a new site, now called Wowpedia, here: http://www.wowpedia.org. They used a dump (not sure where they got it from, internally or from the Wikia staff), manually moved the images, and a bot moved some leftover changes up until a certain date after the dump. They did some weird things in order to reclaim one's username in the new site. The new page looks good. Btw, in their discussion page on whether to leave, back here at Wikia, there is a nice list about desireable extensions for MediaWiki, which we could add to the new DBWiki server too. --Sega381 15:59, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed they had finished moving last night. Very inspirational to see Wikia's largest encyclopedic wiki successfully migrating! It's funny because Wikia tried to sway their decision by giving them a wider fixed width than they're giving all the other wikis. I'm glad to see they didn't bite. -- Nonoitall talk contr 21:29, October 21, 2010 (UTC)

????

Im a little confused as to what the problem is. Its been a while since ive had a chance to get on so maybe i missed something, but when I saw the new skin i went to my preferances and was able to swich it back. Is there another problem im unaware of or something?

Never mind! I just saw the part about it not being the default until november third. -SSJSensar912Gogeta

Yes, the transition is not complete yet. Until November 3rd, registered users will still have the option to use the old skin, but after that it's sayonara. -- Nonoitall talk contr 05:00, October 23, 2010 (UTC)
Btw, is Monobook going to remain as an optional skin? Though if it does, who knows how long until they make it go away too...--Sega381 04:18, October 24, 2010 (UTC)

I haven't seen any indication of what they intend to do with Monobook in personal preferences. I kind of get the impression that they want Wikia to be the one and only skin available (except on Uncyclopedia). Unfortunately, even if they do leave Monobook as an option in user preferences, we'd still need to rearrange the wiki's content to fit the new skin, since any non-registered visitors to the wiki will see it through the new skin. -- Nonoitall talk contr 06:21, October 24, 2010 (UTC)

And even registered users, unless they know how to change to Monobook. So good point.--Sega381 21:49, October 25, 2010 (UTC)

My Idea

Okay, so heres my idea. How about we give this a little time, and see if we can adapt to it. then, after a certain amount of time, we can take a vote. if the greater amount chooses to say, then we stay. if they choose to go then we can discuss where. Just an Idea. -SSJSensar912Gogeta

There's nothing stopping anyone from using the new skin and trying to adapt to it now. So far, no one has really taken the initiative, and I can't blame them. The key issue to me, is that it's all subject to Wikia's whims. This year, they want us to change all our articles to fit their narrow skin (and they want us to do this for free). Taken by itself, that's irritating. But what about the future? If Wikia shows such disregard for our time, energy and feelings now, what's to stop them from putting us through the same hassle again? We could get everything presentable (or at least as presentable as the skin allows) on the new skin, only to have the proverbial rug ripped out from under our feet when they decide to nix it for something different (and possibly even worse). Given how bad reviews of the new skin are, I wouldn't be surprised if they did do something like that in short order.
It's a recurring theme of them not listening to their users. This happened a couple years ago when they rolled out Monaco too, though I have to say, Monaco isn't nearly as insulting to content space as the new skin is. -- Nonoitall talk contr 03:23, October 28, 2010 (UTC)
So what's the plan,appect the new skin or move?Hikaruyami-having fun* 07:24, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

Thoughts

At this moment in tinme, my current concerns are as follows:

  • Do we go independant, or move to a wiki farm?
    • If we move to a wiki farm, do they have all the available extensions, and everything else we require?
    • If we go independant, how will it be funded? Will major companys who created the whole Dragon Ball franchise want to give us the space to operate?
  • When are we actually going to take action and make a decision on these things, we haven't long left, and this discussion has been on going for some time.

My suggestions would be, can we get someone, who can get in contact with these big companys? This seems like a viable route to me, as we saw, the World of Warcraft Wiki contacted the makers of the game, and were funded completly by them. If not, then I think we should seriously consider moving to a wiki farm. I have spoke with another very active user of this wiki (not on the wiki however) and we agreed that many users would be lost if they had to pay to use the site. Many users here are younger, and do not have the ability to pay over the internet. A wiki farm wouldn't be so bad in my opinion anyways.

So, is there anyone (preferably an Admin) who would be willing to try and make contact? Does anyone else have any thoughts?  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  09:16, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

A wiki farm would be a simple solution, but I guess I just have some concern over finding a reliable one. In spite of their failings, Wikia really is the biggest and most dependable site in its class. I still think joining forces with other anime/manga wikis would be the most ideal thing to do, but for now it seems like we're the only ones who are really gung-ho about making plans.
For going independent, in order to determine how we'd fund the wiki we'll still need to figure out what kind of server resources it would require. If a $2/month VPS would suit us, I'd pay for it myself. If we'd require ten $200/month hosting plans, then our funding source(s) would need to be adjusted accordingly. In any case, I certainly wouldn't propose that the wiki require its users to pay for using the site. However, I could see donations covering hosting costs if they weren't too high.
What companies would it be good for us to contact? I gave it some thought a week or two ago, but kind of wound up between a rock and a hard place. If we go for a company like Funimation, I can't help but think it would perpetuate the notion that we cater to their dub. (Heck, they might even ask that we do that if they sponsor us.) On the other hand, I wouldn't mind it as a last resort (as long as they don't make us do that), and I don't know how interested a Japanese company like Toei would be in helping out an English wiki. Anyone has my full support if they want to inquire about possible help from DB companies though, or if you have any particular suggestions, I can try and get in touch with a few.
Again, depending on hosting costs, there might be simpler, more generic solutions though. I don't know how much something like Google Ads would bring in, but there's even an extension designed to help add them to a wiki. (Might also help our search engine rankings, too.)
I can sense your frustration at the slow pace we're moving, and I share it more than you know, but unfortunately, a lot of the factors in this decision are beyond our control. It doesn't help that Wikia only announced that this skin would be mandatory a fairly short time ago. Hopefully we'll have a better idea of what will be practical once our resident hosting expert has a chance to make a recommendation above. I'm sure he's pretty busy trying to sort through Wikia's mess too. Keep in mind it's not the end of the world if we can't make everything fall into place by next week. A lot of wikis are specifically waiting for the new skin to become mandatory before they leave. (As such, we still have a chance of finding one with which to ally ourselves.)
I think we're all anxious about this, but let's not let Wikia's skin become a cause for contention in our great community. We'll find our New Namek, even if Frieza pokes a few holes through this one before we can. ;-) -- Nonoitall talk contr 11:12, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

Wikia is the largest, however there are still others out there. And I think that FUNimation would perhaps consider giving us the space, I mean we are mostly about the FUNimation dun on here as it is, whilst giving information about the other dubs. I think it's definitely worth a shot. Yeah, I know what you mean, it's just kinda frustrating :P  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  21:43, October 28, 2010 (UTC)

I like the idea of contacting a big company, which in this case FUNimation would be our only choice, so we got nothing to lose. Now we must decide who(admins) will contact FUNimation.
21:49, October 28, 2010 (UTC)
I'd be happy to give it a shot if no one here minds my doing so. -- Nonoitall talk contr 22:28, October 28, 2010 (UTC)
Your not an Admin! ;)  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  08:55, October 29, 2010 (UTC)
Well, gee whiz, forgive my presumptuousness! :-D -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:37, October 29, 2010 (UTC)
I don't know or I can be of any use, but if so you can give me a task. Bardock. 11:46, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, I have to wonder too, who operates the Official Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT websites? I didn't think it was FUNimation, and if it really isn't, then maybe they would be the best to contact first. If nothing else, they have the simplest and most direct domain name. FriezaDBKVillainsThe Reaper!! Lucifer-death talk cont. 16:11, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

Ah, never mind, it is run by FUNimation. I will attempt of contacts with them along with Nonoitall. The more requests we put out, the more likely one of them will get read by someone with the power to do something about it. FriezaDBKVillainsThe Reaper!! Lucifer-death talk cont. 16:19, October 29, 2010 (UTC)

That would be great!  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  09:10, October 31, 2010 (UTC)

I wrote them this last weekend and am awaiting a response. We'll see if we get lucky. :-) -- Nonoitall talk contr 10:45, November 2, 2010 (UTC)
Well I received a reply today, and preliminarily speaking, it looks promising. My contact informed me that we'd need to get Toei's okay, but that they are at least open to discussion. They require details about our hosting requirements, and I'm harassing our resident expert again to see if we can get them those details. Think good thoughts. :-) -- Nonoitall talk contr 23:10, November 2, 2010 (UTC)

Those are definitely GREAT news, now our only obstacle is Toei, keep us informed of their response and thanks for taking the lead about this matter.

12:46, November 3, 2010 (UTC)
@Nonoitall, that's great you recieved a reply! I had a feeling you might get some sort of response. Why do we need to get Toei's ok? And from myself also, thanks for contacting them! I was simply too busy, as you can tell I haven't been on much this week.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  15:55, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

Wonderful! I was confused by the reply I got until finding this out. I received a response saying that details and preliminary approval had been sent to another administrator of Dragon Ball Wiki. I can post the same question to Toei as we did with FUNiation. Who knows, if may have been the reason they were open to discussion to begin with; seeing that many of our administrators are interested in talking. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 21:08, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

You both emailed them? Would you mind if I saw the response they sent back?  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  21:57, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

With Dantman's help, I've relayed some more information to them and my contact has informed me that they will look into what they can do. I'm not sure exactly what will be involved in dealing with Toei. My contact used the word "we" when he said we'd need to get Toei's approval, which suggests that FUNimation would be involved in asking permission as well. I'll keep you informed.
Ironically, I received a more canned reply (from a person in FUNimation's PR department) to my first inquiry this morning, explaining that FUNimation would not be able to host the wiki. However, it was after this that I received another reply from the person (a marketing manager) I'd been talking to before, stating that they'd look into what they could do! :-D Perhaps FUNimation has a little case of its left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing. I'll keep talking to the right hand and see what we end up with. -- Nonoitall talk contr 21:44, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

Haha! I can't wait to see how this develops! Hopefully for the good! And the above comment was mine, for some reason wikia signed me out randomly.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  21:57, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

In the interest of keeping everyone up to date on our correspondence, I've included a copy of it here. -- Nonoitall talk contr 00:46, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

I hope you don't mind, Nonoitall, but I grabbed the replies you got and included them in my initial email to the PR department of Toei Animation (at least the main-connection. I will likely be getting hold of a Resource manager as I find the contact information as well). Hehe, and now everyone will know your name :P. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 01:49, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

You didn't read the very top of that page with the messages did you? ;-P -- Nonoitall talk contr 05:24, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

Haha, I missed that. It was covered by an IM screen when was first reading through it :P. Hehe, just when I was getting to think that the users on DB Wiki could be real people! :D. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 17:02, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

Right, so what is actually happening then? :O  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  13:04, November 6, 2010 (UTC)
For now am waiting for word back from FUNimation. (I'll update the conversation linked up above when I hear from them.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 20:54, November 6, 2010 (UTC)
Sorry, I don't understand, I thought one of the Managers said they couldn't help us?  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  09:00, November 7, 2010 (UTC)

One of them did. The one who initially responded (and who I've heard from most recently) seems more optimistic and a little less perfunctory in his responses though so I'm waiting to hear back from him, since the last thing he said was that he'd look into it and get back to us. -- Nonoitall talk contr 10:19, November 7, 2010 (UTC)

Ahh right, I see. That sounds better then ;)  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  11:27, November 7, 2010 (UTC)

What about DragonBall Neoseeker wiki?

What about we move here ?

Time to move now.

Guys time to move out.The new look is gonna be here today after 10am poland time(Whatever that means).Anyway so where are we gonna move?We only have a few hours to decide.Wiki doesnt care and where sick of it.Everyone we have to go this is the final day.Ss4 gogetaLssj4 11:33, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

I think most of us share your enthusiasm to get the ball rolling, but we're already making things happen as quickly as we can. Like I said above, we might have to tolerate the new skin for a brief period before we can get moving. Don't worry — the new skin is only a cosmetic change, and the wiki will still revert to its old, prettier self when it's transferred to another host with Monobook or Vector enabled. We're making some promising progress, so have patience and we'll do our best to be out of here ASAP! :-) -- Nonoitall talk contr 12:19, November 3, 2010 (UTC)
Everything about this reminds me of the plan to go from the dying Earth to the new planet in GT. Wikia is the Earth that was taken over by evil. and the New planet is the new location of the Wiki. Now the only thing missing is the emotionally dramatic theme song for the final hour of the wiki. X3 TanorFaux 12:43, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

That's great! Good work admins you deserve a compliment.

MONACO IS GONE!!!

Its GONE!!They took it away.NOOOOOOOOO!!!I cannot take this anymore.We have to go!Ss4 gogetaLssj4 16:36, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

If you can't wait for us, you don't have to contribute here until we actually do move. Posting these pointless comments, isn't going to make things happen any quicker.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  17:16, November 3, 2010 (UTC)
You CAN switch to Monobook for now. It's much more similar to Monaco than the new Wikia skin. And it is still available in a user's preferences. I've been using it for the last few weeks.--Sega381 18:06, November 3, 2010 (UTC)
I"m using monobook too right now, it's pretty good but not as good as monaco, but it's better then the new skin!
  1. Monaco
  2. Monobook
  3. New Skin

Bardock. 18:08, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

how can you use monobook? -Ire flowa222

Go to your preferences, then scroll down on the first page until you find the skin section.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  18:14, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

ok but can you the activity of the wiki or so i can't find it... -Ire flowa222 oh wait already found it -Ire flowa222

Yep, thankfully Monobook is still available. We haven't done as much tweaking to our Monobook theme as we had done to Monaco, so it's a little bland, but it works. -- Nonoitall talk contr 21:44, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

Wow, Monobook is soooo much better than wikia, is that staying for good? The stupid wikia skin gives me a headache and messes up literally all of the formatting of everything! Okay, slight exaggeration : ) -- Darbura1688.10X.Ka.me.ha.me.ha.....talk.....contrib. 00:26, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

I don't see a logical reason for them to remove the preference option to use Monobook, since they have to keep it here for Uncyclopedia anyway. (Then again, I didn't see a logical reason for them to remove Monaco either.) I'm with you — I could barely even tolerate checking my talk page on the new skin. :-D -- Nonoitall talk contr 00:43, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

Why are they whining about not being able to keep up the maintenance on two skins if they are keeping monobook?? I call BS. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 01:19, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

shhhhhhhhhhh they are watching us dont talk about them User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 01:22, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

There's another deadline on November 10th, it's pretty ambiguous, but it might involve removing monobook. -- Darbura1688.10X.Ka.me.ha.me.ha.....talk.....contrib. 01:31, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

i have a deadline its never run from the new skin RUN AWAY NOW User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 01:33, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

Where'd you hear about the November 10th deadline? (And just when I was thinking things on Wikia weren't going to be quite as bad as I'd feared. :-D) -- Nonoitall talk contr 05:24, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

The international thing here. Not sure if that applies, so I'm waiting a week for the wikia-skin-free celebration, lol. -- Darbura1688.10X.Ka.me.ha.me.ha.....talk.....contrib. 06:11, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

By international, they meant "Non English-language wiki", ie: wiki's without $wgLanguageCode set to "en". ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 4, 2010 @ 10:21 (UTC) 10:21, November 4, 2010 (UTC)

Oh man I don't contribute much (this will certainly change) but I actually come here to get information almost everyday and consider myself a huge life long Dragon Ball fan so when I heard of a new skin I thought nothing of it, but I thought I would check it anyway and I'm shocked at what I saw I thought this website was near perfection so I come here enjoying all of the hard work made by the fans and though I missed most of this talk, I spent hours reading it and I am proud that us Dragon Ball fans have banded together united not as a dictatorship but as a community of Dragon Ball fans. I hope it will all work out for us. But we should never give up and make the new site not a forgotten race but a Legendary group of people working together united for the peace of the Dragon Ball fan community keep us informed because I love Dragon Ball so whether Toei or Funimation help us or not let's make it a site to remember and be proud ofRhm 89 03:59, November 7, 2010 (UTC) P.S. keep up the hard work.

Dude..... that's a bit overdramatic, but I still get what you are saying. We'll make this work. DestructiveKrillinDestructoDiskTOMdisk 21:47, November 7, 2010 (UTC)

Are we Moving?

I cant understand if we are leaving this site or if we are staying. If someone could clear this up that would be excellent. Thanks Burning Attack 08:09, November 11, 2010 (UTC)

We are currently exploring our options as to where we can go (which involves some waiting). The destination of choice is currently FUNimation, and they should hopefully be in touch with us again soon. If that doesn't work out, then, depending on cost (which we're looking into above), independent hosting is another possibility. Another wiki farm is another possibility too, though it might not gain us much more than a default Monobook. My estimate is that within the next couple weeks we should know where we're going, if we're going to be able to leave.
In the meantime, feel free to continue editing the wiki. (I suggest switching on the Monobook skin in your user preferences if you haven't already.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 08:49, November 11, 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing things up. Burning Attack 22:54, November 13, 2010 (UTC)

I don't know about you guys, but us at the Halo wiki had a simaler issue and decided to move to a new :address(halopedian). We had : :someone transfer all of the pages and stuff, you might want to contact our adims about how :it was done. Best of luck, DB and DBZ is my favorite non-video game series, so I'd hate to see the wiki die.
One issue that did happan though, that being that it is very hard to get everyone to know we moved, so people still link :to the old articles a ton on other sites. just something to consider. Also, if you guys do move, can one of you leave me a PM saying what the new adress is so I know? Jabberwockxeno 15:24, November 14, 2010 (UTC)

Hi, Jabberwockxeno contacted me on Halopedia. If it doesn't work out with FUNimation, I can transfer and host the wiki for you guys. I moved Halopedia over to halopedian.com, which I am currently hosting. Just something to consider if some of the other options don't pan out. --Porplemontage 19:50, November 14, 2010 (UTC)

@Jabberwockxeno: Thanks for the suggestion and for getting us in touch with another potential ally! If you'd like to keep informed about where we move, I've just created a status page that will only be updated with major developments from this discussion (such as where we move). You and anyone else interested are advised to add it to your watch list if you'd like to keep informed!
@Porplemontage: Thanks very much for your generous offer! (Nice to hear from a wiki who has not only moved but also carries more traffic than us!) I'm thinking we should probably give FUNimation a little more time to respond before we give up on them, but your invitation presents us with a welcome alternative to consider if that doesn't work out. How would hosting with you work? (IE, what level of control would we have over the installation, how would hosting be funded, etc.?) -- Nonoitall talk contr 22:07, November 14, 2010 (UTC)
I would probably be the only one with access to the installation, taking input from the community and managing the extensions and settings accordingly. The way I handle funding is that if I need more money to run the site, I'll serve ads to logged-out users. --Porplemontage 05:04, November 15, 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the info! While it would be neat if we had access limited to just the DB Wiki's own MediaWiki installation and database, I feel that your offer would still be quite satisfactory as is. What's more I very much appreciate your generosity. I propose that we wait until the end of the week to see if FUNimation is interested in helping us out, and then (if they haven't responded or have refused) we can make a final decision as a community as to which of our remaining options we'd like to go with.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of server resources does it currently take to maintain Halopedia? I've been trying to get an idea of what kind of server requirements we'd have if we wanted to host the DB Wiki ourselves — just to see if the idea is feasible or not — but haven't gotten a whole lot of input so far. -- Nonoitall talk contr 23:22, November 16, 2010 (UTC)
Right now I'm running Halopedia and mariowiki.com on one server with dual quad-core processors and 12GB of RAM. Caching helps. --Porplemontage 11:37, November 18, 2010 (UTC)

Custom Theme and future community here

Hi All,

I have been following your conversation here and posted above. I can see that some folks plan to stay on Wikia, and I think the time may be coming for those who plan to stay to talk about the future of the wiki, most especially if you plan/would like a custom theme. I put up the current one as just a temporary theme, but Sannse has offered to create a custom one for you if folks are interested. A couple of cool ones she has made so far include Bleach, Finnish Harry Potter and X-Files. Just let us know what pictures you are interested in having there. I also think it might be a good idea to start discussing who will admin rights once some users decide to leave. The wiki will remain open, and will need new leadership if the current admins plan to leave. If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to get in touch with me. Best, Sarah (Help Forum) (blog) 23:49, November 16, 2010 (UTC)

im thinking of staying here if everyone leaves, i will stay with the majority of the community but will keep up here. so it would be awesome if there is a new theme User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 23:52, November 16, 2010 (UTC)

@Sarah: Is it just me or do two of those three links not actually point to a page that shows off a new theme? I think there might be a mistake there. :-D
Anyway, the page that did show off a new theme was very pretty, but I'm more concerned about the functionality of the wiki. Will the custom theme do away with the fixed width, forced image attribution and off-center articles?
In any case, our current admins should be getting together within the next week or two to discuss a few things, one of which will be whether some of us will stay behind to continue working with this wiki. -- Nonoitall talk contr 06:57, November 17, 2010 (UTC)
I messed up those links-- sorry (it was a long day!) -- they are fixed now. The new theme will not change the functionality of the site, but we are doing testing right now and collecting data on the changes we made - so there may be adjustments in the future. Please leave a message Sannse about what you would like in your theme. Also, please let me know if the admins want to chat further or have any questions for me. I am happy to answer them. Cheers, --Sarah (Help Forum) (blog) 17:22, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

For a custom theme, can we have Monaco back?  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  20:34, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

XD we wish User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 20:36, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

Conference

Since it's looking more and more like our move is imminent, I think it's about time the admins (and any other interested users) got together and discussed a few things:

  • A domain name for the forked wiki (again, NO SUGGESTIONS HERE)
  • Whether or not some of the admins will continue to maintain things here
    • If so, what path we'll ultimately be guiding the two wikis along (IE, will one be social and the other be encyclopedic?)

In the interest of getting this discussed quickly and discretely, I'd like if we could get our group of users together via instant messaging or chat within the next few days. Keep in mind that even though this discussion is private and primarily intended for the admins, any reputable user may participate. Since we just have those few things to discuss, it shouldn't take too long — maybe half an hour to an hour. So, without further ado, a time and place would be good to know. What works best for everyone else?

Time/place (insert yours below)

nonoitall

Where: MSN/Windows Live instant messenger, Yahoo! instant messenger, IRC, Skype or Google Talk. If need be I can register for any other free instant messaging network.

When: Any time from 12:00PM - 2:00AM PST (8:00PM - 10:00AM UTC) this next Friday, Saturday or Sunday. (Note that the AM times correspond to the next day.)

Raging Gohan

Where: I have Windows Live messenger, but i can (like nonoital) register to any other free instant messaging network.

When: I don't have any specific time that i'm online, you can contact me just about any time, i check my msn every day so you can contact me when ever you want.ASSJ R GThe Ultra ThunderSSGTransfo4Edit Countcontribs 12:05, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

SSJ4 Lewich

Where: Windows Live Messenger would be the best for me, some programs will not allow me to connect to the internet, because of personal network settings at home.

When: Same as Ragin Gohan.

10X

Where: Gmail apps are best, but I can always make a temp. account if something else is easier.

When: Not totally sure what times for edit history here correspond to where I live... let's say 3am-7am GMT, or 10pm-2am US east, any day. -- SSJ4 Goku(2) 10X.Ka.me.ha.me.ha.....talk.....contrib. 18:17, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

DragonBallZGTGoku

Where: I have AIM, iChat, Pidgin, Skype, and Tokbox. I can certainly get another form of chat if that is more convenient for other users. Basically, I'm flexible, and just give me enough time to get another program if needed.

When: Hmm, the edit times on this Wiki have always been a little off... So I'm going to put in real world times and time Zones. I am in the eastern time Zone of the United States, and I tend to be online most consistently from around 11 AM to around 4 PM. I am able to shift around my schedule for the most part if other times are better for other users. Again, I'm flexible, and I'll just need notification if things are going to be done strangely. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 19:22, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

Sega381

Where: Probably easiest for me is Windows Live Messenger, though I have no problem with Skype or Google Talk, or even IRC.

When: Friday not likely, saturday and sunday probably best in the afternoon or at night (UTC-3). I think I'm at UTC-3 now, so the proposed time below would be 7:30 PM for me... not the best time, but I could be there for a while, if the discussion is not too long.--Sega381 02:25, November 18, 2010 (UTC)

Discussion

Let me know what will work for you guys (add it along with your name in the above section) and let's see if we can't get a little conference together for this weekend! (If you're an admin and you don't care to participate, that's fine, but be sure to mention it here so we'll know we can proceed without you.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:08, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

We should really stick to IRC, Animanga already has a channel. It's neutral, open to everyone, accessible by anyone (freenode's webchat, or Wikia's CGI:IRC), and it can be logged for transcript. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 17, 2010 @ 09:19 (UTC) 09:19, November 17, 2010 (UTC)
Sounds okay to me as long as all our admins are okay with IRC. -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:36, November 17, 2010 (UTC)
Ah, my dear comrades. I honestly want to participate, but I just don't have any time for a live chat. I barely have enough time to check up on the articles and keep track of the forum as I have about an hour of time during the entire day to check up on things. To an extent, I'd love to voice myself further and be a part of this conversation somehow, even if I can't log in for an msn chat... I haven't gotten a chance to do that for about a year now. Even with our hectic schedules, I just want to say that I would like to remain a part of this wiki; I'm not too confident in a move from this domain as I barely manage the current wiki. If there is a split, I've decided to stay here on this current project and help to the best of my ability. Thanks again to all. - User:PrinceZarbon/sig 19:01, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

I think I need to voice my concern about leaving this Wiki as is when we leave. The Dragon Ball community is already basically split down the middle between this Wiki and DaizEX forums. Our traffic is sure to drop dramatically when we move. I can't help but think that splitting the Wiki community between this Wiki (Which the people would already know about, and have read and edited before) and our new location would risk our new location becoming dead in the water right from the start. This not to mention the fact that any difference between the two Wikis would only cause confusion and needless arguments. Because our main goal in maintaining a Wiki is to provide encyclopedic information for the Dragon Ball community to avoid confusion, opinions, and incorrect speculations, I believe that upon a move, we should remove the content from this Wiki. I made this suggestion when the new skin was first announced, and granted, at the time it was likely an extreme answer out of anger, it still seems extreme. However, with the amount of time I've had now to think about the statement and it's implications, I have to admit that I still consider it the right course of action. I know there are users that have said they want to stay here even if the rest of the community moves, but frankly, I see no reason why these users can not just provide edits for the new web address instead. Well, there is my opinion. I know there will be some uproar about it, as there was in the beginning. But I ask only that everyone takes the time to really consider all of the points made here. Logically, I really do think it is the better way to go. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 19:37, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

I agree with dbzgtgoku, actually i had already thought myself suggesting that we should do this, but didn't say anything in case wikia staf won't let us do so.ASSJ R GThe Ultra ThunderSSGTransfo4Edit Countcontribs 20:25, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

No, that's a very bad idea. That's only a skin change, not the end of the world... If you want move and create your own website you can, but don't botch what have been done here. Jeangabin666 20:59, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

Well it's not that simple. It's about splitting the community again and confusing them. Not to mention possibly killing the new location before it even starts. The new skin is only the catalyst beginning the reactions of all these things. Please consider all the points in the above message before discounting them. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 21:07, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

i agree with DBZGTKakarot User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 21:04, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

And while we are on the subject, why can't you just move to the new location with us? As you say, it would only be a new "skin" or a new location, so what's the difference? Either way you will have to get used to something different. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 21:09, November 17, 2010 (UTC)


I have mixed feelings towards your statement, DBZGTG. I agree that two Dragon Ball Wikis would be confusing, especially if one were to be inactive. But, I must say that I would hate for all our hard work on this wiki to be removed. I know that when we move it will be transferred over, but I would still be a little sad for all our work here gone. Overall, I agree with your statement and I think that in order for us to bring more attention to our new location we need to blank this, but there's still that piece of me that holds back. Considering all points and factors and my own thoughts, I would hate to have an even larger divide between the community than we already do with DaizEX and Kanzentai, so when we move I'm voting we remove this wiki.  SSWerty  21:10, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, you've hit the nail right on the head. All of the work done on this Wiki would be moved to the new location. So, Jeangabin666, nothing would be "botched" by the move. And then everything could continue to be edited from there. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 21:14, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

but its still hard to let go of wikia but still we need to kill the stuff on this wiki so we won't be killed on the new location User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 21:16, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

Just a small notice: Wikia will make this wiki stay open, even if we delete it (they will undelete it). Only in extreme cases and when asked by the founder of a wiki, Wikia MAY remove a wiki, or not. That's their policies, and I've already been in this same discussion on another wiki that has recently moved out of Wikia. So it is highly unlikely that this copy of the wiki would end up deleted. In the best case, it could end up abandoned.--Sega381 02:25, November 18, 2010 (UTC)

I can move to the new location, but everybody can also stick here. The new skin doesn't diturb me. If the new location, if ever there will be one, is better than this one maybe I'll consider on moving there too, but for now I don't see why we should move. Jeangabin666 21:25, November 17, 2010 (UTC)

Well the choice to move comes not only from the new skin but also how the Wikia Staff have treated everyone when implementing the new skin. User's input has been ignored, feedback was negative but misinterpreted, and others have been outright banned for stating their disapproval of Wikia's methods (I.E. shoving the skin down our throats instead of giving us a choice: things like that). The new skin is ban, but the worrying thing is what they might do in the future to us without consulting us, just like they did with the new skin. That just happens to be the straw that broke the camel's back. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 21:37, November 17, 2010 (UTC)
I am hating the fact that they (either accidentally or on purposely) misunderstood us. I do want to rebel, really I do, but I do like the new skin. Life can be a b*tch, but sometimes we just have to deal with it. I will be on both the new wiki (if) and this. The Solar Dragon (of the Simpson Wiki) has been globally blocked, just for insulting Sannse. Pushing the barrier a bit, don't ya think? I will understand if she can't handle insults easily, as can't I, but still. It dosen't make up the fact she did that (note: I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. It was either her or Uberfuzzy (or somethin like that.).) Either way, that was irrexcusable from a reasonable person who's already gone through the adolescent stage. MajinBuuKidDebutNV NomadMusikMajinBuuKidDebutNV (contribs) Alt. Account 22:40, November 17, 2010 (UTC)
@PrinceZarbon: That's a shame that you won't be able to participate. :-( If you have any suggestions for a domain name (*****.com, *****.org, etc.) make sure to e-mail them to me and I'll present them in the conference for you.
I agree with everyone that splitting our community down the middle to maintain two wikis isn't a good idea. I'm definitely in favor of our active community as a whole making this move together, and I think our core users all are as well. (Naturally it's up to individuals as to what they'll actually do, but it appears that we're mostly in favor of moving and practically all in favor of sticking together, so I don't think we have to worry about losing our community in the transition.) All that really remains is working out a few details, such as the domain and how we'll work around the wiki that gets left behind. Anyway, that's what the conference is for. I meant for this "Discussion" section to be more about what time and place works for everyone. :-P
So far, it's tentatively looking like our conference method is Windows Live, with everyone being able to work with that and one being only able to work with that. As far as timing goes, we're kind of spread out, so I'm just going to try and make a proposal in the middle and see where that gets us. How about 2:30PM PST (which corresponds to 5:30PM EST and 10:30PM GMT/UTC). Would everyone be able to work that in? If so, is there a particular day that would be optimal for you to work in that time? -- Nonoitall talk contr 23:35, November 17, 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, that makes sense. I just wanted to make the point known once again, lest some forgot. I'll have to find or create a Windows Live account, but that shouldn't be a problem. The times seem fine to me, as I would be free at that time one any day anyway. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 01:10, November 18, 2010 (UTC)

jack678 not logged in here. im an active user as a get on almost every day. i dont know if i will be allowed at the conference. if so, wat is windows live? ty jack678

You're welcome to join in. Windows Live is an instant messaging client (previously known as MSN instant messenger). You can download the official client here. You'll also need to sign up for a free Windows Live ID here. (Note that if you already have an e-mail address @hotmail.com, @msn.com or @live.com, you can use your e-mail address and password as a Windows Live ID.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 01:57, November 18, 2010 (UTC)
well i guess i will be there but im not really important enough so i will still go User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 02:03, November 18, 2010 (UTC)
ok ty nonoitall i got an account. do i have to download the official client? It is actually blocked lol. c u tommorow im retiring from the computor 4 tonight.Jack678 (i copied an pasted sig)

Jack678

Then I believe there is only the day to figure out. I figure the sooner the better, so why not try Friday or Saturday, so we can get closer to the actual move. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 04:52, November 18, 2010 (UTC)

It sounds like Saturday is probably our best bet then, in light of Sega381's schedule. (@Sega381: And the conference should be pretty brief.)
So as it stands now:
Saturday at 2:30PM PST (which corresponds to 5:30PM EST and 10:30PM GMT/UTC) on Windows Live instant messenger.
If you can't make it at that time/place, speak up and we can try to make adjustments. Also, since we're using Windows Live, if you who are interested in the conference would e-mail me with the Windows Live ID you intend to use, I'll make sure everyone gets invited to the discussion. (Alternatively you can post your ID here, but it may attract unwanted spam.)
@Jack678: At what point do you experience issues? If the page I linked isn't loading for you, you could try a direct link to the installer. Alternatively, there are other clients that interface with the Windows Live network. aMSN, emesene and Pidgin are a few of the popular ones. (Pidgin can use many different IM/chat networks, so if you use that one you'll have to specify that you're using an MSN account when you set it up.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 05:58, November 18, 2010 (UTC)
Sorry to be a pain, but I can't manage anytime after 10pm GMT. Sorry about that. I also think we should keep the chat to admins, otherwise we would be as well talking on here. It could become very hectic. Just my opinion.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  10:00, November 18, 2010 (UTC)
You're no pain. :-) What about Saturday at 12:30PM PST (which corresponds to 3:30PM EST and 8:30PM GMT/UTC)? Would we all be able to manage that if we kept it to an hour or less? -- Nonoitall talk contr 22:26, November 18, 2010 (UTC)
I think I have no problem with that time, in fact it works better for me than 10:30 PM UTC.--Sega381 02:58, November 19, 2010 (UTC)
This is fine or me also. Everyone else? :)  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  08:17, November 19, 2010 (UTC)

This is Jack678 again. ssj4lewich said that "I also think we should keep the chat to admins, otherwise we would be as well talking on here. It could become very hectic. Just my opinion" i now am confused weather or not im ALLOWED to come. Can I or can't I? @nonoitall:im not experiencing issues. I have an account now but I just wanted to know if you had to download that one of those links or if ill be fine without it. thankyou again!Jack678

You're still welcome to come if you like, though there's no obligation. Just be sure to e-mail me with the Windows Live messenger ID you'll be using if you want to join in. You will need a Windows Live account (which you apparently already have) and an instant messaging client that works with Windows Live. As long as you're signed in at the time of the conference and I have your ID, I'll invite you to the discussion. Don't sweat it if you can't make it though; we're not doing anything too earth-shattering. -- Nonoitall talk contr 02:29, November 20, 2010 (UTC)
Are you gonna post "Important Details" because that would help alot for people who can't be there because i can't be there but i still wanna know the general details (im Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito on alt account) User:TheDarkPrinceReturns !/sig 02:40, November 20, 2010 (UTC)
Absolutely. All that's really going to be discussed is our domain name (the address of the new wiki, basically) and what we'll be doing about the old wiki here. After the conference, I will update both this page and the status page with the results. -- Nonoitall talk contr 02:50, November 20, 2010 (UTC)
ok thats cool but its still imporant if you have a conference that would be the whole idea of a conference to discuss something important User:TheDarkPrinceReturns !/sig 02:52, November 20, 2010 (UTC)
It's not so much that it's important, but it's better that we get this discussed quickly and in a slightly less public area than this page. After all, we don't want to spend several days mulling over domain name suggestions only to discover that all of the suggestions got grabbed by a squatter who saw the discussion. -- Nonoitall talk contr 03:23, November 20, 2010 (UTC)
Well you got a verygood pint there but it is still very important User:TheDarkPrinceReturns !/sig 03:26, November 20, 2010 (UTC)

What you could do is just post the entire conversation on a page on here. If your using the windows live messenger client, you can set it to automatically save conversations on your Hard Drive.  SSJ4 Lewich  talk  contribs  13:32, November 20, 2010 (UTC)

Well our conference went [not exactly] according to plan earlier today, and I have posted the major updates to the status page, so check it out to see where we stand now. I must confess, SSJ4 Lewich was correct and we had quite a lot (a little too much, in fact) of lively discussion about our new name and domains. Myself and the other admins who were present had to take a little time in a separate conversation to gather our thoughts, and then discuss them with the rest of the group who showed up. Ironically, both groups actually ended up thinking along similar lines in separate conversations. (Great minds think alike.) Still, my apologies to those who made the effort to come and didn't have a chance to be quite as involved as we had hoped. Though I'm not sure of the identities of each of you, I'd like to extend a personal apology to jack678, Raging gohan, TheDarkPrinceReturns ! and Bardock..
On the plus side, I enjoyed getting to know you users who showed up a little better, and I'm looking forward to working with you in the future to make whatever project we work on great. Despite the various glitches in our meeting, we made some good progress, and it has enabled us to enter the final stages of our transition. Thanks everyone! (PS: Dantman was right; we need to look into IRC for our next get-together.) -- Nonoitall talk contr 04:54, November 21, 2010 (UTC)
;) orrr... you guys could just start idling inside of #wikia and #wikia-animanga on FreeNode... ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 21, 2010 @ 05:00 (UTC) 05:00, November 21, 2010 (UTC)

Migration

Well things have been set in motion and the wiki's contents will be transferred to our new host shortly. Bare in mind that from this point onward, edits to this wiki may not be carried over to the new wiki, so if you have something you're going to change on an article, you might be better off waiting until the transfer is complete. An announcement will be made when everything is ready for us to head over there! -- Nonoitall talk contr 23:24, November 21, 2010 (UTC)

Well, I hope he does it well... I was almost hoping for a clean slate to do it the MWDumper way or something. I put together a potential logo. I might as well see if I can port and improve the monobook theme for use in vector. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 21, 2010 @ 23:36 (UTC) 23:36, November 21, 2010 (UTC)

As a small note of the migration, I will be staying here to see if they have a new skin. Although, I'll be on the new one too. :) MajinBuuKidDebutNV N?omadMusikMajinBuuKidDebutNV (contribs) Alt. Account 23:51, November 21, 2010 (UTC)

so whos staying on this wiki??(i will stay here and go to new one) User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 23:53, November 21, 2010 (UTC)

I have a few small questions about the new wiki:

  1. Are we going to have to make new accounts?
  2. If not, will our edit count carry over?
  3. Will the articles on here be kept or will they just be blanked?
  4. Will editing work the same on the new wiki? (I'm finally getting the hang of editing on here.)
  5. Are we still going to have a discussion page on the articles so as to settle disputes?
  6. Are we going to have a forum for discussing the improvement of the wiki, such as the forum we are currently on?
  7. Will we still have the option for sigs?

Thanks for the help. DestructKrilliniveKrillinDestructoDiskTOMdiKrillinGarlicJuniorSagaNVsk 04:11, November 22, 2010 (UTC)

As far as I know, based on the methods of transfer, here are the answers:
  1. You will not have to make a new account, your current account can be carried over.
  2. Along with your account, all edit history, and thus edit count, should be exactly the same.
  3. The articles will be kept here. If we started blanking articles, the Wikia Staff would have many of us banned.
  4. Editing will be exactly the same. It is unclear at this point what sort of "skin" we will be able to use. Chances are it will either be monobook (the one we can use right now instead of the new skin), or Monaco (the better old skin we had before this whole discussion began).
  5. All pages will be translated over. That includes talk/discussion pages as well.
  6. There will be the ability to create forums on the new Wiki just like this one, so any topic could be discussed in the same way.
  7. All pages, including articles, talk pages, templates, forums, and user pages (which are where signatures are mostly created) will be translated over. I'm unsure about blogs, but that's another topic.
Hope that helps! GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 04:45, November 22, 2010 (UTC)

Ok, thanks a lot! DestructKrilliniveKrillinDestructoDiskTOMdiKrillinGarlicJuniorSagaNVsk 04:49, November 22, 2010 (UTC)

Edit conflicted: Editing the wiki, talkpages, and sigs are all built in features, they're the same in normal MediaWiki as they are here. Pages in this forum are just articles on the wiki they'll get transfered in the import, we just need to install the right version of the DPLForum extension (the newer versions switched from the forum tag to a parser function and work a little differently... either we pick an old version or tweak our forum lists to the new format). For accounts, I don't know how Porplemontage intends to do it, though there are ways to try migrating users. As for edit counts, most people trying to import don't do it quite right and edit counts don't get transfered, but if I have access to it I can probably find a way to fix it. As for pages here, Wikia has their own interpretation of "community", so pages here will sit here to stagnate. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 22, 2010 @ 05:05 (UTC) 05:05, November 22, 2010 (UTC)
Oh, btw... we'll probably be running MediaWiki 1.16 straight off, ideally instead of Monobook we'll use Vector (ported versions of Monaco aren't yet usable as a default skin). ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 22, 2010 @ 05:05 (UTC) 05:05, November 22, 2010 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for the correction on that one, Dantman. GTGohanBlueGroup6blue400 1203477316 wwwtengoverguenzablogspotcom-luis-v-blue-goku 05:14, November 22, 2010 (UTC)

And for those who wonder what Vector looks like, Wikipedia has made that skin their default. BTW when do we get to see your logo proposition Dantman? :-P -- Nonoitall talk contr 05:17, November 22, 2010 (UTC)
I already have the logo and skin up on a test wiki, though I don't want to drop urls where scrapers will grab them. :/ You guys would have already seen it if you idled in IRC. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 22, 2010 @ 05:20 (UTC) 05:20, November 22, 2010 (UTC)
i don't really like monobook mainly because i like watching the recent activity for recent edits incase someting is wrong and i don't think monobook has"Wik activity"(which i don't exactly get) and tht is the only reason i use the new look. User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 07:33, November 22, 2010 (UTC)
The recent edits not in any normal skin, not in monobook, vector, modern, etc... Heck, even Monaco if turned into a vanilla skin won't have that (its part of the widget system). We could implement something like it as an extension or a custom skin though. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 22, 2010 @ 07:39 (UTC) 07:39, November 22, 2010 (UTC)
ok well that would be nice ...... i guess i don't really undertand what you mean but i think i know what your sayin(hm coul have worded that a little better eh?) um im gonna end this before i like stupid User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig14 07:46, November 22, 2010 (UTC)
Here's what he means USSJV: The Wikia Activity item is a special feature on the new skin (I remember, on Monaco, there was something similar (my own words at that.) to that of the Wiki Activity Item.) that it can only access. Although, it is possible to implant such a feature on to Monaco, or even another skin. Correct me if I'm wrong Dantman. MajinBuuKidDebutNV NomadMusikMajinBuuKidDebutNV (contribs) Alt. Account 12:12, November 22, 2010 (UTC)

Downsides of the new hosting

As nice as it is there are some things I haven't liked so far on the new hosting:

  • Lack of control; The code is all on the server with no-one but Porplemontage having access to it, not even checked into a repo where it can be forked and tweaked by someone who knows more about MediaWiki.
  • Porplemontage is only actually doing the primary domain; This means that all our secondary domains currently point no-where, to get them to work I'll actually have to run a server doing that myself, even though the wiki is already on a different server
  • I'm not sure about what mediawikidumper exports, but full image history wasn't imported, only the current version of images are on the new wiki.
  • Porplemontage seams unwilling to run cron jobs;
    • One of the two cron jobs I wanted to run was the sitemap generator. It generates the wiki's .xml sitemap for search engines. The existence of this sitemap and submitting it to Google is the reason why futurediarywiki.com shows up somewhere in Google searches even though it's almost brand new and only has me editing it, and no-one linking to it... while halopedian which has been out for longer, has a community, and likely people linking to it doesn't show up very significantly in Google searches yet.
    • The other cron job I wanted to run was a full .xml dump of the wiki.
      • The pages.xml can be used by bots, though it's not as important. It's also fairly useful for reuse of data in some cases.
      • However the full.xml has two important functions:
        • Wikia offers a full.xml (meaning we're taking a step back by not having it), having a full xml dump of the wiki means that if there are ever any disagreements or issues in the future we will simply be able to migrate the wiki again making use of the page history dump (this is how we moved from Wikia after all), so making this move without that means that in a disagreement we don't have a good method anymore of migrating the wiki to a new host without a LOT of trouble, besides directly asking for the data, which in a disagreement doesn't always work.
        • A full.xml also serves as a backup of the wiki's data (even if it misses the images or the logs and users, it still has the history of the content). Porplemontage has said that there are "blackups". However judging by a history of people I've talked with, when someone simply says backups like that they usually end up meaning that their host makes backups of the server... I DO NOT trust host backups. Besides the similarities with the item above about that not being public, and any issue with a disagreement, I don't trust any dump made only by the host to be safe from destruction. There was once a fairly big wiki farm called ScribbleWiki, heck I talked to it's owner, back at that time they were probably just about the best wiki host you could go too if you were trying to leave the Wikia area. But one day the host had a little bit of trouble with the server they were on... Like other people ScribbleWiki relied on it's hosting provider to keep backups of everything to keep things safe... The host wasn't able to use their backups (if they even made them) to restore ScribbleWiki... As a result ScribbleWiki had to close down, and thousands of wikis that were hosted on ScribbleWiki all lost all of the data on their wiki. And hence I DO NOT trust 3rd parties to keep full backups of a wiki safe. One fact about Wikia I do know, is that they keep scheduled backups of everything... and they do a half-sane extra step, they keep them indefinitely... so they keep outdated backups even after new backups that replace them have been made, so there's no issue with something being lost.
~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 26, 2010 @ 22:05 (UTC) 22:05, November 26, 2010 (UTC)

Can you not just set up domain redirects at the domain registrar? And the backups are done by the server (just like how the cron job dump would be done by the server, essentially doing the same thing twice) and then stored on the backup hard drive. --Porplemontage 23:01, November 26, 2010 (UTC)

Fine, I guess my registrar does offer domain redirects without paying for hosting. I've only ever really used them for registration anyways, I like to keep my dns in one central location on one place with a good dns interface. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) Nov 26, 2010 @ 23:14 (UTC) 23:14, November 26, 2010 (UTC)

We're open!

The new wiki is up and running, so head on over to the new Dragon Ball Encyclopedia and start editing! Be sure to drop Dantman and Porplemontage a line to thank them for all the work they've put in to getting things set up for us too! If you have an account here on Wikia, log in at the new wiki using the same user name and password you have here and you're edit history will follow you. If you have any special permissions here (sysop, rollback), then drop me a line on this wiki to let me know that you've reclaimed your name on the new wiki, and I'll restore your user rights on the new wiki.

Check out the forum page on the new wiki for a place to discuss the change and any issues you experience. Happy encyclopedic editing! -- Nonoitall talk contr 06:51, November 27, 2010 (UTC)

The new Dragon Ball Encyclopedia wont load for me. I don't know why Tienshinhan 02:38, December 1, 2010 (UTC)
I think it was down very briefly earlier today. The site is actually back up now, but for some reason the domain name is not resolving correctly. Either Porplemontage's nameserver isn't pointing at the site or the domain isn't configured correctly. I'm looking into it. If anyone would like to access the site right now, you can by manually setting dragonballencyclopedia.com and www.dragonballencyclopedia.com to 96.31.66.82 in your hosts file. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're probably better off waiting until the issue is resolved though.) Hopefully all should be right in a few hours or at the latest, tomorrow. -- Nonoitall talk contr 02:49, December 1, 2010 (UTC)
The new wiki will not allow me to login to my current account or create a new one-- pingufetch5
You should be able to login to the new wiki using the same name and password as you use on this wiki. If you're having difficulties, feel free to e-mail me and I'll be happy to help you out! -- Nonoitall talk contr 03:58, January 2, 2011 (UTC)

Mainpage Message

Hi, this wiki will be remaining open, so I am going to change the main page link (in the wiki news template) to point here so users can see the discussion, rather than just be linked off the site. I think we should pick a time for this message to come down, since once those who decide to leave do, the remaining (and new) community will likely want to have a different message there and elect new admins. Thanks, --Sarah (Help Forum) (blog) 23:12, December 1, 2010 (UTC)

I guess I don't see too much need to set a date. It's wiki-related Dragon Ball news, so it can get get bumped down the news list as soon as there is other wiki-related news to replace it, just like the other items on the list. (I did add both links for convenience and date the news entry though, so now it no longer is stuck at the top.) Myself and a couple other admins will be sticking around to help facilitate this wiki's transition and foster amicable cooperation between the two unique projects. We'll also be happy to help promote new admins to help further this wiki's objectives as the community grows! -- Nonoitall talk contr 23:55, December 1, 2010 (UTC)

I really don't understand the importance of having two wikis. One is on the wikia server and the other is scratch made and more encyclopedic? This is getting confusing. Banan14kab 08:09, December 2, 2010 (UTC)

I'll certainly be sticking around Sarah, no worries. -- SSJ4 Goku(2) 10X.Ka.me.ha.me.ha.....talk.....contrib. 08:20, December 2, 2010 (UTC)
@Banan14kab: The new wiki is in place for editors who want to continue to focus on encyclopedic article content. The old one here will continue as a more casual project showcasing Wikia's social features and connections. -- Nonoitall talk contr 08:48, December 2, 2010 (UTC)
O alright then. So maybe we should remove the notice at the top of pages with the Future Trunks image saying to collect more info. Just on this wiki no the new encyclopedic one.Banan14kab 09:42, December 2, 2010 (UTC)
That's a good idea. :-) There are quite a few article elements that we should either reduce or remove now. -- Nonoitall talk contr 09:54, December 2, 2010 (UTC)
i think we should stickto the rules that we had to a certain degree but still keep it more social know what im saiyan? User:Ultimatesupersaiyanvegito/sig18 09:56, December 2, 2010 (UTC)

???

I guess my only question is why? Whats the point? This wiki is doing fine, theres really no need to start another one with the same exact info. The idea just seems...exhausting...

Edit: Oh, gotcha.

It's so that users with an encyclopedic focus can continue to contribute to a wiki that promotes that goal. The very reason that both wikis are doing fine is that they fill different roles — this one as a place for fans to get together and talk up all things Dragon Ball, and the other as a place for content-driven editors to showcase article content. -- Nonoitall talk contr 22:31, January 7, 2011 (UTC)
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