(This is a long email. Feel free to skip ahead to the "MY PROPOSAL"
section at the end.)
I mentioned in an earlier email that SourceForge upgraded the PHP on
the server that runs the FreeDOS Wiki. I don't know why, but the PHP
upgrade has caused the wiki to not load a stylesheet. It doesn't
appear to be a *missing* stylesheet - the wiki doesn't seem to be able
to detect and load at least one stylesheet. So the wiki is currently
showing unstyled web pages.
For a while, I've wanted to move the FreeDOS Wiki to a new server, not
hosted by SF. The SF folks have been great, but the web hosting is
sloooooooooooow and websites there are much more difficult to
maintain. The not-quite-broken wiki is my motivation to finally move
the wiki.
I can set up a new website on the same service that currently hosts
the www.freedos.org website. Since we aren't using the
wiki.freedos.org hostname right now, I can set up a new
wiki.freedos.org site.
>From my other email: the SF upgrade means the new-PHP site is hosted
at freedos.sourceforge.io - so I had to change all the "wiki" links to
point to freedos.sourceforge.io. The older-PHP vhost.sourceforge.net
that "wiki.freedos.org" points to will go away soon. I could repoint
the "wiki.freedos.org" alias to the new-PHP site .. but I think it's
easier to just go ahead with the new hosting.
However, we have a "legacy" problem in the wiki database:
A little background:
Years ago, SF set up a shared "all-projects" MediaWiki. All SF-hosted
projects could use that, and SF had some front-end that carved out a
space for each project. (I don't remember the details anymore.) Later,
SF retired the shared wiki, and gave each project an export of their
data, plus a user list. Because of how MediaWiki tracks edits, the
"user list" was every user on SF. The user list is 99% non-FreeDOS
users.
We set up our own MediaWiki on vhost.sourceforge.net
("wiki.freedos.org") and imported the data. We've added some wiki
editors since then; a few of those are still active.
But if I migrate the current MediaWiki database to new web hosting,
we'd have to import the legacy user list too. It doesn't seem like a
good idea to have that many non-FreeDOS users defined in the wiki's
user list.
MY PROPOSAL:
I did some analysis, and the FreeDOS Wiki has 290 pages in it. That's
more than a few, but it's not a ton.
My current thinking is to set up a new wiki.freedos.org website
(re-point the "wiki.freedos.org" name to the new website) and do a
manual copy/paste of all 290 pages. It would be a pain to do all that
by hand, but I would like to use that opportunity to do some wiki
cleanup at the same time.
When the new wiki.freedos.org is ready, I would change the "wiki"
links on www.freedos.org to point to the new wiki.freedos.org website.
I can add new wiki editors at that time, and probably set up a "self
service" feature so folks can create their own wiki accounts (would
need to look at how to prevent spamming).
PROs:
+ The new user list would be just FreeDOS folks
+ Wiki cleanup (consistent naming of pages, consistent formatting of pages, etc)
+ The new hosting service would be faster, so the new wiki.freedos.org
would be faster, more responsive
+ Easier to maintain on the new web hosting
CONs:
- Manually copying/pasting 290 wiki pages would be a pain, but doable
- I think I can pace myself to copy all 290 wiki pages in one month
(by around Oct 1) but delays could push that date out - in the
meantime, we would continue to use the SF hosting we have now, with
unstyled pages
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