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> ...long term sustainability problems, financial situation... Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance say

> ...long term sustainability problems, financial situation... Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance says they have more money right now than they had at the start of the year and twice as much as they had the same time last year. > Owen and Alexander are fully committed to seeing the sustained growth of Miraheze > Compared to where we were before 2019, Miraheze is in a much better financial position, has drastically improved its legal standing and compliance and has taken strides to improve the technological stack behind the project through the right levels of investment being open for technical volunteers to harness. So, which is it? Are you shutting down or fully committed to sustained growth? Are you now unsustainable or better financially than ever before? Nothing about this announcement makes sense to an outside observer who has no idea what "taking into account recent events" means.

deleted 3y ago
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KomoD 3y ago
Yeah what is up with that...
duskwuff 3y ago
There's some further context at https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Statement_from_the_Board https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Stateme... -- specifically: > To clarify a bit on the reason behind this choice, the technical team behind Miraheze is currently 3 people (5 if you include two unprocessed resignations). Two of those three people (myself include) are currently burned out on the project and wish to step away. There's also some discussion of possibly handing over the project.
- golph 3y ago
  Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minutes https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...
  - joecool1029 3y ago
    I had figured it was not exactly technical burnout in running Mediawiki installs but regulatory burnout in following Euro GDPR/cookie banner/bullshit-of-the-now requirements. Some of them are easy but the rest phase in once you reach a certain scale of users (which it sounds like they probably have).
    - LordShredda 3y ago
      It clearly says technical burnout. Why do you have to blame GDPR? If anything it was the best thing to happen to the open internet
      - aerio 3y ago
        Yeah, speaking as a European tech lead; GDPR was a pain in the butt a few years ago when it was introduced - and all client websites had to be retroactively fitted with cookie systems, routines had to be implemented, stuff had to be learned, etc. Once sites are planned with it in mind from the get go it's really no big deal, and huge for the end user.
        duskwuff 3y ago
        For a wiki farm like Miraheze, GDPR/CCPA/etc compliance is fairly easy. MediaWiki collects fairly little personal data about users, and there are well-defined methods for the site operator to export or delete that data if a user requests that they do so. Besides, that all kicked in years ago. It's not a new concern.
        Nemo_bis 3y ago
        Cookies were regulated by the ePrivacy directive back in 2009. The case raised above is about someone who had access to see the users' IP address. Handling training and authorisations for people with access to personal data is an ongoing job, not something you do once and forget.
tallies 3y ago
My impression from reading their Discord server yesterday is this: - Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge - Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free wiki host called WikiTide - The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided to call it quits - There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group of volunteers FWIW I had a horrible experience using Miraheze last year: - September: I created my wiki - November: Miraheze had an error with a drive and over 25% of their wikis were lost. It took them weeks to admit the extent of this error and that they had no plans to use a professional recovery service - Early December: I recreated my wiki and rewrote it (250+ articles) - Late December: Miraheze recovered the back-ups they thought they had lost and said they would merge the new and old versions of recreated wikis. Somehow, due to 'someone unplugging a hard drive', they lost all of the content I'd written since November. I've since learned my lesson about making local back ups, but come on. It was clear there had been tons of technical and communication problems for a long time.
- nerpderp82 3y ago
  One job! This sounds like an adversarial attack against those who would host wikis on their site.
- helf 3y ago
  [dead]
- culi 3y ago
  My wiki also got affected by the harddrive. They send out a message with everything they knew pretty much immediately even to people not affected by the error and continued to update as they learned more. Not sure why you seem to think it took "weeks". For a volunteer-run service they've actually been quite on top of it and compassionate in my experience
  - tallies 3y ago
    You're right, it was 10 days, not quite weeks. It's not important but here are some of the miscommunications and apologies: November 18: "The cloud server which hosts one of our database, db141, experienced a disk issue. As a result, a small number of wikis hosted on db141 are unavailable. [...] While cloud14 has been reinstalled, we will have to send the affected disks to professional data recovery. The earliest ETA for having wikis restored is potentially early next week. [...] Our number #1 goal is to restore the data on the disks affected so that wikis are restored versus using a backup which could be various days old" November 24: An update to the situation was embedded in an unnecessary meeting on Discord: "Our Miraheze Meeting is starting now! Join us while we talk about everything Miraheze, such as recent policy proposals and we'll be providing an update on the db141 issue We'll answer any questions you have and will listen to any comments or concerns." November 28: "I understand the frustration, and we have not yet given up hope on data recovery, so you can still wait if that is your choice. But I also don't want to give people any false hope. It is not looking super great for data recovery. I won't completely rule it out yet, and I can't say anything definitively. Venues will be opened shortly for requesting that wikis be recreated from scratch (with images at least still intact) if that is your wish [...] in the recent Miraheze Meeting it has been brought up that our communication has been less than ideal, and some feel some questions have been dodged and/or ignored. I have gone back and looked at our responses to some questions, and I can see how this could be assumed [...] I would like to clear one thing up now. Something that seems to keep being brought up is that we sent the drives to a data recovery service. This was not true [...] Owen currently has the drives and has for a few days. They are not at a data recovery service. This was due to some internal miscommunication within SRE, and is something that is being addressed [...] Once again we apologise for this miscommunication and we are working to resolve our internal communication problems [...] Indeed, over the last few days, it would appear that information was not properly being relayed within our own team which led to some breakdowns in communication. Clearly, different members had different insights and views on certain topics. This has led to a strain in communications and we are working to rectify that." I don't think it was ever explained how the data was recovered.
Quarrel 3y ago
Certainly it is hard to make it gel on the money side. From their frontpage: > If 550 of Miraheze's 300,000+ users gave only £12 (16.35 USD) once a year, Miraheze would exceed its budget requirements. So not for want of £6,600 / year, presumably? Labour's of love like this can just burn you out. Building the right sustaining community is hard, but it also seems like they're too big to just fizzle out like this? A shame.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

KomoD 3y ago

Yeah what is up with that...

duskwuff 3y ago

There's some further context at https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Statement_from_the_Board https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Stateme... -- specifically: > To clarify a bit on the reason behind this choice, the technical team behind Miraheze is currently 3 people (5 if you include two unprocessed resignations). Two of those three people (myself include) are currently burned out on the project and wish to step away. There's also some discussion of possibly handing over the project.

golph 3y ago
Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minutes https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...
- joecool1029 3y ago
  I had figured it was not exactly technical burnout in running Mediawiki installs but regulatory burnout in following Euro GDPR/cookie banner/bullshit-of-the-now requirements. Some of them are easy but the rest phase in once you reach a certain scale of users (which it sounds like they probably have).
  - LordShredda 3y ago
    It clearly says technical burnout. Why do you have to blame GDPR? If anything it was the best thing to happen to the open internet
    - aerio 3y ago
      Yeah, speaking as a European tech lead; GDPR was a pain in the butt a few years ago when it was introduced - and all client websites had to be retroactively fitted with cookie systems, routines had to be implemented, stuff had to be learned, etc. Once sites are planned with it in mind from the get go it's really no big deal, and huge for the end user.
      - duskwuff 3y ago
        For a wiki farm like Miraheze, GDPR/CCPA/etc compliance is fairly easy. MediaWiki collects fairly little personal data about users, and there are well-defined methods for the site operator to export or delete that data if a user requests that they do so. Besides, that all kicked in years ago. It's not a new concern.
      - Nemo_bis 3y ago
        Cookies were regulated by the ePrivacy directive back in 2009. The case raised above is about someone who had access to see the users' IP address. Handling training and authorisations for people with access to personal data is an ongoing job, not something you do once and forget.

tallies 3y ago

My impression from reading their Discord server yesterday is this: - Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge - Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free wiki host called WikiTide - The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided to call it quits - There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group of volunteers FWIW I had a horrible experience using Miraheze last year: - September: I created my wiki - November: Miraheze had an error with a drive and over 25% of their wikis were lost. It took them weeks to admit the extent of this error and that they had no plans to use a professional recovery service - Early December: I recreated my wiki and rewrote it (250+ articles) - Late December: Miraheze recovered the back-ups they thought they had lost and said they would merge the new and old versions of recreated wikis. Somehow, due to 'someone unplugging a hard drive', they lost all of the content I'd written since November. I've since learned my lesson about making local back ups, but come on. It was clear there had been tons of technical and communication problems for a long time.

nerpderp82 3y ago
One job! This sounds like an adversarial attack against those who would host wikis on their site.
helf 3y ago
[dead]
culi 3y ago
My wiki also got affected by the harddrive. They send out a message with everything they knew pretty much immediately even to people not affected by the error and continued to update as they learned more. Not sure why you seem to think it took "weeks". For a volunteer-run service they've actually been quite on top of it and compassionate in my experience
- tallies 3y ago
  You're right, it was 10 days, not quite weeks. It's not important but here are some of the miscommunications and apologies: November 18: "The cloud server which hosts one of our database, db141, experienced a disk issue. As a result, a small number of wikis hosted on db141 are unavailable. [...] While cloud14 has been reinstalled, we will have to send the affected disks to professional data recovery. The earliest ETA for having wikis restored is potentially early next week. [...] Our number #1 goal is to restore the data on the disks affected so that wikis are restored versus using a backup which could be various days old" November 24: An update to the situation was embedded in an unnecessary meeting on Discord: "Our Miraheze Meeting is starting now! Join us while we talk about everything Miraheze, such as recent policy proposals and we'll be providing an update on the db141 issue We'll answer any questions you have and will listen to any comments or concerns." November 28: "I understand the frustration, and we have not yet given up hope on data recovery, so you can still wait if that is your choice. But I also don't want to give people any false hope. It is not looking super great for data recovery. I won't completely rule it out yet, and I can't say anything definitively. Venues will be opened shortly for requesting that wikis be recreated from scratch (with images at least still intact) if that is your wish [...] in the recent Miraheze Meeting it has been brought up that our communication has been less than ideal, and some feel some questions have been dodged and/or ignored. I have gone back and looked at our responses to some questions, and I can see how this could be assumed [...] I would like to clear one thing up now. Something that seems to keep being brought up is that we sent the drives to a data recovery service. This was not true [...] Owen currently has the drives and has for a few days. They are not at a data recovery service. This was due to some internal miscommunication within SRE, and is something that is being addressed [...] Once again we apologise for this miscommunication and we are working to resolve our internal communication problems [...] Indeed, over the last few days, it would appear that information was not properly being relayed within our own team which led to some breakdowns in communication. Clearly, different members had different insights and views on certain topics. This has led to a strain in communications and we are working to rectify that." I don't think it was ever explained how the data was recovered.

Quarrel 3y ago

Certainly it is hard to make it gel on the money side. From their frontpage: > If 550 of Miraheze's 300,000+ users gave only £12 (16.35 USD) once a year, Miraheze would exceed its budget requirements. So not for want of £6,600 / year, presumably? Labour's of love like this can just burn you out. Building the right sustaining community is hard, but it also seems like they're too big to just fizzle out like this? A shame.