RationalWiki:Community Page

New enemies join the fray

Denyse O'Leary decides to bitch about non-materialist neuroscience. tmtoulouse ^irritate 23:53, 29 August 2007 (CDT)

Media Magazine in Boston, MA covers RW and CP

Blast Magazine publishes a feature piece on CP and covers RW as well. tmtoulouse ^irritate 09:12, 5 September 2007 (CDT)

Hosting woes

Hopefully the DNS servers will have our domain name pointed here in about 12-20 hours for everyone. Now that is done I can take a bit of a breather and tell you that we are not done yet! Here is the situation. Siteground had basically shut us down and blackmailed us for $100 a month. I wanted to decrease the amount of “down time” as much as possible and sever our ties with siteground. To do that I have set up a home here at this service, but we will still be bumping against a CPU problem. This should not be as “game stopping” as it was at siteground but it will be a problem. That is why this is going to be our temporary new home.

While trying to get the site up and editable by the mob I have also been working on a parallel track to get us a permanent home. This is a lot more complicated and will take a little more time, but I am well on my way. We have reached the point we really need a dedicated IP address and a private server. Since we are going to have to make this move anyway I decided that we should optimize what we get out of it. I want us to be able to have as much manageable control over our site as possible with out me having to physically host it in the student ghetto. That means a private server, dedicated IP address, our own private DNS server and root access to everything. Having this available means I am the one that monitors our CPU and memory usage, our bandwidth, disk space, ect. I am also the one thats in charge of our DNS and our server so I am the on that gets any DMCA request or other issues. It makes rationalwiki.com our site and makes us answerable to pretty much no one but ourselves.

All of this is complicated, and will take time, but I am well on my way to setting it up. It is also surprisingly not as expensive as one might think. Its about half as much money as what siteground was blackmailing us for, and we get far more out of it. When I made the decision to make this move I restructured my budget so that if I have to I can eat all the costs of hosting RW. Hopefully though some of the other members of RW will be willing to share the burden. Once things get settled I am going to do a “pi pledge-a-thon” the goal being to get 15 users to pledge “pi” dollars a month to RW. Hopefully we can find 15 people who can afford $3.14 a month, but even if we can't I will support the site for as long as possible.

All this means that we will have to transition once again to a new site. But that transition will hopefully be much much smoother. We will not have to “transfer” the domain again only adjust the DNS server, and I will own the DNS server. I am setting up a “beta” version of the wiki that I can use to move stuff in and test before I move the “live” version. That should mean that I know everything will work before I do it. Also the beta version will allow me and others who are interested to test software updates, expansions, and large scale changes with out having to do it on the actual live wiki. It will be a few days till we make the move to our permanent home. I will work as quickly as I can, but that must be tempered against my existing busy schedule. I will try and make sure any “down time” occurs on our off-peak usage, which is pretty much all day Sunday, since everyone is at church.

Any questions? Lets discuss over on the talk page!

Godspeed, tmtoulouse ^irritate 12:13, 13 September 2007 (MDT)

Rollback

I have implemented a change to rights such that users that have been on the site for a little while get access to the edit rollback feature that was previously only available to sysops. This is a "one-click" revision that removes the changes to an article by the most recent editor. It is primarily useful for mass vandalism clean-up. So thats what the new button does. tmtoulouse ^irritate 15:03, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Excellent, rollback is a much easier way to revert the kind of vandalism we get around here, it also is a tiny bit easier on the server. I campaigned for this to be done at Wikipedia a while ago but nothing came of it. - Icewedge 19:26, 21 November 2007 (EST)

Off site discussion

Anyone else might be interested here. tmtoulouse ^irritate 19:00, 21 November 2007 (EST)

OMFG, ROFL, why can't they just all bugger each other already and get it over with?--PalMD^{-If it looks like a donut, eat it} 19:09, 21 November 2007 (EST)

If you poke around this is getting coverage all over the place, including some big names like Andrew Sulivan and PZ Myers. I am not sure if it is "our" doing or not.........no one claims credit, but if it is its the most wide spread negative attention CP has gotten in a while so congratulations to said individuals. tmtoulouse ^irritate 19:15, 21 November 2007 (EST)