Hosting

[Simon Koldyk]

Hello,

My name is Simon Koldyk and I'm from a company called ScribbleWiki, we do wiki hosting for corporations and community wikis. We would like to offer our services of hosting Bulbapedia. The advertising would stay in some form (not intrusive) and a little "hosted by ScribbleWiki" at the bottom would go up; but, any extra costs would be covered by our company.

We have no interest in owning/managing anything, the owner of the site would still be Archaic, and could choose to move anywhere else at any time. The content would still be under by-nc-sa, the only thing would change is we would handle the hosting architecture and assist with upgrading / development.

I'll be talking to Archaic personally; but, wanted to first post this to the community to see initial reactions to this sort of arrangement.

Regards,
Simon Koldyk
ScribbleWiki President & CEO
[email protected]

 

[1Eevee1]

So, what would be the advantages and disadvantages of going with ScribbleWiki over whatever we use at the moment? That would be the first thing that we, and probably Archaic, would need to know.

 

[MAGNEDETH]

i dont speak on behalf of the community, but the server needs help and it sounds like a good deal to me. granted, i know nothing of the server's inner workings or anything about its current host. but i do know the server is under tremendous stress, so, id like to hear where this is going.

 

[Simon Koldyk]

So, what would be the advantages and disadvantages of going with ScribbleWiki over whatever we use at the moment? That would be the first thing that we, and probably Archaic, would need to know.

While I don't know everything that is going on my understanding is that it is getting more expensive to host Bulbapedia (and Bulbagarden), and that advertising and donations are not covering it. The main bonus is that we would cover the extras.

So that would be you could remove the server limitation like not being able to edit in your userspace.

Also we could add memcache or some more memcache servers (if memcache is already running) to make the wiki run faster.

Thank you,
Simon Koldyk

 

[MAGNEDETH]

so as users, we would see no difference what-so-ever?

 

[Tina]

But.. I thought that it was Bulbapedia... <_< At the same time, this might be quite a good thing for the servers and all, but..

 

[Archaic]

Simon, I would suggest that you have a little chat to Zhen. Your proposal does interest me, but I'd need to see the fine print, and Zhen would have to be sure that your server arrangements would actually fit the wiki's hosting requirements. I should let you know also that we've already rejected a literal buyout from Wikia on two separate occasions now. That's not to say that your offer would be rejected out of hand, just that we're very wary about control and ownership. A number of staff have had some rather painful experiences there in the past, which we're anxious not to repeat.

 

[Simon Koldyk]

Simon, I would suggest that you have a little chat to Zhen. Your proposal does interest me, but I'd need to see the fine print, and Zhen would have to be sure that your server arrangements would actually fit the wiki's hosting requirements. I should let you know also that we've already rejected a literal buyout from Wikia on two separate occasions now. That's not to say that your offer would be rejected out of hand, just that we're very wary about control and ownership. A number of staff have had some rather painful experiences there in the past, which we're anxious not to repeat.

Thanks for your reply Archaic, I will talk to Zhen, and I'm sure we can work with the technical set-up of the wiki and other things. As I stated before we're not looking for control or ownership, we differ from Wikia as community wikis are not our main business merely a community outreach for our community. Domains, logos and such will still be owned by the current people.

MAGNEDETH, there would be no difference to users besides maybe a little bit of time that editing would be locked so that we could move over the servers. Otherwise the only difference would hopefully the pages load faster.

 

[MAGNEDETH]

MAGNEDETH, there would be no difference to users besides maybe a little bit of time that editing would be locked so that we could move over the servers. Otherwise the only difference would hopefully the pages load faster.

well, considering the server was down for a few days last week for a much less interesting reason, that sounds completely tolerable. ill leave this topic to the big boys now.